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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#761

Post by networkimprov »

baudehlo wrote: post #755
networkimprov wrote: post #689

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…

I used to work in anti spam and we would call these FUSSPs. https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

TL;DR: Thousands of brilliant minds have tried to fix email for decades, and realized it can't be done!

Ahem, I'm trying to bury email, not save it -- not unlike Slack :-)

Re: Slack is down

#763

Post by ffpip »

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…

Telegram is closer to 500 million now.

https://t.me/durov/142

Re: Slack is down

#764

Post by _6fmb »

criley2 wrote: post #390
_6fmb wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.

It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you. This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal" But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an execut…

It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.

Re: Slack is down

#765

Post by chillfox »

dheera wrote: post #661
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…

> self-hosted How often is Slack/Discord down? I mean it's not perfect, but I really honestly don't think I could match their uptime by self-hosting, as well as more on-call rotations for something that's not core product. I very much prefer that for something that isn't core product, if it goes down I need to do exactly nothing for it to come back up, and that the engineers at Slack will be starting to work on it li…

People really over estimate the difficulty of running self-hosted systems with great uptime.

When self hosting you can get away with simpler systems that ends up being more stable and have higher up times for lower effort.

The reason you see cloud providers having issues is not because the thing is difficult, but because doing anything at huge scale ends up being difficult.

Re: Slack is down

#766

Post by kords »

hacky_engineer wrote: post #212
matsemann wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I had a rewrite of some core logic the last day before Christmas that I didn'td deploy, as it wasn't time critical to get out and I didn't want to be disturbed during holidays. Today it was perfect to deploy, as I can watch it the whole week if needed.

Yeah, I do this all the time. I don't want to be bothered on the weekend, so I push releases at the beginning of the week when possible.

Same, I would rather release on a Monday than a Friday.

Re: Slack is down

#767

Post by kortilla »

btmiller wrote: post #533
kortilla wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is “right-sized” if it happens so rarely that it realistically causes no problems.

Rare is not never.

But never isn’t necessarily a reasonable goal. People will tolerate outages when it’s not lost money/business.

Re: Slack is down

#768

Post by dheera »

welterde wrote: post #740
dheera wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://thel…

> your email program

Reality check: Most people don't use email programs anymore.

Also how do you get IRC to sync all conversation data, history, between your several desktops and phones, how do you send files, make calls, and thread conversations?

Re: Slack is down

#769

Post by eropple »

welterde wrote: post #740
dheera wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://thel…

I'd bet hard money that within epsilon of anyone using a desktop email client in 2020, and thus having one to set up in the first place...is in an organization with access to Microsoft Teams.

Re: Slack is down

#770

Post by will_pseudonym »

Unklejoe wrote: post #691
thesuitonym wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For competing with Discord, it seems like it would benefit from a more robust free offering to compete with Discord. Being able to create a free Discord server is great, and it is incredibly capable for most communities that don't need the fancy perks of Discord Nitro etc.

> The free Discord plan provides virtually all the core functionality of the platform with very few limitations. Free users get unlimited message history, screen sharing, unlimited server storage, up to eight users in a video call, and as many as 5,000 concurrent (i.e., online at the same time) users.

For a lot of small communities that aren't focused around commerce of any kind, Discord's free offering blows Element Matrix Services out the water. It's a non starter. If I could create a server with feature parity to Discord's free server, any new community I'd create I would definitely jump on EMS in a heartbeat, and I'd start trying to recreate communities currently within Discord, to be on EMS.

So like a very normal progression for Discord servers is that some niche sub-community wants to gather, and so they create a free server, and people join and there's all kinds of rich content that gets posted and curated and great discussions and then as it gets bigger, people running the community or people who want to support the community will boost the server with Discord Nitro for additional features like more slots for custom emojis (I can't communicate enough how important of a feature this is to Discord's success, even though it seems like minor window dressing).

That kind of model is what would justify a server starting to shell out money every month for EMS. I would note that Discord's pricing for this kind of level of community is tiered and not a per-user thing. You unlock more features based on how many users are paying for Nitro, going up a tier based on breakpoints of 2/15/30 Nitro Boosts per month. It doesn't cost more to have a tier 3 server if you gain more users. This is a big deal for fostering growth and unseating incumbent social networks (which is what Discord and Slack are).

Just some thoughts. I really want stuff like Element/Matrix to succeed!

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