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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#521

Post by dfabulich »

colordrops wrote: post #400
solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

I'm guessing it's highly likely that one of the reasons for the acquisition is to make Hipchat the on-prem version of Slack, or at least create a path to that goal. Why does everyone here assume they will shutter the product? Slack has been promising self-hosted chat for years.

https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2018/07/atlassian-slack...

> As a result of this partnership, Atlassian is discontinuing all real-time communications products, and we are working with Slack to provide a migration path for Stride and Hipchat customers.

They provide dates for shuttering everything. Stride and Hipchat Cloud are shuttering Feb 2019. The latest version of Hipchat Server will be supported until June 2020.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#522

Post by philwelch »

wokwokwok wrote: post #410
philwelch wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime" Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the ad…

Its superficial to suppose the immediacy of slack is its only feature. The reality is that email fails to serve the purpose for complex discussions that involve many people , especially when you're using a rubbish email system like outlook. Another form, be it meetings, chat, forum, whatever is required for this... and to be fair, gmail and the like offer some form of searching and sorting nested threads... ...but yo…

Outlook may very well be shit, but that’s largely because business/enterprise email products are optimized for the same PowerPoint-addled minds that Slack is. Rich text is where email first started to go wrong.

Seriously, go read the lkml archives sometime, and go tell the authors of one of the most important and high quality pieces of foundational software in the world that they would be better served with something like Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#523

Post by lucb1e »

Groxx wrote: post #377
jawilson2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.

Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#524

Post by travbrack »

SamWhited wrote: post #412
travbrack wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The client-side story of XMPP is pretty bleak, especially if you're trying to get non-technical people to use it.

This is why we need specific services (like Slack or HipChat) that are XMPP but maintain their own ecosystem, clients, specific feature sets, etc. Then if you want to use third party clients (eg. for better accessibility, or because your platform isn't supported officially, etc.) you can, but if not you can use their clients. HipChat was almost this way (I used Mcabber with it extensively), but had just enough bits o…

It's a real shame that the industry has forsaken the protocol in favor of walled gardens.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#525

Post by philwelch »

samstave wrote: post #406
linuxftw wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information. There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not. Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating a…

Goofing off via chat has been a thing since IRC, and you don’t really need much above and beyond IRC to goof off. And if tech companies treated Slack as belonging to the same class as ping pong tables and kegerators, that would be highly appropriate. But they treat Slack like it’s a serious business communication tool.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#526

Post by lawl »

brendanr wrote: post #519
it33 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a so…

Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/ )

> Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days?

Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#527

Post by Shivatron »

jawilson2 wrote: post #258
apple4ever wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client)

1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.)

2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing).

3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus.

4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man.

5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#528

Post by philwelch »

spookthesunset wrote: post #364
philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that. That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.

What word would you use for people who are incapable of communicating through the written word? Or for an Internet that is increasingly designed to cater to such people?

The dialup-era Internet was mostly text and a little bit of pictures. There was good text, bad text, and lots and lots of fanfiction, but at least it was text. Even if you went to The Onion, there might be one goofy photoshopped photo but you had to read an actual article with real paragraphs to get the jokes. Now everything is a video, or a picture, or a meme, and everything longer than 140 characters is “tl;dr”. That’s a cultural decline akin to when television displaced reading in the mid-20th century.

I can communicate in either style, so it’s not a personal thing from my perspective—except, since I can communicate in either style, I can also tell which style is more conducive to deep and meaningful discussion.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#529

Post by lallysingh »

travbrack wrote: post #391
Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For on-prem, why not use a free and enterprise-quality XMPP server, like Openfire[1]? It's Java so runs just about anywhere, and with even relatively low resource allocations, you can support a large number of concurrent chats and group sessions. Plus, since XMPP is an Open Standard, you can use any XMPP complaint client of your choosing. Cisco embeds Openfire in a few of their enterprise products already (including…

The client-side story of XMPP is pretty bleak, especially if you're trying to get non-technical people to use it.

No good web front ends?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#530

Post by karmelapple »

munificent wrote: post #366
eganist wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in the mute-everything-non-critical class, which is a good practice regardless of the client. If they really need you, they'll ring/call/DM. Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.

I think you're confusing communication throughput with latency. I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction , it's because I want less interruption . Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing…

I have never expected that the other party is sitting and staring at the screen in any Slack or chat I’ve used. An @mention will change the expectation of interrupting or not, but as someone who has used various chat programs for 24 years of my life, this ha never been an expectation I’ve had, nor one I’ve seen too frequently expressed.

What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind? Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Have you worked with people who do expect that? Honestly curious.

I wonder how my growing up with it, and in chat rooms with mostly tech-savvy folks, has affected my use and expectations of it, too.

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