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RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

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Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#32

Another sweet new open soruce Slack alternative is Friends, https://github.com/moose-team/friends

There's also letschat: http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ Dunno why people tend to flock over to the propietary option though. :(

> people tend to flock over to the propietary option

Because it Just Works(tm) and there's no fiddling or faffing about necessary. I'm all for [FL]OSS applications, but sometimes proprietary solutions, even if they do the same task, are just easier to use and integrate (both technically and bureaucratically)

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is XML-based, noisy, and just plain annoying to deal with. There's only so much polish that can be applied to a turd...

Are there any sensible, albeit less popular, modern equivalents to XMPP?

IRC is better and actually more popular. IRC solved the problem of instant messaging over 20 years ago, and solved it very well. This is a problem that everyone and their mother attempts to re-solve and they always end up with a solution that's inferior to IRC. Just deploy an IRC server folks!

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#34
post #24

So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool. * a month or so passes * Now everyone is invested in the tool and since the expectations have been set by things like Slack they expect integrations to work flawlessly, search to be infinitely fast, 99% uptime, Google OpenID authentication, and a slew of other features and before you know it you have someone sp…

Also, there's nothing stopping your company from making the product better.

You shouldn't be spending 2 hours each day solving the same problems. If you make fixes, push them upstream (and others will too), then everyone gets a better product.

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#36
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any sensible, albeit less popular, modern equivalents to XMPP?

IRC is better and actually more popular. IRC solved the problem of instant messaging over 20 years ago, and solved it very well. This is a problem that everyone and their mother attempts to re-solve and they always end up with a solution that's inferior to IRC. Just deploy an IRC server folks!

IRC solved basic communication, but the necessity of bots for things like authentication for usernames, logging, and retaining permissions are inelegant kludges, in my opinion. If XMPP has problems, so does IRC.

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#37
Funnily enough there are actually multiple Slack-like chat app projects underway in the Meteor community. I guess building a chat app is the new building a todo list app?

Yesterday at Meteor's main meetup Devshop this was presented: http://spacetalkapp.com/ and the speaker mentioned that there's a big community effort underway to keep improving it.

Let's see which one wins the race :)

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#38
post #24

So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool. * a month or so passes * Now everyone is invested in the tool and since the expectations have been set by things like Slack they expect integrations to work flawlessly, search to be infinitely fast, 99% uptime, Google OpenID authentication, and a slew of other features and before you know it you have someone sp…

Also, there's nothing stopping your company from making the product better. You shouldn't be spending 2 hours each day solving the same problems. If you make fixes, push them upstream (and others will too), then everyone gets a better product.

When you are running a business, you use tools to make your life easier.

The reason I pay for Slack is precisely so I _don't_ have to push fixes upstream.

Tools are a means to solving a problem. Something being open source is not by itself a plus. I don't want to be developing a chat client so I can use it, I want to build my own fucking company.

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is XML-based, noisy, and just plain annoying to deal with. There's only so much polish that can be applied to a turd...

Are there any sensible, albeit less popular, modern equivalents to XMPP?

matrix (https://matrix.org/) is a more modern messaging protocol than XMPP; it revolves around HTTP and JSON because it's the most logical today the way XMPP is based on XML because it was the most logical at the time. Let's hope they can achieve something here !

Re: RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is better and actually more popular. IRC solved the problem of instant messaging over 20 years ago, and solved it very well. This is a problem that everyone and their mother attempts to re-solve and they always end up with a solution that's inferior to IRC. Just deploy an IRC server folks!

IRC solved basic communication, but the necessity of bots for things like authentication for usernames, logging, and retaining permissions are inelegant kludges, in my opinion. If XMPP has problems, so does IRC.

I don't think it'd be very difficult to set up some sort of web UI for account creation, combined with existing in-client features for usernames/passwords. That'd be more worthwhile than building a new solution from scratch.

IRC has advantages over XMPP by having a much wider variety of clients and the fact that you can create your own integrations for things like build automation in a very short period of time thanks to the simple text-based protocol.

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