Agreed. And neither use Discord! Matrix is more appropriate. It's quite annoying Rust project went with Discord and didn't pick open options.
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
71–80 of 136 posts
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients. Example? As someone who has written a library to facilitate creating 3rd party bots, I've never seen anything to suggest this.
3rd party bots≠3rd party clients. Discord very actively goes after the latter and those who use them.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many projects prefer a limited history for interactive chats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#74Most FOSS projects that aren't on Slack/Discord/IRC seem to be on gitter.im
gitter.im's frontend/SPA client has a bunch of glitches, but the backend seems solid.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#75Acting 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…
It's built, it's called Mattermost and it's awesome, super flexible, full API, full control and very easy maintenance/upgrade path.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#76My 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…
That makes IRC sound like a good tool for open source projects though. None of the negatives seem to apply to this scenario.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#77Acting 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...
Code fences, sane identity management.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#78I totally disagree with this article. IRC is incredibly user hostile and for even a technical user is intimidating, complex, and nonobvious. Everyone uses Slack or Discord, and everyone knows how they work, and the UI is easy. All the features that ddevault says are bad are things that almost everyone else cares about. I, for one, am thankful that more communities are moving off IRC.
I agree that IRC doesn't hit the needs and wants of many contributors these days. But I've really found the limits of the Slack free plan a bit rough in the Elixir Slack. And I'd say concerns about being on a proprietary system are valid. It ends up being a mess of pragmatic trade-offs, rather than clear-cut. Slack and friends is overall more approachable.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most servers do, and a simple channel mode solves the spam problem (which isn't nowhere near as much of a problem as email spam).
I don't believe that it does. For a week or two about a year ago, freenode had a problem where accounts would join channel, spam links to sites accusing prominent people of child porn, and be kicked a moment later. If there's a channel mode that can stop that, while still keeping the channel useful for people who need support, I couldn't find it.
in my experience, even just setting +s to enforce TLS connections was enough to remove all spam.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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, yo…
Instead of re-inventing the wheel building your own interface, why not just spend that time working on the FOSS project in question? FOSS dogma seems to frequently get in the way of FOSS development. If you aren’t pure and blessed, somehow you are less worthy.
> Instead of re-inventing the wheel building your own interface, why not just spend that time working on the FOSS project in question?
Hu? Because they won't take my contribution that rips out all of the web interface and replaces it with EMACS?
I mean, what does this even have to do with FOSS? Developing stuff as protocols instead of as user interfaces does not in any way prevent FOSS, very much to the contrary. There are FOSS IRC clients in all shapes and forms: Web interfaces, X GUIs, Windows GUIs, mobile clients, terminal UIs, EMACS modes, XMPP bridges, Matrix bridges ... how is any of that "reinventing the wheel", and how would we be better off if all those clients had to be part of one "IRC FOSS project" rather than independent projects with standards-based interoperability?