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Slack is offline

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is offline

#101

Post by saas_co_de »

acchow wrote: post #84
Arathorn wrote: post #75

This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service like Slack. Your options include: * Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol) * Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature) * MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license) * Zulip.org (all about threads!) * ...o…

Is there reason to believe self hosting will have better uptime?

yes. small scale is almost always simpler and less error prone than massive scale.

slack also has pretty dubious quality standards. e.g. their desktop app and their atrocious replacement for screenhero.

Re: Slack is offline

#102

Post by avhon1 »

anonu wrote: post #92
Arathorn wrote: post #75

This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service like Slack. Your options include: * Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol) * Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature) * MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license) * Zulip.org (all about threads!) * ...o…

Do these solutions have good mobile frontends?

I run an XMPP server for my friends. We use Conversations [0,1] on Android and BBOS, and Zom [2] on iOS. We use OMEMO [3] for encrypting most of our conversations, and while it isn't perfect, it usually stays out of the way.

Generally, the experience with the mobile clients has been quite good. Conversations and Zom are stable, attractive, and featureful. The biggest issues are some interoperability problems with desktop clients (displaying messages that should be hidden) and some things which I believe are server-side configuration issues.

Zom hides a some useful configuration features (in the name of being dead-simple to use), so I'm trying to convince one of my iPhone-owning friends to try ChatSecure [4].

[0] https://conversations.im/

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.siacs.conversations/

[2] https://zom.im/

[3] https://conversations.im/omemo/

[4] https://chatsecure.org/

Re: Slack is offline

#103

Post by scaryclam »

acchow wrote: post #84
Arathorn wrote: post #75

This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service like Slack. Your options include: * Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol) * Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature) * MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license) * Zulip.org (all about threads!) * ...o…

Is there reason to believe self hosting will have better uptime?

Generally yes, given the reasons others have said. Other than that, at the very least, outages can be dealt with more proactively when you have your own setup. Third parties won't have the same priorities that your company does.

Re: Slack is offline

#104

Post by dbenhur »

bojo wrote: post #80
badminton1 wrote: post #70

Slack has a nice market share, but also many competitors, many of them 100% ripoffs with the same features (to name a few, Attlassian HipChat and MS Teams... not to mention open source products). Slack has been experiencing service degradation often lately, so I would not be surprised if people start switching. In our team we already started looking for an alternative.

HipChat came out long before Slack.

Yeah and they've had service degradation and availability issues long before Slack also. ;-P

Re: Slack is offline

#105

Post by flukus »

TylerE wrote: post #97
flukus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Self hosting doesn't have to operate at the scale of slack, so there's a whole slew of issues avoided. Pushing text messages around really isn't that difficult when you aren't serving millions of customers. 2. You can perform maintenance outside of office hours, with SaaS you don't get to decide when an upgrade (and potential outage) happens. I don't care about 99% uptime, I care about having 99% uptime while I'm…

There's also a wholew slew of issues driven right into.

Such as? If you've got less than 1000 users then you need an extremely basic server, a raspberry pi should more than suffice. Then you've just got a little bit of manual (or automated) administration, software updates and backups mostly.

I really didn't expect my post to be so controversial, is the HN crowd really so terrified about running there own hardware?

Re: Slack is offline

#106

Post by seanp2k2 »

scaryclam wrote: post #103
acchow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there reason to believe self hosting will have better uptime?

Generally yes, given the reasons others have said. Other than that, at the very least, outages can be dealt with more proactively when you have your own setup. Third parties won't have the same priorities that your company does.

Since Slack's main business is chat, they have a pretty good incentive to get everything working again ASAP. Here's their SLA for "plus plan" and Enterprise plan:

  Our Plus plan Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees a 99.99% monthly uptime1
  We’ve designed our SLA to be simple and transparent — based directly on the information we make publicly available on 
  Slack’s System Status page.
  If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan 100 times the amount your 
  workspace paid during the period Slack was down.
Source: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-plan... + https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115003205446-Plans-...

Chat is a commodity these days. For most businesses, it probably makes more sense to just let the companies in the business of offering paid chat services do their thing.

Re: Slack is offline

#107

Post by seanp2k2 »

flukus wrote: post #105
TylerE wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a wholew slew of issues driven right into.

Such as? If you've got less than 1000 users then you need an extremely basic server, a raspberry pi should more than suffice. Then you've just got a little bit of manual (or automated) administration, software updates and backups mostly. I really didn't expect my post to be so controversial, is the HN crowd really so terrified about running there own hardware?

I'm guessing that you're being downvoted because there's a lot more to consider. I agree that it doesn't take much hardware these days (most single-board computers would work perfectly well) to service https://www.slack.com/plans ) would likely take considerable engineering effort. Sure, you could set it up, toss it in a closet, and it might have 100% uptime for a year...until it doesn't. If chat is business-critical, there are chat companies that have profit motive to deliver a good service. If chat is a nice-to-have at a company (and you e.g. don't have to worry about data retention laws / compliance stuff), maybe it's fine to run it on an rPi / t2.micro (free) AWS instance.

Luckily, there are a ton of great free and paid options out there these days!

Re: Slack is offline

#108

Post by synicalx »

acchow wrote: post #84
Arathorn wrote: post #75

This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service like Slack. Your options include: * Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol) * Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature) * MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license) * Zulip.org (all about threads!) * ...o…

Is there reason to believe self hosting will have better uptime?

People like to jump on bandwagon or the other, but the real answer is - it depends.

With Slack, the application itself is probably pretty tough, but for a lot of businesses their infrastructure and connectivity TO Slack (ie internet/WAN) is probably not very resilient. So for a lot of smaller outfits I'd say that Slack is better.

But if you're a large org and your infrastructure is very resilient and diverse, then you're probably better off self-hosting - assuming you can leverage your existing infrastructure to do so.

Re: Slack is offline

#110

Post by seanp2k2 »

cadr wrote: post #2

When the status page is returning a 500 error... not a good sign.

Returned for me when I was looking but took ~30 seconds to do so. They should host their status page on a separate domain and use something like CloudFlare in front of it to help with sudden spikes in traffic. Another alternative is to use Twitter / Facebook as the status page and let them deal with the traffic spikes, or just serve static HTML.
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