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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

drewdevault.com

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Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#21

Post by cnst »

t0mbstone wrote: post #13

Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional. One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's. IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like…

> One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history.

There's literally web-clients available where all you gotta do is click a link and write a name that hasn't been taken by anyone yet, and you're in. No email address, no password.

History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by most projects. How do you get history for Slack without having an account?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#22

Post by ddevault »

t0mbstone wrote: post #13

Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional. One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's. IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like…

Emojis, reaction gifs, ugh.

https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#23

Post by chrisseaton »

t0mbstone wrote: post #13

Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional. One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's. IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like…

> Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional.

The author doesn't equate them - they even list many critical things that Slack has that IRC doesn't. Which makes their conclusion even more silly.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#24

Post by cnst »

PebblesHD wrote: post #14

My only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from enterprise tools and other integration pro…

> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool,

If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools!

Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history, ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste that comes with Slack.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#25

Post by oefrha »

cnst wrote: post #21
t0mbstone wrote: post #13

Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional. One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's. IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like…

> One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. There's literally web-clients available where all you gotta do is click a link and write a name that hasn't been taken by anyone yet, and you're in. No email address, no password. History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by…

> History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by most projects.

Most projects? Really? I'd say at most 20% of IRC channels for open source projects I've been on have published history.

Shopping around for a log bot and figuring out a publishing channel is not straightforward. In fact nothing is more straightforward than builtin. While I'm not a big fan of using Slack for open source collaboration, saying IRC history is straightforward and provided by most projects is indeed delusional.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#26

Post by thrower123 »

cnst wrote: post #24
PebblesHD wrote: post #14

My only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from enterprise tools and other integration pro…

> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools! Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history, ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste that comes with Slack.

I have a warm place in my heart for Pidgin. For a long, long time I had to deal with IM clients that wouldn't let you sign in more than one account per instance, and some of them used mutexes to prevent running multiple instances.

It looked like hot dog vomit, but it worked wonderfully.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#28

Post by oefrha »

cnst wrote: post #24
PebblesHD wrote: post #14

My only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from enterprise tools and other integration pro…

> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools! Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history, ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste that comes with Slack.

> Sharing files is trivial with Gist

Apparently not all files that need to be shared are text files. Developers have a million ways to share text files, thank you.

(I know how to use gists to share images and other files. It's not pretty.)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#29

Post by me551ah »

The biggest problem for me in IRC is lack of good mobile clients. You can't get push notifications and if you want to stay persistently online then you need to keep a perpetual battery-draining socket open. You could setup a relay on your server ,but it's cumbersome and too technical for most people.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)

#30

Post by baroffoos »

me551ah wrote: post #29

The biggest problem for me in IRC is lack of good mobile clients. You can't get push notifications and if you want to stay persistently online then you need to keep a perpetual battery-draining socket open. You could setup a relay on your server ,but it's cumbersome and too technical for most people.

The best solution I have found is to use Riot/Matrix and connect to the channel via an irc bridge. That way you get a modern app/protocol which works on mobile. A better solution again would be to an actual matrix room for your foss projects.
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