Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

Post by mugsie » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:24 PM UTC

itistoday2 wrote: post #6

pnathan wrote: post #3

Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?

IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.

Post by itistoday2 » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

mugsie wrote: post #11

itistoday2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.

> making it poor for community building eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services. - http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-... Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem, and there is quite a few high quality mobile and desktop clients for IRC.

Post by itistoday2 » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:30 PM UTC

kefka wrote: post #14

itistoday2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.

> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it. It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. > Other important missing features are ease of use in term…

Post by CDRdude » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

itistoday2 wrote: post #15

kefka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it. It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. > Other important missing features are ease of use in term…

> It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot. I have actually done that, and I know it's not trivial. Few want to spend time tinkering with bots and hooking together archiving services. They want a nice Slack-type experience.

Post by itistoday2 » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

JoshMnem wrote: post #16

I wish that someone would build an easy-to-use layer on top of an open protocol like IRC or XMPP. The tool could manage setup, configuration, archiving, and notifications. Instead of building a walled garden that is merely accessible via an open protocol, it would be more interesting to build a thin layer on top of an XMPP server that could even be removed or replaced later, if desired.