Downdetector reporting a lot of AWS complaints simultaneously.
NA is all green per -- https://status.aws.amazon.com/
Slack was down
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: Slack was down
#152If 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.
Some other open Slack alternatives I know about include:
Matrix[1]: maybe the most impressive. A chat _protocol_ with multiple server and client implementations, gateways to everything, and just out of beta.
Zulip[2] (as mentioned), Rocket.Chat[3], Mattermost[4]---Slack clones. open source, developement open to pull requests to various degrees, can pay to have hosted in cloud or get support.
Non-free or qualitatively different solutions include Discord, MS Teams, and the original IRC, I guess.
Apologies for any inaccuracies or omissions; I'm not an expert in the space.
[1] https://matrix.org/ [2] https://zulipchat.com/ [3] https://rocket.chat/ [4] https://mattermost.com/
Re: Slack was down
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really what it comes down to. Email existed forever, but no one really liked it until Gmail made it flashy. Smartphones existed forever but no one really liked them until Apple/Google made them flashy. Search existed forever but no one really liked it until Google made it flashy. Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end presentation is the only thing that matters.
Sorry, you are wrong. This is pure revisionism. Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at the time. I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.
I owned several Windows Mobile phones, one Blackberry, and one Palm device before iPhone and Android came out. I know the history. They were not popular devices. Even just looking at Blackberry sales by themselves, sales of these devices pre-iPhone were absolutely insignificant [1].
Same thing with email. Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL pre-dated Gmail by quite a long time, but Gmail now owns something like 80% of all webmail traffic.
I think your confusion might be where I said "these things existed but no one really liked them" maybe you read "these things didn't exist before"?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-of...
Re: Slack was down
#154Is it really that hard to spin up an IRC server for moments like these? I too have had to switch to Skype communications today. I wish people used IRC in the first place so I could write my own bots.
You can write bots in Slack. Actually they tout that as a big feature.
Re: Slack was down
#155If 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.
Has anyone tried Twist ( https://twist.com/ )? It looks a lot like Zulip but with a nicer UI. I think it is crazy that Slack has not invested more in first-class threaded, context-aware conversations.
Tried it. While the interface looks 'nicer' at first glance, it fits far less content on the screen. It also had more of an email-y vibe while Zulip has more a chat-y vibe, which I personally prefer.
Beyond that, Zulip is open source and self-hostable, while Twist is not.
Side note, we have a chat about self-hosting set up on Zulip at https://homelabos.zulipchat.com/ with 85 members and growing. It's been great for new users to be able to come in and catch up on old discussions in a way that isn't possible with non-threaded platforms.
Re: Slack was down
#156Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in orde…
It takes much longer to listen to an audio recording than it does to read a sentence. And in certain cases, compose one.
Re: Slack was down
#157If 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.
But... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...
You pay for "close" to it, but no chat app is going to have 100% uptime at scale.
Re: Slack was down
#158I never really understood how such buggy software can have such crazy high valuation. Seems like just a matter of time before someone does the same thing but better.
Re: Slack was down
#159If 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?
They are down... You are talking about the potential to kick them.
Re: Slack was down
#160Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in orde…
It takes much longer to listen to an audio recording than it does to read a sentence. And in certain cases, compose one.
Agree, because the audio is richer.
A slight pause, a 'hmmmm', a chuckle, can infer the statement as a question, or at least give a hint as how confident the statement is, instead of a proclamation.
Otherwise, without inflection, every sentence can read as a definitive statement. Zero nuance, and we end up with places like Twitter. It's awful for discourse.