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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)

#111

Post by piva00 »

api_dolla wrote: post #90
charlesdaniels wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 are many solutions available to do this. Many channels publish chat logs publicly, which can be downloaded and searched using grep or your tool of choice. And there are web clients that can do this. > Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out ther…

This reminds me so much of the ‘Show HN: Dropbox’ post

I have linked to that post quite a few times here in HN along the years, it is surprising for me how many times this same kind of answer pops up and I don't understand if it's lack of vision or empathy that there are people out there that want tools with better ergonomics and are willing to pay for that.

Quite a few of us here work in software, of course we can just jerry-rig a lot of solutions based on existing tools, it doesn't mean it is sufficient to be a product or useful for a broader set of users...

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

#112

Post by packetlost »

oytis wrote: post #106
chipperyman573 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the things you listed are true, and you and I and most other people on HN can respect why (at least to us) these reasons stand out from slack. But a middle manager who doesn't even know what IRC stands for isn't going to want to learn the syntax for grep. They're not even going to know why they have to write \" instead of ". They want something where you can scroll up, and then your messages from two months ag…

Yeah, but the original point was about FOSS projects. Just don't let managers into your FOSS project.

Don't let knowledge of old * nix tools be effectively gatekeeping people from joining a FOSS project.

grep is not a sufficient replacement for indexed search with fields. Just try to use Discord's search feature, you can specify constraints extremely easily. The equivalent in grep (if you even have logs going back that far) would be some gnarly regex that you have to reference what characters you need to specify unless you're very familiar with regex.

IRC isn't hard, but it has real shortcoming and real problems. The user experience hasn't meaningfully changed in 20+ years, but people's expectations and how they interact with chat platforms has. This is coming from someone who uses IRC every day, both at work and at home.

What we really need is most of the features of Slack without it's terrible threading mechanism and no GIFs.

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

#113

Post by ddevault »

CameronNemo wrote: post #77
ddevault wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emojis, reaction gifs, ugh. https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...

Code fences, sane identity management.

I don't understand why people bring up identity management in IRC like it's a problem. No one has issues with this.

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

#114

Post by prsy »

saagarjha wrote: post #70

> Slack provides an IRC bridge that lets you connect to Slack with an IRC client. Which doesn't exist anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857 . As far as I'm aware, there is no way to connect to Slack anymore without their official client, unless you use something that is either their website in an app wrapper or probably violating their ToS.

weechat has a plugin called wee-slack that I've been using every day for over a year https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

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

#115

Post by lidHanteyk »

chrisseaton wrote: post #65
rumanator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

I think it’s a bit snide and snarky to just post a link like that. And I don’t even think it’s applicable - in the community I’m in we decided we didn’t want an eternal log of everyone’s discussions. More formal discussions in PRs and emails are recorded, but we rather let conversations fade away after some time.

It's pretty tone-deaf of you, though, and suggests limited connection to FLOSS communities. Freenode, for example, has a policy that channels disclose in their /topic if there are public logs. Many mailing lists have the property of being viewable forever, and contributors understand that property, building discussions that last for decades and taking matters off-list when privacy is needed. This is not a new problem, and FLOSS communities tackle it already.

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

#116

Post by rsync »

aidenn0 wrote: post #64
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…

There are several richer IRC clients; the author of this article suggests https://thelounge.chat/ in a later article about IRC.

"There are several richer IRC clients; the author of this article suggests https://thelounge.chat/ in a later article about IRC."

I have no dog in this fight as I do not use slack nor do I use irc anymore ...

However, reading this comment thread makes me think that what you all really need is neither a slack alternative nor an irc alternative ... what you all really need is a very well written irc bot.

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

#118

Post by jamesgeck0 »

gizmo385 wrote: post #47
armitron wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

Slack has no public API for 3rd party clients; it's strictly for bots. The EULA says they can ban you if you use a 3rd party client. The clients I've seen require you to open browser web dev tools in the browser and copy your API key from the browser session.

Even browser CSS modifications are apparently frowned upon.

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

#119

Post by KindOne »

c-cube wrote: post #79
trothamel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uppercase 'S' for TLS, lowercase 's' just hides the channel from /list and ALIS on freenode.
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