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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#681

Post by thesuitonym »

pachico wrote: post #640
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

I can hardly see those as alternatives to Slack. Maybe https://mattermost.com/ is what you were thinking about?

Matrix with Element (Riot) as the front-end is pretty close. It does what slack does, it's just not very good. XMPP is arguable. It can be a Slack alternative, if you stitch enough other servers on top of it. Personally, I don't think XMPP will ever be more than chat, but some of its adherents believe differently.

Mattermost is certainly not what I meant. That's just trading one Slack for another.

Re: Slack is down

#682

Post by ende »

projectileboy wrote: post #656
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

You bring up a good point, however, which is that we _could_ use open source, non-centralized alternatives for many of the online products we consume, but we choose not to, and so we increasingly become slaves to corporations that actively seek to narrow our choices. Another example of this is the push from big sites like Reddit to use their apps rather than just use a browser - it’s not about functionality, it’s abo…

Or, or... and bear with me here... or, packaged click-button solutions with paid (contractually obligated) dedicated product support is a better use of our short time, more often than not.

Re: Slack is down

#683

Post by irrational »

tmoertel wrote: post #558
irrational wrote: post #523

My business coworkers are freaking out over Slack being down. But all my technical coworkers are nonplussed. It's interesting how those of us with a technical background are not too disturbed by things breaking.

Interestingly, nonplussed is one of those words having two meanings that are at odds with each other. According to Google, those two meanings are: 1. (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react. "he would be completely nonplussed and embarrassed at the idea" 2. INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.

I wasn’t aware of definition 1. I did mean the informal North American definition.

Re: Slack is down

#684

Post by thesuitonym »

Unklejoe wrote: post #648
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

I can only offer my own personal experience: Matrix has been working well for me for a couple years now. However, I probably have a more narrow use case than you're thinking of. I run a small homeserver and use it to communicate with a group of about 20 friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. We use it mostly for chatting and image/video sharing. We never use live calling (audio or video). There have been a…

This is actually the use case I've been trying to get to for some time. Unfortunately, I need it to "just work" to get my non-techy friends interested, otherwise they'll go right back to Discord.

Like I said, it's close, I just don't think it's there yet.

Re: Slack is down

#685

Post by gmmeyer »

013a wrote: post #221
lol768 wrote: post #17

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is c…

Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.

Re: Slack is down

#686

Post by spicyramen »

lallysingh wrote: post #676
spicyramen wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

Spam killed xmpp

I remember using clients like pidgin with all my accounts it was a great experience. Now I need to have like 100 apps

Re: Slack is down

#688

Post by halukakin »

thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

If the benefit we are looking for is better up time, that will not happen. The main benefit is going to be knowing why the system is down, and the eta to being up again.

Re: Slack is down

#689

Post by networkimprov »

MattJ100 wrote: post #665
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

The problem is that XMPP and Matrix are protocols, not products. Element (the primary Matrix software) definitely has Slack and Discord in its sights. I don't think there are any serious "self-hosted Slack-like" contenders that are XMPP-based right now. You can piece components together (yay, standards!) and I did exactly this for the IETF's XMPP deployment recently. But it's far from being a cohesive easy-to-deploy…

It's largely overlooked that the success of Slack & MS Teams is partly due to the cybercrime portal that email has become. IOW, you don't get phished in your org's Slack chats. To prevent phishing, any chat service will suffice; an open protocol isn't necessary, as you don't intend to engage with ppl outside your org.

The essential problem IMO is how to replace SMTP. No one has proposed and implemented an alternative, to my knowledge. So I decided to[1]. The current draft omits federation (although I wouldn't rule it out in all cases yet).

[1] https://github.com/networkimprov/mnm/blob/master/Protocol.md

Re: Slack is down

#690

Post by radlad »

gmmeyer wrote: post #685
013a wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is c…

Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.

IME, Slack is far more likely to lose my message than iMessage. I believe that's part of the point being made above.
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