I like IRCCloud, it lets me use an open platform, but pay for archival of the channels I care about.
Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
331–340 of 536 posts
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#332I know most people hate meetings, but chats are worse. Maybe you want a Bulletin board system ?
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#333Earlier 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…
Why do you want a chat client to integrate with gitlab or jenkins?
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it gen…
> Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century.
Wait... did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#335Forums. 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 Mailing lists are far too outdated.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.
> Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them.
WTF?
How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol?
I don't care to learn your forum's user interface, and I don't care to poll your forum for new content. I have a mail user agent that's configured to fit my needs and that I know well how to operate, and that's where all the mailing lists that I am subscribed to push their new content into this one unified interface for me to interact with them. Web forums for the most part are just a pile of broken usability.
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been IRCing for 24 years. I know about bouncers, different clients, etc., and I still prefer Slack to IRC. I like knowing that it's going to handle unicode properly, in all cases, for everyone on the Slack channel. I like that it handles right-to-left text for everyone reading. I like not having to ever think about, is my bouncer down? I also like not having to think about, where am I going to run my bouncer? It…
I used IRC a lot as a teen back in the late 80s early-to-mid 90s. This was back when to make a private channel you would have to join a channel that was a negative number and hope nobody else wandered in on a guess (which was unlikely to happen since the number of users was literally under 200 at peak times). Pre-Eris, Pre-EFNet, etc. Despite the nostalgic kick of it, I never used it as a serious work tool at any of…
I used IRC a bit in the mid 90s when I first encountered this whole internet thingy. Even though I was young and dumb, it struck me as a bit lame: nerd bullshit with fiddly setup. The async aspects of usenet and email struck me as more scalable, and the web had, you know... graphics.
I had to use IRC again in 2015, and pretty much nothing had changed, except now I was 20 years older.
Most of the criticisms of Slack seem to boil down to: this (whatever it is) is something IRC could do. But it (whatever it is) is virtually always something IRC doesn't do, something it does in some half-arsed fashion (that requires a huge amount of fiddly setup), or something that's supported by only a few clients. How is this not obvious? I'm perpetually mystified that anybody would admit in public to not understanding why Slack is taking a massive dump on IRC.
(Criticisms of Slack's closed nature are valid. It's also worth asking why it has to take up 2GBytes of RAM just to show a tree view, an HTML view and a text box! But don't tell me that you can't understand why Slack is winning anyway.)
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#337We 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…
The costs for an Free / open source developer haven't changed in this "new" world. Distribution of software is the same as it ever was. I'm having a bit of cognitive dissonance trying to understand what an "open source service" is. If it's "open source", in terms of the OSI definition, your "million people" could just download and self-host it. To my mind, at least, if it can't be self-hosted it's not "open source".…
You're arguing semantics. What most people are looking for is a "service bureau", and they use the word software to describe that. People don't want to manage their own infrastructure, and right now will happily pay for someone to take care of that for them.
Open source isn't wholly incompatible with this model, for sure - you can still have open source code that can be hosted by the developer for a fee. But the specific idea of throwing something up on the web and letting people use it if they want isn't as effective, because not having to worry about the software (including how it's hosted) is part of the draw of using third-party software in the first place.
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fix your group's culture. Document things. If people refuse to document things, then do it for them and shove your docs in their face. Do it until they write the documentation themselves.
> Fix your group's culture. Culture-change is about the hardest thing to achieve.
It's also the most important thing. If your culture is bad, changing what tool you use isn't going to fix everything. You're just going to have a new tool everyone uses poorly.
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> we're still waiting for anyone to contribute a more efficient transport, but turns out HTTP+JSON works well enough that nobody has bothered. Well, except you managed to needlessly intertwine matrix and HTTP such that it's essentially impossible to reasonably port it to a sensible transport protocol.
What do you have in mind? There is nothing particularly specific to HTTP about Matrix at all - it just needs some kind of request/response mechanism, and a way to stream events back and forth. For instance https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/... is the proposal for Matrix over websockets (which streams server->client events over a websocket in a manner which has nothing to do with HTTP). But nobody's bothered to implement it, because nobody seems to feel HTTP+JSON is particularly broken in practice. Similarly switching HTTP for COAP would be trivial, but nobody's bothered afaik.
Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
If freenode disappears, it's less than a day to pick a new network and connect. Nobody changes clients, tooling, etc. That's the difference between a closed walled garden like slack and an open protocol.
Nobody changes clients if Slack disappears and is replaced by another webapp. It's all in browser. The UI might change, but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one, which doesn't happen with web apps. I say this as someone who's used IRC a crapton and is a strong advocate for open protocols (and for more than just ideological reasons): Realistically , if Freenode disappears, IRC will mo…
> Nobody changes clients if Slack disappears and is replaced by another webapp. It's all in browser.
You aren't serious, are you? Because the new client runs on the same virtual machine, you are not changing clients? That does not really make sense to you, does it?
> The UI might change, but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one, which doesn't happen with web apps.
(1) I haven't ever heard of a computer changing its operating system from MacOS to Windows because anyone but the owner of that computer decided to make that switch. How would that happen?
(2) Erm, no, not necessarily?