Relatedly, are there any 3rd party Slack apps out there? Their APIs are powerful and seem pretty complete.
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
61–70 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#62I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…
> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.
Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I take this promise with some skepticism.
So either this is a lack of priority and disrespect to a part of their users or some level of incompetence.
I might sound harsh about this, but imagine being a blind software dev that's supposed to work with Slack to participate in teams. Every day you sign on to your team it's possible that the Slack devs break something and you can't function. And now they closed the escape hatch.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#63Time to use Discord
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#64Zulip. Open source with IRC gateway, but most importantly a model that lets you tame the firehose.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies are just using Micro$oft's playbook. Oh, and spoiler alert, Microsoft still is too: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/Windows... Embrace / Extend / Expunge
You post implies that you're officially affiliated with Slack. If so, are you really comparing yourself to "Micro[s]oft's playbook"? Why can't you work to fix the issue rather than follow the industry standard?
looks to me like they just copy/pasted the MOTD from an irc client that connected to slack's gateway
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#66Slack was fine, now it is time to move back to IRC. Some people like slack or telegram because they provide an API for BOTs. Something IRC has been open to since the begining. Non power users might have trouble using IRC with the usual clients (mIRC/irssi/bitchx). Today a family member, not technical and 60+yrs asked about "that tool" that is like whatsapp however it allows users that just joined a group to read old…
A few projects exist that try to be "modern" UIs for IRC (bias: I contribute to Lounge)
TheLounge - https://thelounge.chat (FOSS, self-hosted)
IRCCloud - https://irccloud.com (mobile clients OS, hosted)
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#67Slack was fine, now it is time to move back to IRC. Some people like slack or telegram because they provide an API for BOTs. Something IRC has been open to since the begining. Non power users might have trouble using IRC with the usual clients (mIRC/irssi/bitchx). Today a family member, not technical and 60+yrs asked about "that tool" that is like whatsapp however it allows users that just joined a group to read old…
You just described the Matrix riot client:
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#68I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…
Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing. The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility…
I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard. What is their moat, what exactly does it offer that it's impossible to replicate using existing libraries and APIs?
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#69From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a "tube" from https://sameroom.io - not free though.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#70Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…
There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people are using them, but that doesn't change that Slack dropping support for bridges is just typically disappointing. Matrix also has full Slack/IRC/whatever-else-you-want bridges (which you can stack to talk between IRC and Slack). So there's that.
However, this is simply untrue:
> Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will follow.
When you are Slack Inc and the only differentiator you have is that you are in control of how chat works, why on earth would you switch to a protocol that you don't have full control over?