31–40 of 136 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with Discord?
Everything that's wrong with slack, and more. No IRC gateway. Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients. Centralized control. Ownership of your data.
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…
Free slack is on par with IRC here -- you need someone nerdy enough to run a chat history bot to get a full searchable history.
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…
On the free slack plan, you don't get history beyond its 10k message limit (or whatever the number is), unless you start paying per head. Even on small teams, that limit is hit surprisingly quickly. For the medium-to-large sized open source project slacks -- the history is basically completely useless. Free slack is on par with IRC here -- you need someone nerdy enough to run a chat history bot to get a full searchab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the free slack plan, you don't get history beyond its 10k message limit (or whatever the number is), unless you start paying per head. Even on small teams, that limit is hit surprisingly quickly. For the medium-to-large sized open source project slacks -- the history is basically completely useless. Free slack is on par with IRC here -- you need someone nerdy enough to run a chat history bot to get a full searchab…
That's not necessarily true. If you're a certified non-profit, you can get free Slack with unlimited message history for up to 250 users ( https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833 ).
EDIT:
Answered my own question: up to 85% discount, which is very nice, but still might be infeasible for many projects/communities.
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.
Funny to see this reposted today, as just today I encountered an open source project which primarily uses Discord for chat - a terrible idea for all the same reasons. I had planned on writing a similar follow-up article reminding people that Discord is a bad communication medium for open source projects, too. I think that this is something the community ought to be occasionally reminded of, lest we lapse.
Is mumble[1] a decent replacement for discord? I like the idea of the immediacy of voice chat for talking over ideas and issues. [1]: https://www.mumble.info/
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…
How the fuck did people come to think of this as a negative? One of the stupidest things about "modern" IT services is that the public interface is a user interface instead of a machine readable iterface, so you can't build a user interface that fits your needs or preferences, you can't innovate features independently, and you can't use software to process the data, you have to interface everything with a human (or go to great length to scrape stuff 'n shit ... just the point of using information technology!).
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…