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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)

#121

Post by oytis »

packetlost wrote: post #112
oytis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unle…

Well, my experience with Slack (never tried discord really) is that it's pretty hard to find anything that is more than a week old. Slack (and IRC) is designed to exchange the information quickly and forget about it. If we need traceability then e-mail is much superior to both.

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

#123

Post by tom_mellior »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #101
tom_mellior wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't innovate features independently That's also the case with open protocols like IRC. Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata. You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.

> That's also the case with open protocols like IRC. No, it's not. > Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata. Then you are bad at protocol design. > You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard. No, you innovate by being backwards compatible with es…

I think you read too much into my post. I didn't claim anything about protocols in general. You yourself admit that it might not be flexible enough to evolve. It has certainly had a lot of time to try.

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

#124

Post by pmoriarty »

imtringued wrote: post #93

As someone who heavily used IRC in his childhood I disagree. IRC is pretty much dead. If you want opensource instant messaging then go with Rocketchat or Matrix with Riot.

The FreeNode IRC network is alive and well for opensource support. Lots of devs for many, many projects, and users for many Linux distros, for instance, hang out there all the time.

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

#125

Post by Ruthalas »

ptman wrote: post #97
_sharp wrote: post #18

I've used RocketChat at a previous company, basically a clone of slack. I didn't have to manage it, but it seemed to work great.

rocket.chat is open core, please avoid it

Can you elaborate on this? I am currently using RocketChat and would interested to hear of security issues or similar problems it has.

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

#126

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

tom_mellior wrote: post #123
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's also the case with open protocols like IRC. No, it's not. > Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata. Then you are bad at protocol design. > You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard. No, you innovate by being backwards compatible with es…

I think you read too much into my post. I didn't claim anything about protocols in general. You yourself admit that it might not be flexible enough to evolve. It has certainly had a lot of time to try.

> You yourself admit that it might not be flexible enough to evolve.

I don't really think so, but I don't really know, I haven't every tried to do anything in that direction.

> It has certainly had a lot of time to try.

Except that people have to do it? As far as I am concerned, IRC is good enough, so I don't feel like putting any effort into "improving" anything, and it seems like a lot of people using IRC feel this way. Those who feel it's not good enough, though, seem to prefer building non-interoperable systems or just using proprietary lock-in vendors. Obviously, that's not gonna result in anything new in IRC.

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

#127

Post by kixiQu »

Bnshsysjab wrote: post #102
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…

Riot seemed reeeeally clunky when I tried it, which is a shame because I’m sure it’d be a decent codebase

it's getting better all the time IMHO. The problem is that the reference back-end is in Python which isn't scaling well enough for the matrix.org instance / its rooms-- which is the only instance many people try. There's a project to implement that back-end in Golang which I expect to be a real turning point if it can get off the ground.

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

#128

Post by esotericn »

I totally understand that IRC has issues, but there's really nothing that beats just being able to hit '/j #channel' on freenode and it's probably there and my client works how I expect it to.

The fragmentation pretty much excludes me from switching away. It's completely impractical to maintain notifications / check new messages / reasonably understand the interface of 5+ different clients (on multiple machines too!), so the theoretical benefit of using a new platform doesn't exist.

There's what - Gitter, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Matrix? I'm sure there are more.

How do people actually manage this? Do people really have 5 of these clients open, or do they just arbitrarily pick one? Slack, when I've used it, has been a 'per organization' thing, can you have multiple orgs open at once or do you need a tab for each of those?

I just find the whole thing bonkers. IRC wasn't an arbitrary choice ten years ago, it was a defacto standard.

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

#129

Post by DenseComet »

oytis wrote: post #121
packetlost wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unle…

Well, my experience with Slack (never tried discord really) is that it's pretty hard to find anything that is more than a week old. Slack (and IRC) is designed to exchange the information quickly and forget about it. If we need traceability then e-mail is much superior to both.

Discord's search feature is beautifully from what I've experienced. I can search and get snippets from months and months ago almost instantly.

Good search can be done with chat, it just tends to be hard.

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

#130

Post by aidenn0 »

rsync wrote: post #116
aidenn0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

The downside to that is that even with a well written bot, there is no source of truth for history, as the bot can become disconnected from the server, which implies we should move history logging and archival to the server, which is a bridge to far for many people; in particular Drew (the author of TFA) believes chat should be ephemeral rather than persistent and he is not alone in this camp.
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