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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#731

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

BS

The only thing "killed" XMPP was that proprietary made money, XMPP didn't.

Apart from that, it's alive and well. See Conversations for android, Prosody for server.

Re: Slack is down

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.

One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.

Yes. The Chinese state and the US state are both proven to spy on their citizens. For reference, see the heroic Edward Snowden's 2013 leaks.

Re: Slack is down

#733

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…

Remember when Facebook messenger was xmpp based? Lol.

Re: Slack is down

#734

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…

Yep, I've stopped recommending Matrix because 1. There is virtually zero user-facing documentation. Need to know how to backup keys, verify another user, or what E2EE means? Ask your server operator. Basically the onus is on operators to document this stuff for their users. Except the stuff we're documenting is hard even for server operators, and especially challenging to document in a way that both nontechnical and…

This is disturbingly good summary. I remember Matrix being presented as less bloated compared to XMPP... sure.

Re: Slack is down

#735
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what if you're taking a few days off to backpack in the wilderness with no signal while it goes down? Who deals with the downtime?

If you are the only technical person on your team then it's of course not ideal and would require some further thought into making things redundant. But even that is easy enough to do with IRC (setup two servers, link the irc servers together, single DNS record that points to both servers - job done). If there are other people on the team that have _some_ technical skills then they can fix it.. IRC lacks quite a few…

IRC will be incredibly hard to use for non-technical people on your team. Mobile clients for IRC look like crap, and have horrible-looking ad bars. No integration with Google Drive, Github, or other things.

It's just not a business-friendly tool.

I'm an engineer and personally I'm fine with IRC, I'm just trying to be realistic here.

Re: Slack is down

#736

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…

No, EMail has fundamentally bad UX for a lot of use case slack and similar are used for.

> problem IMO is how to replace SMTP.

Sadly SMTP is probably one of the parts of Mail which have aged best. Enforcing the usage of some (currently by design optional) features wrt. authentication and similar at the cost of backwards compatibility and you have all you need from the delivery protocol.

BUT:

- IMAP and similar is much worse.

- Mail bodies are a big mess it's always fascinating for me that mail interoperability works at all in practice (again you can clean it up a lot, theoretically, but backwards compatibility would be gone).

- DMARC, DKIM and SPIF which handle mail authenticity have a lot of rough corners and again for backward compatibility are optional. Again it's not to hard to improve on but would brake backwards compatibility.

The main reason mail still matters is because it's backwards compatibility, not just with older software but also with new software still using old patterns because of the (relative to the gain) insane amount of work you need to put into all kinds of mail related components. But then exactly that backwards compatibility is what.

(Yes, I have read the "Why TMTP?" link and I have written software for many parts around mail including SMTP, and mail encoding. The idea that SMTP is at the root of the problem seems to me very strange. Especially given that like I mentioned literally every other part of mail is worse then SMTP by multiple degrees...)

EDIT: Just to prevent misunderstandings one core feature of mail is the separation of mail delivery and mail authenticity, in the sense that you don't need the mailman to prove the authenticity of a mail. At most the legal/correct/authentic delivery.

Re: Slack is down

#737

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…

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

XMPP killed XMPP. Its just not very good. It doesn't work well between different clients and servers. The protocol is a horribly overcomplicated mess of overlapping, partially supported extensions for basic functionality. And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery. (It was invented before the iphone.)

There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a purely technical decision.

Re: Slack is down

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never lived in the mid-west or the New England region of the USA. Maybe it's a regional usage (I've lived in Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington). I'm not sure where I picked up my usage from. My dad is from Colorado and my mom from California. Maybe I picked it up from one of them ;-)

Re: Slack is down

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, EMail has fundamentally bad UX for a lot of use case slack and similar are used for. > problem IMO is how to replace SMTP. Sadly SMTP is probably one of the parts of Mail which have aged best . Enforcing the usage of some (currently by design optional) features wrt. authentication and similar at the cost of backwards compatibility and you have all you need from the delivery protocol. BUT: - IMAP and similar is mu…

> No, EMail has fundamentally bad UX for a lot of use case slack and similar are used for.

The opposite is also true.

Re: Slack is down

#740
post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are the only technical person on your team then it's of course not ideal and would require some further thought into making things redundant. But even that is easy enough to do with IRC (setup two servers, link the irc servers together, single DNS record that points to both servers - job done). If there are other people on the team that have _some_ technical skills then they can fix it.. IRC lacks quite a few…

IRC will be incredibly hard to use for non-technical people on your team. Mobile clients for IRC look like crap, and have horrible-looking ad bars. No integration with Google Drive, Github, or other things. It's just not a business-friendly tool. I'm an engineer and personally I'm fine with IRC, I'm just trying to be realistic here.

Is it really though? If I take a look at a random modern IRC desktop client - how is it more difficult to setup than say your email program? The amount of information needed on setup is about the same: server, username, password (in fact email can get a bit more confusing in big corporate email setups with differing imap and smtp servers, etc.)

Also there are plenty of modern web clients for IRC, such as https://thelounge.chat/ or https://kiwiirc.com/ (which is supposed to work on mobile too).

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