Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
271–280 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only Slack can answer that, but considering that Slack is commonly used at many technology companies I'd say that the number is probably reasonably high. I tend to find that software developers tend to have a much lower tolerance for non-native/poorly optimized/proprietary software than most people.
That may be true for greybeards, but I've found the opposite with people of the younger generations.
> I've found the opposite with people of the younger generations
You're talking to one
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#273evolution sucks
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#274Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord has all the same problems Slack does. It's a proprietary VC-funded app without a sustainable business model.
What's Discord’s business model? Slack has a paid-for tier, but I haven’t seen anything like that on Discord.
Discord has a paid subscription, but since they've committed to be ad-free and not paywall off key features... well, there's almost no compelling reason for it.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#276Great, I feel like an idiot. I advocated slack, because it granted the freedom to choose a client. Now I helped lock-in others. Suggestions for alternatives, that I could migrate to? The requirements are: mid sized teams, desktop and mobile, all major os. People used web based client, native clients, irc gw, and bots. We need search and archive. Self-hosting is an option.
IRC, with web clients like IRCCloud, TheLounge, or IRCAnywhere.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche…
Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a , they didn't bother adding expected keyboard behaviors. I'm fortunate enough to work with co-ops, and the company I'm founding hosts its own tools specifically because those I can control, and I can pick the more accessible open source chat solution. But I can't count how many times I've had to be some company's special snowflake because I can't use Slack, can't use Toggl, can only use parts of Basecamp, and as such can't participate in a bunch of their processes. Now I'll encourage companies further away from Slack than I already do. Forget not touching it with a 10-foot pole. The 100-footer is coming out for this one. I'm sorry to post such an unproductive comment, but if you're working for a silicon valley company and not doing accessibility then you're doing it wrong, and you can pay me or any number of other talented blind developers with some of that investor capital if you want us to show you how to do it right. There is no excuse for being so exclusionary.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go and a native desktop client is sadly not a huge selling point for the sales team. At the end of the day Slack has to optimize for growth and there's a huge list of features that will bring more ROI than native clients which will req…
Fine, if they don't have any business reason for a native client they should just can the slack desktop app because it provides 0 benefits over the web app then. If you're going to do something do it right or don't do it at all.
The desktop app allows them to Mark the checkbox of having a "native" app when selling ... And in my environment quite a few folks prefer the election app over the browser. I don't know why, though.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of memory to slowly and jerkily send plain text over the internet, and not quite keep up with typing when autocomplete-ing usernames, you know. Stop expecting so much of your computers /s
mIRC takes 24MB!
I wrote an MSNP (Windows/MSN Messenger) client and used it for many years, all the way until Microsoft turned the protocol into a horrible XML-ised mess and then dropped support completely (as in, turned off the servers.) One standalone Win32 binary less than 32KB, usable from Win95 up to Win10; and over all the years I used it and noticed its memory usage, it was never more than 2-3MB. Yes, it had emoji support (though not very large ones, obviously.)
The amounts of memory that users are reporting for Slack are all several times higher than the entire RAM of the first computer I started using my MSNP client on.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#280From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a "tube" from https://sameroom.io - not free though.
Free for some providers that have Sameroom-operated "BridgeBots".
Any combination of Hangouts, Skype, GroupMe, Telegram, and Gitter is free to connect.
We also had a Freenode BridgeBot, but couldn't get around the max connections per user issue.