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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#771

Post by perryizgr8 »

josephg wrote: post #737
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

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 pur…

> It was invented before the iphone

That's true for email also. So that's not an evidence for anything lacking in xmpp. The plain fact is that Google killed it due to their greed.

Re: Slack is down

#772

Post by perryizgr8 »

PhilippGille wrote: post #724
thesuitonym wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This thread is about a Slack outage, which you have no control over. Mattermost and similar software is self-hosted, which of course doesn't mean you're getting 100% uptime, but you have (more) control over it.

In practice self hosted usually translates to more downtime and slower performance when it works. Unless your org has more expertise running a chat service than Microsoft or slack, your self hosted alternative is always going to suck more.

Re: Slack is down

#773

Post by josephg »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #745
josephg wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pur…

> And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery. What makes you think so? If Conversations was draining my battery, I would have noticed by now, I'm pretty sure that Facebook Messenger is worse in this aspect...

Maybe things have changed - certainly when I looked at it a few years ago (around the time that google stopped supporting it) my understanding was that xmpp had no push notification support. The app in the phone had to either poll or explicitly hold open a TCP connection. (Which is problematic when the app is backgrounded.)

Has this been fixed in XMPP?

Re: Slack is down

#774

Post by __sisyphus__ »

Arathorn wrote: post #700
rattray wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 javas…

I've wanted to try something like this (on a smaller scale), but haven't had time. It's good to hear of an implementation that reflects my expectations. How long did it take you to migrate over?

Re: Slack is down

#775

Post by sizeofchar »

mnky9800n wrote: post #733
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…

Remember when Facebook messenger was xmpp based? Lol.

Also Google Talk.

Re: Slack is down

#776

Post by cgtyoder »

exhaze wrote: post #175
Aperocky wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Uber/Slack not release in CI/CD? At least in backend? I don't see any need to deploy a big change at once in the software world today. At worst feature gate the thing you want to do and run it in a beta environment, but still push the actual code down the pipeline.

> run it in a beta environment Every Uber/ex-Uber engineer is nervously chuckling at this comment right now

As the saying goes, Everyone has a Test environment. Some people are lucky enough to have that distinct from Production.

Re: Slack is down

#777

Post by dmix »

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.

Looks like a great start. The TODO list is most of the stuff I'd want that push it over the edge of even suggesting to our company to replace Slack.

But I signed up and will keep it on my radar as it matures.

Re: Slack is down

#778

Post by dkdk8283 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #289
dkdk8283 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of logs and history is a feature not a bug.

For business users, there are regulatory requirements. You need to keep information around for some period of time, but not forever. History and searching is useful for spreading tribal knowledge throughout an organization.

Sure I understand but I don’t think that aligns with the spirit of the comment I replied to. I read it as FOMO.

Re: Slack is down

#779

Post by u801e »

layer8 wrote: post #760
u801e wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that email is not suitable for asynchronous long-form threadful discussions. The limitation that email has is that if you're not part of that conversation from the beginning, you'll have to piece it together from previous quoted material. One email like protocol that properly handles this is NNTP.

True regarding the late-comer aspect, although it is less of an issue when using mailing lists with an archive. In the past, when lacking an archive I also just asked another participant to send me the earlier discussion in mbox format, which was easily accomplished with the unix MUAs of the time. Regarding the actual modes of discussion I was thinking of though, usenet and email are mostly the same.

> I was thinking of though, usenet and email are mostly the same.

For the most part, they are and many readers support both protocols (or at least they did in the past). The nice thing about NNTP is that it doesn't require maintaining a separate archive or having someone send you an mbox file to import. Just subscribing to the appropriate groups was sufficient (depending on the article retention policy).

Re: Slack is down

#780

Post by u801e »

networkimprov wrote: post #756
u801e wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that email is not suitable for asynchronous long-form threadful discussions. The limitation that email has is that if you're not part of that conversation from the beginning, you'll have to piece it together from previous quoted material. One email like protocol that properly handles this is NNTP.

I agree with both of you, and TMTP supports adding people to a thread after it starts (see PostNotify).

I'm not finding much about TMTP or postnotify with a search through Google. Could you link to some resources?
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