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Slack was down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack was down

#141

Post by papln »

anaphor wrote: post #80
nixgeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

I don't mean it in a disparaging way. Most software sucks to some degree so the goal is to find something that "sucks less". Pretty much everything can always be improved on.

"more pleasant to use and less buggy."

Borrowing from Lin Manuel-Miranda's Thomas Jefferson:

> These are wise words, enterprising men quote 'em > Don't act surprised, you guys, 'anaphor wrote 'em

It's a nicer way to convey the same idea, without triggering a combative emotional response in reaaders.

Re: Slack was down

#142

Post by papln »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #58
elwell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...

Actually it's only two nine's, which means Slack can be down for 52 minutes every year. > 1. We purposely made our commitment to the ‘fourth 9’, viz. 99.99% uptime guarantee in contrast to the typical SLAs which tend to offer 99.90%. We believe that extra availability makes a difference: the ‘fourth 9’ is important when your team relies on Slack every day. You need Slack at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 minutes. [1…

Assuming the failures are deterministic across workspaces (is that true?) Slack has been down for over an hour for some workspaces, since the problem started at 10:54 AM EDT.

What is the A part of Stack's SLA?

Re: Slack was down

#143

Post by MiroF »

nixgeek wrote: post #68
anaphor wrote: post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

Slack is a multi-billion dollar valued company, we're not kicking them while they're down

Re: Slack was down

#144

Post by MiroF »

elwell wrote: post #27

" Some workspaces might be experiencing issues with messages sending and loading." (emphasis mine) Is that marketing-speak to lessen the loss of trust?

It's only down in the US

Re: Slack was down

#145

Post by rerx »

mslate wrote: post #78

Any alternatives to Slack with parity screensharing functionality? Being able to draw on the screen is so valuable for remote pair programming—Hangouts/Skype don’t cut it

We use Zoom for that.

But we still rely on Slack for general messaging and chat rooms.

Re: Slack was down

#146

Post by mr__y »

awj wrote: post #109
mr__y wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you could take any old-school internet tech, add some flashy GUI, slap "for enterprise" label and you get a great and popular solution that solves the problem noone ever could solve. Maybe it's time for gopher for enterprise

So, what you're saying is there's tons of technologies lying around that are a solid UI and some extra features away from being valuable to normal people. But somehow doing those things and making lots of money is bad?

No, of course not. Neither adding some minor extra features (that make a huge difference for the end-user) nor profiting from it is bad. My concern was that there is so much good tech that is not being utilized just because it lacks enterprisey look and marketing attention.

Take slack as an example: ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend (use any existing web irc client and integrate that with elastic search results). MVP really seems as a one guy one weekend project. And that was lying underutilized for decades. While my original comment was just a snarky remark, I really think that there are other areas where such a (relatively) simple MVP could allow huge productivity boost to many businesses and allow them to use an existing tool that right now is just too hard/too complicated to use by a wide audience.

And of course the market will reward those that will find the right solution and come up with a great UX improvement to that tech. The hard part is creating the GUI that is both efficient and easy-enough , and the hardest part is of course finding the right tool and the right problem to solve. (edit: formatting)

Re: Slack was down

#147

Post by papln »

Why hasn't Slack built a P2P fallback for Enterprise teams?

Slack server knows at least which clients has recently been active in a chatroom, so the server could send that information to clients (per privacy opt-in) who can then make a best-effort attempt to send their new messages to the recently-active clients.

Perhaps that's just self-hosting with extra steps. At some point, isn't it cost-effective to offer customers a SaaSBox that they can deploy as a minimal-functionality on-prem backup to the cloud service?

Re: Slack was down

#148

Post by TheRealWatson »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #77
rvz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I really want to like Zulip Chat. It has everything all the alternatives have + self-hosting, but as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with. I already have to put up with 10+ electron apps slowing down my Macbook. I shouldn't have to make s…

10+ electron apps seems excessive, what other Electron apps are you running? I think Slack is the only one I'm running (that I know of)

I only use Electron apps if I like them too much or if they're unavoidable. The only two I have running all the time are Slack and InVision.

Re: Slack was down

#149

Post by enlyth »

allana wrote: post #76
nixgeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low. This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.

I'm sitting at 341MB after all day heavy usage, let's not exaggerate here :)

Re: Slack was down

#150

Post by mr__y »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #129
timdorr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually just fixed that in 4.0: https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-deskt... I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4 workspaces.

400MB for what basically is a client for a proprietary version of IRC is ridiculous. How much memory did BitchX use ?

while I don't remember how much memory did BitchX use, I do remember that a whopping 8 megs of ram was enough to run mIRC with 20+ channel tabs without serious glitches. And those precious megs were used not only for the irc client but also for the OS itself.
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