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

821–830 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#821

Post by perryizgr8 »

XCSme wrote: post #809
perryizgr8 wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you try self-hosting and it lead to more downtime and slower performance? From my experience, when I self-host stuff it's a lot faster (more server resources) and never had any downtime (server doesn't simply go down for no reason).

I haven't tried it personally. But my employer hosts an on-prem Github instance and it is just terrible. So many downtimes, long times before anybody gets around to repair it, general performance issues, maintenance windows for upgrades, etc. Just a huge pain. I've seen this sort of problem with the old Exchange on-prem services too.

Re: Slack is down

#822

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

You're making some fundamental assumptions about federation that I think are completely wrong. Are you telling me that you never need to communicate with anyone outside of your organization? How do you intend to receive invoices? How will you communicate with outside vendors? Sorry, but you need some text-based way of communicating with people and email is the best way, that's why it's survived so long despite being problematic. If you have internal, asynchronous chat, why would you need internal email?

Sorry my dude, but business runs on email. Saying lets get rid of it is as naïve as saying lets get rid of Excel. It's just not going to happen.

Re: Slack is down

#823

Post by Unklejoe »

JohnBooty wrote: post #781
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…

and use it to communicate with a group of about 20 friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. I'm insanely curious about the human side of things here. How did you get them to buy into this idea in the first place? That sounds like quite an achievement. The non-technical folks in my life generally struggle with paths of least resistance (iMessage, etc) and it's hard to imagine getting them onto some alternative…

It did take some persuading. I think the main reason I was able to pull it off was ironically because they're not that technical. I bet most of my friends don't even know what Slack or Discord is. That's not to say they're dumb or anything - they just don't spend as much time online as one would think.

Previously, we were mostly using group texts or Snapchat/Instagram to communicate, so the biggest selling point was the fact that we can share full quality pictures and videos between iOS and Android people.

Re: Slack is down

#824

Post by thesuitonym »

JohnBooty wrote: post #781
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…

and use it to communicate with a group of about 20 friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. I'm insanely curious about the human side of things here. How did you get them to buy into this idea in the first place? That sounds like quite an achievement. The non-technical folks in my life generally struggle with paths of least resistance (iMessage, etc) and it's hard to imagine getting them onto some alternative…

For my part, I don't have buy in yet (Because I'm not convinced Matrix is ready) but I think I could get it. I have 7 or 8 friends who do not use Discord except to talk with me and a few other friends that I know can be convinced to at least start using Element next to Discord. Once I feel like my homeserver is in a state that I can invite these non-technical people in, I'll be in the same place.

Re: Slack is down

#825

Post by vector_spaces »

erikbye wrote: post #818
vector_spaces wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you submitted the requested bug reports? Also, it seems the FAQ answers several of your points: https://element.io/help

Yep, I have, although funnily enough it turns out that the rage shake feature was the only way to submit a bug report with diagnostics from a client (as of a couple of months ago anyway) and that feature itself was broken for one of my users (who has since churned).

That FAQ is a great start, but it's not sufficient for non-technical users. It's not easily searchable, it doesn't provide screenshots, and it doesn't go into enough detail for each item (e.g. describing what can go wrong + troubleshooting).

Thanks for pointing it out though

Re: Slack is down

#826

Post by pas »

perlgeek wrote: post #810
pas wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RocketChat works pretty well for simple team comms. I have no idea if it can do XMPP and/or Matrix.

My experience with RocketChat is that it works quite well on the surface, but after using it for some time, some very annoying bugs emerge: * You get notifications for channels for which you have suppressed those notifications * Some channels are marked as having new notifications, when they haven't * Notifications for new messages in threads you are involved in are quite hard to find (horrible UX) * Some UX choices…

I agree, it's still got a long way to go. I'm saying it's still a perfectly viable alternative to Slack. Fast, simple, works. (At least this is my perception/impression. I wanted to evaluate Slack alternatives for some time, but haven't got the time for it yet. So I was surprised when I got an invite to one of our client's rocket.chat instance and things worked pretty well.)

I'm in a slack workspace that is constantly notifying me of a thread, but I can't make it read. Maybe it has something to do with the free messages limit. So the message is there, but cannot be accessed. Annoying as hell. I thought about submitting the bug to Slack, but then just let it go, and probably we'll just move to Signal or something.

Re: Slack is down

#827

Post by pas »

jasonblais wrote: post #815
pas wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP. Good idea. I thought it's integrated into GitLab (on premise omnibus), but I still haven't fiddled with it, but enabled something in the config file, but nothing happened. I know it's a tough spot, but if it were usable from GitLab with zero config that would be great for fallback.

@pas: Mattermost is indeed integrated with GitLab Omnibus. To enable Mattermost, you can add the Mattermost external URL in the config file, and run `sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure`. I'm wondering if that's something you've tried? https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/#getting-s...

Thanks for your reply! I gave it another try, and it works now beautifully :o (Possibly last time I tried it, there was no LetsEncrypt integration and the external URL setup was more involved?)

Re: Slack is down

#828

Post by decrypt »

Unklejoe wrote: post #823
JohnBooty wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and use it to communicate with a group of about 20 friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. I'm insanely curious about the human side of things here. How did you get them to buy into this idea in the first place? That sounds like quite an achievement. The non-technical folks in my life generally struggle with paths of least resistance (iMessage, etc) and it's hard to imagine getting them onto some alternative…

It did take some persuading. I think the main reason I was able to pull it off was ironically because they're not that technical. I bet most of my friends don't even know what Slack or Discord is. That's not to say they're dumb or anything - they just don't spend as much time online as one would think. Previously, we were mostly using group texts or Snapchat/Instagram to communicate, so the biggest selling point was…

This is awesome. I have always wanted to self-host a Matrix instance as well, but I imagine it's going to be very hard to convince them to move over, from Telegram. Is there a blog post that I can read about homeserver setup? I am keen on seeing how easy it was, and keen on seeing what level of technical and financial resources you had to invest to get going.

Re: Slack is down

#829

Post by __sisyphus__ »

Arathorn wrote: post #799
__sisyphus__ wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it’s a entirely new codebase; probably best way to visualise progress is to look at the contributor graphs at https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

Cool, thanks for sharing!

Re: Slack is down

#830

Post by darkerside »

pgAdmin4 wrote: post #812
darkerside wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People returning to work and downloading a huge backlog of messages from the past two weeks.

As an Microsoft Teams Ex-Dev, I can vouch that message retrieval after vacation puts a lot of stress on storage systems before it stabilizes :)

Yeah, makes sense. A system typically optimized for performance and real time delivery is suddenly asked to perform multiple batch retrievals in large chunks. Ouch!
Post reply on HN