Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#121

Post by biztos » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

Just yesterday I was musing that if I were King of the (World|Company) I'd want an open-source Slack-alike that I could just drop into the Cloud of my choice and operate entirely within my private network, subject to my own access control just like other internal services, and with full access to all message histories in whatever database-like thing it uses in its Cloud. Sure, I'd still have a SPOF but it's game over anyway if my Cloud goes dark.

Is there such a project, and if so does it have any traction in the real world?

(Oh and ditto for every damn thing Atlassian owns. Yikes.)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#122

Post by jgrahamc » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

kevcampb wrote: post #118

jgrahamc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. I'm irritated, however, that you picked on Cloudflare as a bad actor here when we strive to be transparent and quick to get out full information whereas others (e.g. Amazon) are slow as mud. But I get that being on the other side of this is difficult when you don't have information.

Amazon, Google, seem far far worse. I wasn't intending for my post to me representative, just that the CF outage is recent and affects me more personally than the others atm. Also, I had zero expectation my comment would actually be read, this is quite a surprise. If it's any incentive, if the status page had any inkling that something was wrong, I'd be first on here posting "omg their status page is real".

Fair enough. Thanks for making the comment. Made me think about how fast we act in terms of public status pages. And sorry that route leak affected you.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#123

Post by thg » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #121

Just yesterday I was musing that if I were King of the (World|Company) I'd want an open-source Slack-alike that I could just drop into the Cloud of my choice and operate entirely within my private network, subject to my own access control just like other internal services, and with full access to all message histories in whatever database-like thing it uses in its Cloud. Sure, I'd still have a SPOF but it's game over…

https://mattermost.com/

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#124

Post by pmlnr » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #99

lqet wrote: post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

"just running an IRC server" is... a lot. Or can be. Who is running it? Does it scale well? How is login synced with corporate logins? What about mobile devices? It's not "better" than email, it's different. Real time. It has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. Point is, it's really not all that crazy to just pay a third party to manage all this stuff for you. You might imagine the alternative…

> Does it scale well?

It's IRC. On modern hardware. It's practically infinite.

> it has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't.

There and were are things way before Slack, eg https://loqi.me/

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#125

Post by manaskarekar » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #121

Just yesterday I was musing that if I were King of the (World|Company) I'd want an open-source Slack-alike that I could just drop into the Cloud of my choice and operate entirely within my private network, subject to my own access control just like other internal services, and with full access to all message histories in whatever database-like thing it uses in its Cloud. Sure, I'd still have a SPOF but it's game over…

Dunno about feature parity but zulip is great.

https://zulipchat.com

https://github.com/zulip/zulip

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#126

Post by nostoc » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #102

One problem with Slack we have in the finance world is that _literally everything_ employees say on company assets needs to be recorded and readily accessible for audit (No this is not an invasion of privacy, you're on company time on company systems, we don't peer into your personal phone or anything). Unfortunately, Slack does not do this very well. I'd really like to know if there's another service that _does_ do…

Mattermost, but you'll have to manage it yourself.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#127

Post by evanwalsh » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #121

Just yesterday I was musing that if I were King of the (World|Company) I'd want an open-source Slack-alike that I could just drop into the Cloud of my choice and operate entirely within my private network, subject to my own access control just like other internal services, and with full access to all message histories in whatever database-like thing it uses in its Cloud. Sure, I'd still have a SPOF but it's game over…

Zulip, Rocket.Chat, and Mattermost are probably the best options.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#128

Post by daneyh » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #102

One problem with Slack we have in the finance world is that _literally everything_ employees say on company assets needs to be recorded and readily accessible for audit (No this is not an invasion of privacy, you're on company time on company systems, we don't peer into your personal phone or anything). Unfortunately, Slack does not do this very well. I'd really like to know if there's another service that _does_ do…

Symphony chat, what goldmans is trying to aim as the bloomberg IB killer. It's quite nice and designed for banks and API/Bot friendly.

url:https://symphony.com/en-US

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#129

Post by amelius » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

valerij wrote: post #62

reminds me of that one time a genius at IBM created an `ibm-global-announcements` channel and force-invited 200'000 people in it, and then some guy `@channel`d and all ibm's slack workspaces were down for 30 minutes https://status.slack.com/ibm/2018-03/f01d4c22cd953dd7 https://i.imgur.com/Rk6Kdgp.png EDIT: also that channel made using slack impossible for mac book air users, they had around 80% cpu usage for slack. s…

> a genius at IBM

Are you saying it is the user's fault where it is clearly Slack's inadequate implementation that is the problem?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#130

Post by alt_f4 » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #99

lqet wrote: post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

"just running an IRC server" is... a lot. Or can be. Who is running it? Does it scale well? How is login synced with corporate logins? What about mobile devices? It's not "better" than email, it's different. Real time. It has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. Point is, it's really not all that crazy to just pay a third party to manage all this stuff for you. You might imagine the alternative…

Come on, in the 90s and early 00s, volunteers ran and managed IRC networks scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users. This was back when hardware and bandwidth were much weaker and 100x more expensive. It's really not that hard.