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Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

dave.cheney.net

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Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#221

Post by slrz »

cookiecaper wrote: post #183
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few comments that I hope are constructive. Looking at your page, I'm not confident you're avoiding the issue by which these tools proliferate: https://xkcd.com/927/ Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into. You write: > Schedule your time spent and group distracting reminders and notifications in one place If this "one pl…

>or, if necessary, the nasty DOM-manipulation, Windows message hacking, and client-impersonating - to put all these services and their notifications in one place, that would be a solution to the proliferation problem. This isn't possible for web services due to the state of U.S. law. Speaking to a server without the consent of the server's owner is both a crime and a tort under the CFAA. There is also liability for c…

If you publicly advertise your service I can probably assume your consent to speak to it. I don't have to wear a funny hat while doing so just because some hidden legalese on your website says so.

At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#222

Post by cls59 »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #148
dade_ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.

I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it ju…

I don't think it's a generational thing either. I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it. The problem is the difference in the amount of energy demanded by the set-up process. Connecting to Slack is extremely simple and I don't have to fiddle with the settings in order to get a decent experience.

Compared to IRC, I have to:

  - Figure out how to configure my client.
  - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots on Freenode or $other_server.
  - Figure out how to set up something like ZNC in order to federate the client on my phone with the client on my laptop so I don't miss messages.
  - ...
It's an epic yak shave that sucks massive amounts of time and energy a from the thing I joined the community to do: improve a piece of software that isn't IRC.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#223

Post by smt88 »

eropple wrote: post #204
romaniv wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the good old days of ICQ and Jabber you could install a client that would integrate several protocols into a single lightweight UI (e.g. Miranda IM). Unfortunately the new wave of messengers is much more successful at guarding their protocols against such integrations. That said, I wonder what's Discord's official stance on such things. Their bread and butter is voice chat, and they seem to be fairly open minded.…

Franz is pretty alright for this. http://meetfranz.com/

There's also a FOSS alternative to Franz: http://rambox.pro

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#224

Post by kakarot »

hdhzy wrote: post #133
falcolas wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's anything like my experience, the trip from clicking on the button to open the app and wait for the myriad of redirects, before clicking through to the page you actually want to monitor is non-trivial (and sometimes doesn't occur if the tab isn't in the foreground). I don't have that many open, and it still takes me around 5 minutes every day to open them back up.

At least you have SSO! Imagine what if you had different credentials to each of these services (even logins)! There are big companies that operate like that...

And why shouldn't he have different credentials? A password manager would make this a cakewalk.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#225

Post by makepanic »

eropple wrote: post #204
romaniv wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the good old days of ICQ and Jabber you could install a client that would integrate several protocols into a single lightweight UI (e.g. Miranda IM). Unfortunately the new wave of messengers is much more successful at guarding their protocols against such integrations. That said, I wonder what's Discord's official stance on such things. Their bread and butter is voice chat, and they seem to be fairly open minded.…

Franz is pretty alright for this. http://meetfranz.com/

There is also http://rambox.pro/ which is open source

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#226

Post by amelius »

thehardsphere wrote: post #220
amelius wrote: post #209

I can't believe that in 2017 we're still discussing what's wrong with our chat software. I have to wonder when we will finally see chat as a solved problem.

The OP isn't actually discussing chat as an unsolved problem. OP is arguing that chat is the wrong choice of solution to the problem of open source software project communication, because it's synchronous. Or to abuse a metaphor, OP is arguing we need to use boats instead of cars to ship heavy things overseas, not that cars are an unsolved problem.

Well this was not directed at the article as much as the other comments in this thread, some of which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#227

Post by EpicEng »

uiri wrote: post #132
drey08 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note: if you go from free to paid, you can recover those lost messages. They're never actually deleted, you just can't view messages after the 10k limit in the free version.

Wow, that is kind of evil. I could understand if Slack kept, say, the last 20k or 50k and only showed the most recent 10k. For them to store all the messages indefinitely for all free servers means that they are incurring the same storage costs whether the server is free or paid. Are the bandwidth costs really that high to justify hiding all those messages (likely on the order of 100k or 1M for many servers) ?

"evil"

Ok, well the alternative is no free version. Yeesh, people are so entitled. They're trying to give you a mostly full featured version of their software in hopes that you'll pay them someday.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#228

Post by cookiecaper »

slrz wrote: post #221
cookiecaper wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>or, if necessary, the nasty DOM-manipulation, Windows message hacking, and client-impersonating - to put all these services and their notifications in one place, that would be a solution to the proliferation problem. This isn't possible for web services due to the state of U.S. law. Speaking to a server without the consent of the server's owner is both a crime and a tort under the CFAA. There is also liability for c…

If you publicly advertise your service I can probably assume your consent to speak to it. I don't have to wear a funny hat while doing so just because some hidden legalese on your website says so. At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.

>If you publicly advertise your service I can probably assume your consent to speak to it.

The implied access and license is probably valid as long as you're abiding the ToS. If you're violating the ToS after agreeing to it ("agreeing" means that proper notice is given to make the ToS binding, etc.), the implied license would probably not work. If you've been specifically asked to stop, either directly or indirectly (e.g., through an IP ban), any implied license or access privileges would almost definitely be revoked at that point.

>At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.

Ad blockers differ because they alter the payload after receiving it under legitimate terms (though this could still probably be considered copyright infringement under the argument that the license is for viewing only, not alteration). The CFAA would not be applicable because when the adblocker comes into play, you're not accessing someone's network (which is what the the CFAA addresses).

If a site clearly disallowed AdBlock users in their ToS and adequate notice was given to users that they were to be bound by these terms, it would be "unauthorized access" to the server, which is not allowed under the CFAA.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#229

Post by EpicEng »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #153
uiri wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is kind of evil. I could understand if Slack kept, say, the last 20k or 50k and only showed the most recent 10k. For them to store all the messages indefinitely for all free servers means that they are incurring the same storage costs whether the server is free or paid. Are the bandwidth costs really that high to justify hiding all those messages (likely on the order of 100k or 1M for many servers) ?

No, they hold your data hostage because they can. Welcome to capitalism.

yes, I suppose Slack not existing at all is a more preferable option /s

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#230

Post by kuschku »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #219
kuschku wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile. And other projects, including the GPL project Quassel, do have mobile clients (although Quasseldroid, which I maintain, isn’t exactly the best client in the world).

Lounge has a responsive view you can save to home screen on iOS and android. Looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/MmajSU1.jpg

I've seen it, but it's nothing like even Quasseldroid. And quasseldroid is already a horrible codebase (mostly because I took over maintenance when I knew nothing about code quality).

Yet even Quasseldroid manages to be better.

That said, there is truly a need for a really good, FLOSS irc client ob mobile.

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