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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

#531

Post by u801e »

abalashov wrote: post #82
_jal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question for you: I hear this a lot, in terms of older tools being considered obsolete. Other than the natural human tendency towards novelty and the network effects, what, exactly, is obsolete about mailing lists or IRC? What features are missing in IRC that Slack has for synchronous discussion? (I'll start: animated dancing pigs out of the box and the need to write/plug in your own archiver.) What limitations do ma…

> What limitations do mailing lists impose on open source development that are not present in other tools? None, in my opinion. On the contrary, they are the only tool that demand a structure — just by the nature of e-mail messages — that is coherent enough to be highly useful when searching archives later.

> On the contrary, they are the only tool that demand a structure — just by the nature of e-mail messages

Newsgroups also have this structure and they have the advantage of easily doing an archive search (by being able to download part of or the entire message archive of a given group and using the search features of your mail/news client).

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#532

Post by u801e »

qznc wrote: post #123
_jal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question for you: I hear this a lot, in terms of older tools being considered obsolete. Other than the natural human tendency towards novelty and the network effects, what, exactly, is obsolete about mailing lists or IRC? What features are missing in IRC that Slack has for synchronous discussion? (I'll start: animated dancing pigs out of the box and the need to write/plug in your own archiver.) What limitations do ma…

The problems with mailing lists? Quoting is still a problem. Most answer above. Some below. Many nitpick in between. Threading is easily broken. Especially if Outlook users are involved. Formatting is an issue. There is no markdown or whatever for links. Some people insist on line lengths and other stuff.

> Quoting is still a problem. Most answer above. Some below. Many nitpick in between.

One thing I've noticed on Hacker News, Slashdot, and even reddit is that if someone quotes the post they're responding to, they'll invariably post their response below it. And if they quote multiple parts of the parent post, they'll interleave their responses. I don't recall ever seeing a response where the quoted text is below it.

I've really never understood the rationale behind top-posting. It makes it much more difficult to understand the context of the response without having to jump between the original message and the response.

> Threading is easily broken. Especially if Outlook users are involved.

That's because Outlook does not follow the relevant RFCs in terms of maintaining a message through through the In-Reply-To and References headers.

> Formatting is an issue. There is no markdown or whatever for links.

Most GUI clients will make links clickable. There are also conventions such as using astericks, _underscores_, or /slashes/ for bolding, underlining, or italicizing text, but a lot of clients don't render them consistently, IME.

> Some people insist on line lengths and other stuff.

There is an RFC that adds format=flowed to the Content-Type header. Then every line that ends in a single whitespace character will be joined with the next line and wrapped at screen width instead of at the position of the CRLF characters. Clients that don't support it will still see the wrapped text.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#533

Post by u801e »

vacri wrote: post #448

> This means that the content inside those systems is closed. I cannot link to a discussion in a Slack channel in a tweet. Such a shame that you can't make a link in one closed system to another closed system. > The tools that fit this requirement best are; mailing list, issue trackers, and forums. Mailing lists suck . They're hard to read, hard to follow, and create an endless supply of unresolved issues that everyo…

> Mailing lists suck. They're hard to read, hard to follow,

I find them quite easy to read using a mail/news reader and connecting via a NNTP gateway like gmane.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#535

Post by KajMagnus »

Here's combined forum + chat + question & answers software that you might want to use instead of Slack:

https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ (ED)

It's open source. It seems to solve the problems mentioned in the article (I mean, openly accessible — can link to a discussion & (soon) to a post in a chat channel. Both sync & async communication (both chat and traditional forum topics).

I'm actually just about to a-little-bit start promoting it. ... Ok so let me try to make you more interested in ED:

- Often, organizations setup a chat (e.g. Slack), a forum (e.g. Discourse) + use e.g. StackOverflow — but then they've split their community into three. However with EffectiveDiscussions (ED) you can gather everyone at one place.

- ED is looking to improve the quality of the discussions. For example, there's a novel voting system that solves (I hope) problems related to people downvoting-because-they-disagree, + a novel algorithm for finding the "best" comments (in threaded HN style topics). Plus some other improvements over HN & Reddit, see https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...

(As you might have guessed, I'm the one developing ED.)

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#536

Post by hankewi »

A different take on solving the problem of asynchronous communication: JayPad is a simple web app which works like a tiny mix of Slack/Group Chat and Post-Its. Offering synchronous discussion via chat and the possibility to store results of these discussions into a container of Notes for asynchronous consumption.

In its early stages, but working beautifully.

[1] https://jaypad.de

[2] https://hackernoon.com/how-jaypads-help-us-build-jaypads-c66...

[3] https://hackernoon.com/how-planning-a-weekend-trip-with-our-...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g2Hecd-Ujo&

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