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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

#401

Post by spectistcles »

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.…

To be fair, you don't actually need to know Docker beyond being able to follow a tutorial.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#402

Post by EvanAnderson »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #337
EvanAnderson wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spec…

I'm arguing semantics because I believe the semantics matter.

I feel very strongly that decentralized computation and software freedom are powerful forces for good. Conflating hosting and software plays to an agenda of curtailing individuals' and businesses' ability to self-host and to have freedom. I think this agenda is driven by hosting providers' profit motive primarly, but it plays into agendas of unrelated parties who seek to curtail freedom for their own ends.

The creation and maintenance of software is a service-- it always has been. Creating and maintaining software has never been a "product" because it doesn't suffer from scarcity. The best world I can envision is one where the underlying infrastructure, authorship, maintenance, and administration are all able to be decoupled based on need.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#403

Post by photojosh »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #392
srssays wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming sucked before HTTP+JSON became the lingua franca of machine communication. Being able to use any programming language with modern HTTP-based protocols is a real luxury. Before, you could only use a programming language if had a production-ready implementation of the protocol you wanted to speak. Otherwise you would spend the next weeks or months tediously writing one. This was so crippling that XML actual…

> Being able to use any programming language with modern HTTP-based protocols is a real luxury. No, it's not, it's a huge pile of crap, because HTTP is so complicated that you essentially have to distrust any implementation of it that you haven't audited, and even then, it's questionable (plus, most implementations turn out to be buggy if you look closely, and serious vulnerabilities aren't exactly uncommon), and it…

I've just finished my first project using websockets. Coming from the embedded world and bare UARTs plus a little bit of C sockets, I found it hilarious that we've got so many layers to essentially do the same thing that I could do on an 8-bit microcontroller.

The critical difference? Speed of development. Websockets was so blindingly quick to get working. Haven't hit the edge cases yet though. If I were doing it with raw sockets I'd have to reimplement many of those layers and write a mobile app as opposed to a mobile webpage with only 300 lines of JS.

> Ever used HTTP for peer-to-peer communication? Sort of. They're peers, but one always acts as the server, I just haven't needed to make them true peers, but I could if I needed to. One of the nodes connects to a public server and has other private nodes connect to it. (300 lines of Python/Twisted)

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#404

Post by photojosh »

milesrout wrote: post #374
jrochkind1 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Session persistence > No, nobody wants this Are you serious? I think lots of people do. I think it's one of the draws of Slack. > The thing is, most IRC servers don't want to buffer messages indefinitely for everyone that makes an account then never logs in again. Is that what Slack does? Whatever they do, I think it's what people want. Indeed it is not an experience offered by IRC, perhaps because "most IRC server…

>Are you serious? I think lots of people do. I think it's one of the draws of Slack. No it isn't. What it implies is what people want: persistent logs, signing in from their phone logging them into the same session as signing in from their desktop, etc. >Is that what Slack does? Whatever they do, I think it's what people want. Indeed it is not an experience offered by IRC, perhaps because "most IRC servers don't want…

> Slack has a much higher barrier to entry than IRC and most people using it are private companies.

Only if you're a nerd. Took me 5 minutes to get started with Slack for our company and managing it is a piece of cake.

Mind you, I haven't used IRC for a decade, maybe it's become a whole lot easier since then...

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#405

Post by orangeshark »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #335
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.

> 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…

Why not both? Something like DFeed[1] which is used as the D programming language's forum[2].

[1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

[2] https://forum.dlang.org/

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#406

Post by milesrout »

photojosh wrote: post #403
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to use any programming language with modern HTTP-based protocols is a real luxury. No, it's not, it's a huge pile of crap, because HTTP is so complicated that you essentially have to distrust any implementation of it that you haven't audited, and even then, it's questionable (plus, most implementations turn out to be buggy if you look closely, and serious vulnerabilities aren't exactly uncommon), and it…

I've just finished my first project using websockets. Coming from the embedded world and bare UARTs plus a little bit of C sockets, I found it hilarious that we've got so many layers to essentially do the same thing that I could do on an 8-bit microcontroller. The critical difference? Speed of development. Websockets was so blindingly quick to get working. Haven't hit the edge cases yet though. If I were doing it wit…

It's not exactly super hard and complicated to get things working on a microcontroller though. In fact, the first time I did it, I felt it was so much simpler than all this complicated web stuff.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#407

Post by milesrout »

photojosh wrote: post #404
milesrout wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you serious? I think lots of people do. I think it's one of the draws of Slack. No it isn't. What it implies is what people want: persistent logs, signing in from their phone logging them into the same session as signing in from their desktop, etc. >Is that what Slack does? Whatever they do, I think it's what people want. Indeed it is not an experience offered by IRC, perhaps because "most IRC servers don't want…

> Slack has a much higher barrier to entry than IRC and most people using it are private companies. Only if you're a nerd. Took me 5 minutes to get started with Slack for our company and managing it is a piece of cake. Mind you, I haven't used IRC for a decade, maybe it's become a whole lot easier since then...

>Only if you're a nerd. Took me 5 minutes to get started with Slack for our company and managing it is a piece of cake.

Slack requires you to make an account on their website, a new account for every Slack group. IRC you can just join - pick a nickname and type the server's address and you're in.

IRC is completely trivially easy to use, Slack is not.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#408

Post by vacri »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #387
Arathorn wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your justification of why "it's essentially impossible to reasonably port it to a sensible transport protocol" appears to be an explanation of how one could reasonably port it to a sensible transport protocol (JSON over some flavour of socket) ;) Totally agreed that HTTP is inefficient and increases the potential bug surface a bit. However, the ubiquity and convenience empirically seems to outweigh the inefficiency a…

> Your justification of why "it's essentially impossible to reasonably port it to a sensible transport protocol" appears to be an explanation of how one could reasonably port it to a sensible transport protocol (JSON over some flavour of socket) ;) Except for the fact that it's necessarily redefining quite a bit of the protocol, also necessarily further complicating any possible universal implementations because this…

> What exactly would people facepalming and walking off feel like, that this doesn't feel like it?

Funny how the silent majority is alway on 'my side'. No-one ever claims that the silent majority is against them.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#409

Post by projektir »

monkpit wrote: post #388
mmanfrin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and Facebook ate forums. Reddit in particular fills that interest-niche conversation role to a degree that it strangles forums.

Reddit IS a forum platform. Anyone who wants to create a subreddit can do exactly that. Reddit did not replace forums, just the software that they run on.

Reddit is distinctly different from a typical forum due to how heavily it weighs time and popularity. A normal forum can have multiple threads of thought active at the same time without interference, and sometimes a thread can live for a long, long time. There's no need for a thread to be super popular to survive, a thread can literally live off of two users.

On reddit, if the time is not right, the discussion will not be had and ends up in oblivion.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#410

Post by sundvor »

My HN feed right now:

4. TypeScript at Slack (slack.engineering) 183 points .. 5 hours ago | flag | hide | 86 comments

5. Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications (cheney.net) 615 points .. 12 hours ago | flag | hide | 395 comments

Quite random, but I couldn't help but notice.

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