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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

#301

Post by Arathorn »

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.

Given Matrix & Riot are entirely FOSS, please do spell out its obnoxiousnesses (rant here, or file on http://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues) so we and the wider community can go fix it. Agreed that Riot is too heavy; we're currently doing a performance blitz on it. In terms of Matrix itself being too heavy... we're still waiting for anyone to contribute a more efficient transport, but turns out HTTP+JSON works well enough that nobody has bothered.

Empirically many people seem to use it fine for business and for IRC-style purposes though :)

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#303

Post by alxndr »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #260

We are, temporarily, in a kind of dark ages of end-user open source software. The reason is that we shifted from software-as-a-product to software-as-a-service. With the old upload-and-forget model of software distribution, you could put a tarball on a free FTP site for a few pennies, and then a million people could use it, or one person could, and you wouldn't have to lift a finger. A million people could fork your…

Could take the "Heroku" out of the Heroku button if there were a really easy way to deploy/connect Docker containers.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#304

Post by wazanator »

cls59 wrote: post #222
throwaway9475 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

Same thing has happened in gaming with the introduction of Discord. No one wants to bother with mumble, team speak, or vent.

Trying to get everyone in our group setup with mumble was a pain for the people who only use their computer to game. When we switched to Discord it took maybe 10 minutes to get our group of ten all in one chat.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#305

Post by ornitorrincos »

abalashov wrote: post #73
wonderous wrote: post #31

Does Slack's terms of use forbidden creating an off platform archive? If not, given that searchable archives are one of the ways Slack makes money, makes me wonder why there's not an open source way to pull the chats and archive them in a way that's cheaper and independent of Slack.

Yes, but chat logs are logs of ... chat. By nature, it's disorganised, free-wheeling, contains lots of casual meandering (as any conversation would). Not very useful to a third party. How often do you find solutions in public archived mailing list posts when Googling problems? I imagine often. While some e-mails are more terse than others, fundamentally e-mail list posts demand a certain structure. Can you imagine ha…

I did find some gems on irc logs, but I agree, they should be treated as snooping on conversations

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#306

Post by tomstockmail »

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.

>Riot is really obnoxious to use and get set up, and is also extremely resource hungry.

I set it up over the weekend and it took me less than an hour, and that was because of my HAProxy + Lets Encrypt setup requirements. It's not perfect, but it wasn't obnoxious to do.

Additionally the Riot client on Android via F-Droid has been great on my battery life on my phone, significantly less than Hangouts (which I'm replacing with Matrix so that's why I compare the two).

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#307

Post by otterley »

michaelmior wrote: post #241
otterley wrote: post #21

It might be more useful to speak in general terms than call out Slack in particular. The concerns expressed here aren't limited to Slack (despite the link-baity title), but any form of communication that: (a) Can't be referenced or linked from the Web, and (b) Is a form of synchronous communication The same factors, BTW, apply equally to in-person discussions held at open source conferences. I wonder what the author…

Except with both Slack and Gitter (not sure about others) you can link to specific messages. Sure you still need membership to view the content (a serious downside), but saying you can't link at all is disingenuous.

With Slack, at least, channel history is truncated for free accounts; so it's quite possible that a specific conversation could become practically inaccessible after a while.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#308

Post by it33 »

frikk wrote: post #247
mgbmtl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We migrated from IRC to Mattermost and haven't looked back. It integrates so well with our Gitlab/Jenkins flow, too. It's been great. The biggest benefits for us: - Easy to use web push endpoints w/ API keys (great for scripting with curl) - Integration with Gitlab / Jenkins - Chat Logs (see what happened while you were away) - Public listing of channels (no more "oh you have to join #whatever to see that") - Mobile…

Fantastic! Thanks for the mention! Yeah, scripting integrations with curl is super useful.

For others, here's another article of replacing IRC with Mattermost in education: https://opensource.com/education/16/3/mattermost-open-source...

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#309

Post by gnaritas »

27182818284 wrote: post #58
PaulHoule wrote: post #47

What drives me nuts is that there are so many of these things. I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc. All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get…

>It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get The modern office large office is pretty bad in this respect. Really not uncommon to see things like • Need to have Slack open • Need to keep an eye on Basecamp/pm software • Need to have Outlook open / check in on for email and calendar invites • Need Skype open because not everyone uses Slack • GitLab is open in another tab I…

> I've started counting the minutes that I use in a day just logging in to things with our SSO, because it has started to actually add up, haha. It has gotten silly.

I have a similar setup, and I don't waste any time logging into all of them because I simply always have them running. Why would you need to login every day? Are you shutting them down at the end of every day... if so, why?

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#310

Post by vopi »

unknown2374 wrote: post #254
hota_mazi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1] Does it have Android and iOS clients? If not, it's not a great alternative to Slack. It's not even an alternative to Slack.

Yes, they have amazing (and multiple) clients for both Android and iOS. Especially Riot, which is not just a cheap web wrapper that a lot if the alternatives, it's native and in my experience, I have not had any problems, performance inckuded, using it for slack on my Android phone.

Err..Pretty sure it is a web wrapper? Just checked out their GitHub and didn't even see a desktop app.
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