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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

#291

Post by aeorgnoieang »

zellyn wrote: post #41

As I posted on twitter[1], Slack is linkable. Not public, but if you can chat you see them. Gitter: public AND linkable. Async is a good argument; linkability is not. Slack's UI is good. Not perfect, but it's quite usable compared to all the alternatives[2]. People always underestimate the value of good UI. [1] https://twitter.com/zellyn/status/851818007248678912 [2] I've been on IRC on and off since 1993. It's much…

'Async' isn't even that good of an argument.

Have you never replied to an old forum post and been accused of 'necromancy'?

Have you never been late to reply to an email chain or a thread on a mailing list or forum?

There's no clear line dividing asynchronous versus synchronous communication. Even phone calls can be (partially) asynchronous – "hold on, let me check" let alone "let me call you back in ".

And similarly, if a group of people are responding to each other quick enough, even using an 'asynchronous' medium, then they're basically communicating 'synchronously'.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#292

Post by aeorgnoieang »

throw2016 wrote: post #167
xfalcox wrote: post #44

Discourse offers free hosting for big Open Source projects, and you can self-host it on a $5 VPS too. Full Disclosure: I work at Discourse.

I doubt Discourse will run on a $5 VPS. The last time I checked its crashes on 512MB RAM, needs at least 1GB just to start. Have the minimum requirements changed? 1GB minimum and 2GB is recommended by Discourse itself. Discourse is also not easy to setup, its quite involved and complex and you need some Ruby and systems expertise. Infact I think Discourse only supports Docker installs. So you need to know Docker too.…

I did just run across a cloud provider with $5 VMs with 1 GB of RAM (somewhere), but the last time I checked it's at least $10 per month to host Discourse on DigitalOcean or similar.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#293

Post by ktta »

killin_dan wrote: post #277
ktta wrote: post #213

A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1]. It has lots of clients, and a great vision. You use an online client called riot[2] which uses the matrix protocol. There are other clients available[3] including desktop clients. There's E2E encryption coming to more of the clients which is inspired from signal protocol (double ratchet part of it specifically), without Forward secrecy so as to maintai…

Matrix is an extremely heavy protocol, not suitable for business use imo. Riot is really obnoxious to use and get set up, and is also extremely resource hungry. I don't think you're very familiar with chat protocols if you think it's even remotely suitable as a replacement for IRC.

Well. I'm interested to see what you think is a suitable protocol for business.

I said it's an alternative, not a replacement. The days of simplistic IRC protocols have gone. Now people want emojis, search, session persistence, web client, and more things.

So for that, there's obviously going to be more complexity compared to IRC. And IRC feels so hacked on when fit it with the modern features one wants today.

I'm not very familiar with all of the chat protocols, but I'm familiar with the possibilities of communication today. It's riddled with proprietary protocols and chromium based applications. And that's why I see Matrix as the next step.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#294

Post by pjungwir »

Just yesterday I was looking for a way to present all the messages in a given Slack channel as an RSS feed, and I was surprised to come up empty. (I found lots of ways to go the other way though, from RSS into Slack.) The best I found was this, but it looks like you need a Heroku Dyno and must be the account owner---oh and it only exports links, not full messages:

https://gozman.github.io/slack-rss/

So that is one drawback to a closed system.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#295

Post by aeorgnoieang »

vorg wrote: post #245
golergka wrote: post #35

I was expecting Stallman-style advocacy against closed-source as a principle; pleasantly surprised by the arguments. Synchronous communication, indeed, is bad for the main communication channel. However, as a secondary communication channel, it can serve important needs. When people are looking not to just get a single issue resolved, but to form a community, this community is often based on informal communication an…

> Seeing the same people in the member list every day, exchanging little inside jokes ...about what other people are writing in the main communication channel, creating precedents about what should be discussed with "individual members of the community on a personal basis" and deciding the content that should be written on the main channel for the benefit of outsiders asleep in other time zones, ...

How can you generally prevent a subgroup "deciding the content that should be written on the main channel for the benefit of outsiders asleep in other time zones" even in an 'asynchronous' communication channel? There's nothing stopping them from responding to each other quickly enough to effectively communicate 'synchronously'.

I've intended to reply to communications before only to discover that someone else replied first while I was asleep in my other time zone.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#296

Post by maehwasu »

> Slack, et al, are based on synchronous communication, which discriminate against those who do not or can not take part of the conversation in real time. For example, real time chat discriminates against those who aren’t in the same time zone–you can’t participate fully in an open source project if all the discussion happens while you’re asleep. Even if you are in the same time zone, real time chat assumes a privilege that you have the spare time–or an employer who doesn’t mind you being constantly distracted–to be virtually present in a chat room. Online chat clients are resource hogs, and presume the availability of a fast computer and ample, always on, internet connection, again raising the bar for participation.

It's quite amusing that the author takes his (valid) argument about the problems of closed, synchronous communication straight to the language of privilege, discrimination, and oppression.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#297

Post by Veratyr »

tomjen3 wrote: post #271
ktta wrote: post #213

A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1]. It has lots of clients, and a great vision. You use an online client called riot[2] which uses the matrix protocol. There are other clients available[3] including desktop clients. There's E2E encryption coming to more of the clients which is inspired from signal protocol (double ratchet part of it specifically), without Forward secrecy so as to maintai…

Why is there not a web based IRC app?

IRC is a TCP-based protocol and browsers don't support TCP connections.

There are web-based applications that communicate with IRC but they require a proxy running on a server.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#299

Post by ornitorrincos »

lucb1e wrote: post #197
joaodlf wrote: post #125

Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them, even when they sometimes fit the bill so well. Slack is chat. Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them.

The forums I visited all died, but none replaced them (and I kinda miss forums). There are still some active forums that I know of, like Factorio's (a modern game, not one from 2001 when forums were still hot). They have a subreddit which is active as well (though less), but the forum format still works fine for them. New services replaced many things that forums were used for, but not all.

there are also bay12games forums, but yeah, reddit seems to have eaten the forum format mostly

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#300

Post by wazanator »

mgbmtl wrote: post #116
piquadrat wrote: post #20

Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I participate in (Python/Django/...). What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel (while still maintaining mailing lists, bug trackers and the like). And as much as I hate it, the success can't be denied. Es…

On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser active users, to ~ 100 active and ~ 500 lesser active users. I agree that more folks should consider moving away from IRC. The sign-up process for Mattermost is easy. It's intuitive, cross-platform, mobile-friendly, etc. While we geeks are used to IRC, onboarding p…

How do you like mattermost compared to rocket.chat? My group switched from flowdock to rocket.chat to save money and we've definitely seen a dip in participation. Rocket.chat's mobile app constantly seems to have issues with remembering what server you were logged into between updates and the desktop version doesn't recognize when you're caught up with a channels messages leaving it marked unread unless you go out of your way to manually tell it. Plus I really miss threads...
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