Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack is down

status.slack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#691

Post by Unklejoe »

thesuitonym wrote: post #684
Unklejoe wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say it's almost in "just works" territory for everyone except the person who has to actually administer the homeserver (me). I absorb a lot of the complexity for my friends.

The only thing that's a little cumbersome is requiring them to enter a custom server URL when the register/log in for the first time.

Re: Slack is down

#692

Post by throwawaygulf »

dmkolobov wrote: post #660
g00gler wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they in camps along the border? Why are the Uighur? Did the "brown people" break any laws? Did the Uighurs? Are the "brown people" in camps along the border a single, ethnic minority? Are all "brown people" in the country subject to arrest and under surveillance just for being "brown"?

Well, yeah. People _are_ subject to arrest and surveillance for being brown/black in the US.

No they aren't.

Re: Slack is down

#693

Post by megous »

networkimprov wrote: post #689
MattJ100 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you replace it? Will not disabling all public un-authenticated submissions on your mail server suffice? You can also prevent delivery to outside world (and error out on submission so that users are notified) if you really like. Result will be your own private mail server.

And you can keep using all the normal MUA's on desktop and mobile.

Re: Slack is down

#694

Post by sjg007 »

blntechie wrote: post #369
MattGaiser wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google would be catastrophic because so much is stored there. Slack is mostly real time communication, at least for me. There are a few bits and bobs that really should be documented that are in the messages though.

Yeah, Google would easily top the list of companies which can have catastrophic impact. Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Dropbox would be the next in the list I guess if we leave out the utility companies and internet providers etc.

AWS outages have basically crippled a few businesses. The longest I know of was 8-10 hours the day before Thanksgiving. Some Bay Area food company got hit by it and couldn’t deliver thanksgiving dinners.

Re: Slack is down

#695

Post by rattray »

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…

Have you tried http://quill.chat/ ? Younger startup (invite-only) but very slick.

Re: Slack is down

#696

Post by nix23 »

ende wrote: post #682
projectileboy wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>support is a better use of our short time, more often than not

Not when it's down.

Re: Slack is down

#697

Post by rattray »

Arathorn wrote: post #645
zenexer wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is supported by a large number of clients, but running a server and getting everyone on clients with comparable featuresets is a nightmare. It’s a cluster of disparate standards, and it’s overwhelming. I’m sure it’s doable if you have the time to invest, but it’s not straightforward if you’ve never done it before. Matrix is pretty straightforward on the server side of things, but the client UX is invariably medi…

Element (formerly Riot/Vector), has improved loads over the years, and the default matrix.org average send time is around 100ms these days rather than multiple seconds: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca... has details. I suspect you (and the parent) may be running off stale data. That said, Element could certainly use less RAM, irrespective of Electron - and http://hydrogen.element.io is ou…

> it uses ~100x less RAM than Element

Wow – congrats!!

What have been the most important architectural decisions to achieve this?

Re: Slack is down

#698

Post by wrycoder »

irrational wrote: post #683
tmoertel wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm 79, born in the mid-west, living in New England for the last 60 years. Worked in tech. I've never heard the word used except as in Def. 1.

Re: Slack is down

#699

Post by corytheboyd »

rattray wrote: post #695
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…

Have you tried http://quill.chat/ ? Younger startup (invite-only) but very slick.

Thanks for sharing! They definitely nailed the marketing page, I’ll keep in my list of products to follow up on :)

Re: Slack is down

#700

Post by Arathorn »

rattray wrote: post #697
Arathorn wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Element (formerly Riot/Vector), has improved loads over the years, and the default matrix.org average send time is around 100ms these days rather than multiple seconds: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca... has details. I suspect you (and the parent) may be running off stale data. That said, Element could certainly use less RAM, irrespective of Electron - and http://hydrogen.element.io is ou…

> it uses ~100x less RAM than Element Wow – congrats!! What have been the most important architectural decisions to achieve this?

Rather than storing state from the server in the JS heap, new state gets stored immediately in indexeddb transactionally and is pulled out strictly on demand. So, my account (which is admittedly large, with around 3000 rooms and 350K users visible) uses 1.4GB of JS heap on Element/Web, and 14MB on Hydrogen. It's also lightning fast, as you might expect given it's not having to wade around shuffling gigabytes of javascript heap around the place.
Post reply on HN