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Bye bye BetterSlack

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#381

Post by katheriin »

EdiX wrote: post #114
FlorianRappl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did corner the market so clearly they must be doing something, but really I just can't see it. I'm completely stumped. One of the reasons is the lack of competition, e.g., we use Microsoft Teams instead, but its also an electron app with the same problems (and takes ages to start).

I guess this must be it. IRC could in theory do everything Slack does but setting up a server is a pain and shiny clients are rare... I wonder about the rest of the competition, for a while everybody was using hipchat, I never used it myself, I wonder why nobody talks about it anymore.

There is competition out there, they just haven't made enough noise yet. See Fleep for example: https://fleep.io/, Rocket Chat etc.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#382

Post by throwawaymath »

craigsmansion wrote: post #324
throwawaymath wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're in the extreme minority if you honestly confused Slack the chat client for Slackware the Linux distribution. That's...a leap. Frankly the origin of Slack's name has nothing to do with Slackware Linux (or Linux in general) so I'm having difficulty following your grievance here.

70's counter-culture and early hacker culture are not that far apart. It's more than likely their origins are related. Now if "Slack" means the pretty protocol-breaking irc-client to you, that's perfectly fine. But if some party starts threatening someone with 'That's not what "Slack" means! We're the authoritative source on the meaning of "Slack"', a hacker should resists. Slack is for everybody. Many may have forgo…

> But if some party starts threatening someone with 'That's not what "Slack" means! We're the authoritative source on the meaning of "Slack"', a hacker should resists.

Okay but they didn't do that. Slack is concerned about someone using their name in relation to third party, unaffiliated software which is obviously related to their own software. Slack the messaging company doesn't care about the use of Slack outside of that niche.

If you wrote a browser extension called "BetterSlack" that emulated Slackware in your browser, Slack wouldn't care. If you wrote a browser extension called "DontSlackOff!" that automatically restricted the time you could procrastinate on Hacker News or reddit, Slack wouldn't care.

Slack cares about its brand, not being the canonical authority on an English word use of that word in products. The idea that Slack cares about uses of the word that don't have anything to do with its own software seems like a willful misinterpretation of the point. This is a pretty mundane legality and has nothing to do with hacker culture or "resisting" anything.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#383

Post by u801e »

canadaduane wrote: post #17
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #5

Folks, use IRC, XMPP, Matrix, etc. Using proprietary protocols is dumb .

I worked at a medium-sized company during the transition from IRC to Slack. The problem the company had was a split in comms networks. There was a lack of will on the part of engineers to move to GChat, and non-engineers were unwilling to respond/engage on IRC. Marketing, Sales, and Admin were using GChat, while engineering used IRC. Getting everyone on the same comms platform was a major improvement. I'm not saying…

This is largely the same rational that was used at the company I work at to transition to Slack. From an engineer and developer point of view, I rarely, if ever, directly communicate with non-engineers over instant messaging.

For people who deal with different groups of people in the company, shouldn't it be up to them to handle communicating with different groups using different methods rather than compelling everyone to use the same communication platform for instant messaging?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#384

Post by realusername »

ckastner wrote: post #365
realusername wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's not, and I'm not playing on semantic. Laws are above any terms of use, regardless of what they might say. And not using the product makes you not bound to the terms of use, unlike laws which you have to obey at all times.

I'm beginning to think that when you said by "not signing anything" earlier, you actually meant "not agreeing to anything", is that correct? > And not using the product makes you not bound to the terms of use, unlike laws which you have to obey at all times. Of course not. But in this specific case, it is safe to assume that he is using the product, or more specifically: he used Slack to develop BetterSlack.

Ah yeah sorry, there's been some misunderstanding, I agree with you.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#385

Post by kuon »

katheriin wrote: post #380
kuon wrote: post #376

As a riot.im user, I hope it will become a bigger player in the open source space, I am a bit sick of slack for various reasons.

Just out of curiosity, why riot.im out of all the open source alternatives to Slack and similar tools?

Because of the matrix.org foundations.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#386

Post by apotheon »

wpietri wrote: post #234
g3rv4 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not being a good platform partner basically because they make it impossible for me to be one. I’d love to avoid reverse engineering their minified code and use well documented APIs. Unfortunately, that’s not possible nor planned (as they told me on a tweet I linked on the post).

I really feel both sides of this. On the one hand, I like customizing things, and I love to see users getting involved in platforms they love. On the other, I see how responsibly providing APIs is a big long-term burden that can prevent internal innovation. I was talking a while back with some Mozilla people about the move from their legacy API [1] to WebExtensions [2]. It was a giant pain, but their old API exposed…

In deprecating functionality necessary for the extensions that made Firefox worthwhile for me, though, the reasons to prefer it over other browsers evaporated.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#387

Post by pdfernhout »

g3rv4 wrote: post #239
pdfernhout wrote: post #237

From something I wrote in January 2016 (just one concern of many): "Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development" https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-sof... "Slack requires signing up and agreeing with a long Terms of Service (TOS); the TOS can be changed at any time, and historically such TOS have changed for the worse over time for other services once a lot of users adopt the service…

wow... you turned down an interview at a place you liked because of their tools? you certainly have stronger feelings about it than I do :)

I guess I did not explain that clearly enough in the essay. The issue was not using Slack in itself. I've unfortunately had to use a bunch of proprietary tools and hardware over the years, and in fact (unfortunately) I use Slack where I work now. The issue was that Automattic, the company behind the FOSS WordPress software, was moving from open solutions to use proprietary Slack. That included moving away from FOSS ones they made themselves in-house like o2 ( https://github.com/Automattic/o2 ). And that disappointing choice by Automattic to embrace proprietary communications tools seemed in conflict with my hope to have made WordPress into a better FOSS communications platform while working there. I also did not feel it boded well for the company itself -- since Automattic seemed to be narrowing its business ideals from supporting and expanding the single biggest FOSS communications platform on Earth in terms of hosting much of the web to becoming essentially just another WIX competitor.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#389

Post by jjeaff »

tptacek wrote: post #280
barbegal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you there, to win the case there would have to be some economic reason for Slack to not want users to use this extension. The reason they state is "Injecting javascript into Slack via Chrome extension can have an impact on the privacy and security of our customers and our product. Furthermore, this can create reliability issues when we ship product updates." If they can prove that is true then the case s…

If it alters the DOM, it impacts security, and in a very significant way, since DOM security is in a sense the most important security barrier between untrustworthy content and all the messages a user has access to on a Slack.

Sure, it "impacts" security. But as we are discussing above, it would need to be shown to "negatively" impact security. I don't think you could win on the basis of "it's not recommended to do that, but we can't see any examples of it actually causing security problems."

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#390

Post by jjeaff »

BeefySwain wrote: post #301
diminoten wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the person you're replying to's point was to take it to the next step. Let them initiate legal proceedings (and pay lawyers) to do something. Maybe it's foolish, maybe it's not, but this email cost Slack the salary of the person for the time it took him/her to write it. At least make them also pay for an hour or two of legal fees to have this taken down.

And in the process be potentially banned from the platform. This could cost OP his job, considering he built this utility to make Slack bearable to use in his place of employment.

How exactly would they ban you? It's not like Slack verifies your identity upon signup. A new email would be sufficient.
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