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Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#11

Post by saagarjha »

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary.

> We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of the accessibility features you need directly into Slack.

Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#13

Post by tjwds »

pc2g4d wrote: post #8

Of course they do. This is exactly the path Google took. Once you achieve enough power in the market, you can throw open protocols overboard. It's a symptom of the centralized world the internet has become.

Yeah, I don't want to be a downer, but this is pretty much the exact definition of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#14

Post by zitterbewegung »

saagarjha wrote: post #11

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…

I run Slack in a browser tab . Their native apps are basically electron tabs. I wonder how many people used xmpp and irc gateways in relation to all of their active users ?

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#15

Post by saltcured »

This change, if it goes through, means I will disengage from Slack other than passive browsing from their Android app. My teammates will have to remember how to read email if they want non-trivial input.

It feels like a mixed blessing though, as it is a nice excuse to detox from this mess.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#20

Post by jbob2000 »

saagarjha wrote: post #11

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…

Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing.

The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility tools is that it fragments the accessibility experience; you have one tool for OS operations, another tool for browser work, another tool for this, etc.

So that being said - it is a waste of time to target the native APIs for accessibility. Your target is JAWS and that's it. In fact, I'd argue that JAWS is better at reading HTML than native apps, so Slack is doing the right thing by moving all their apps to the cross-platform one.

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