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Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

dave.cheney.net

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Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#101

Post by Pxtl »

coldpie wrote: post #72
Pxtl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then we can all turn off our computers and go home, because something that "works" is obviously good enough and the entire software industry doesn't need to exist anymore. Most things we have today "work" but we're still improving on them because "good enough" isn't good enough.

The question you're not asking is whether your replacement is better than the existing solutions. Slack isn't. It's closed source, proprietary, and tied to a third party's servers. I'm not going to tie my projects or company to that kind of anchor.

Absolutely. I completely agree that Slack brings too many problems to the table to be a replacement for IRC+Mailing lists.

I'm just saying that IRC+Mailing lists aren't good enough.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#103

Post by scrollaway »

hueving wrote: post #96
scrollaway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This applies to Freenode as much as it applies to Slack. If freenode disappears, people using its channels for foss will have similar issues and inconvenience as if Slack/Discord disappear and in both cases, it's recoverable.

If freenode disappears, it's less than a day to pick a new network and connect. Nobody changes clients, tooling, etc. That's the difference between a closed walled garden like slack and an open protocol.

Nobody changes clients if Slack disappears and is replaced by another webapp. It's all in browser.

The UI might change, but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one, which doesn't happen with web apps.

I say this as someone who's used IRC a crapton and is a strong advocate for open protocols (and for more than just ideological reasons): Realistically, if Freenode disappears, IRC will most likely die as a protocol as all major projects switch to non-IRC solutions, which is happening today anyway. A protocol needs users.

The only thing IRC has got going for it is federation and openness. It's not easily extensible, it's not secure, it can't benefit from most of the advances we've made in comms and protocols since the 90s, and there isn't even a common format for your messaging history - most clients just use text logs!

If you want to advance the state of comms and ensure humans are using open protocols to communicate rather than walled gardens, you first have to acknowledge these flaws and needs. Propping up IRC as something it's not doesn't do anyone any favours.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#104

Post by s73ver »

exelius wrote: post #33
pmarreck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack chat provides a number of nice features that IRC (at least out of the box... I know there have been attempts) does not. IRCCloud at least lets you see chat history, which IRC doesn't have out of the box but Slack does.

So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).

Not everyone is going to use the same client.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#105

Post by NateDad »

kuschku wrote: post #57
VLM wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it gen…

> The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer…

"log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)"

There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#106

Post by scrollaway »

philh wrote: post #70
cortesoft wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.

A few people have replied, saying how to get chat history with IRC, but as far as I can tell, none of them work like Slack. With Slack, you can see history from before the first time you connect. It looks like none of the IRC solutions enable that; the IRC protocol doesn't make it possible, without the server (or a channel member) keeping logs. (I haven't used either very much, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

IRCCloud can, they're a client too :) I highly recommend them if you are serious about IRC.

But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec.

https://www.irccloud.com/

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#107

Post by Filligree »

djsumdog wrote: post #80
kuschku wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer…

This is the first I've heard of an IRC bouncer. That's a great idea. It still seems like it's and extra step you have to add though, when really it'd be nice to see some work on IRCv3 so you could have multiple clients connect to one IRC server with the same username and sync without the need of a proxy.

The current answer to that is basically "Use IRCCloud", and that's what I link people who don't already know IRC to.

It's a web/android/iphone client only, but it's IRC. The moment someone grows tired of the client, they can get their own.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#108

Post by dade_ »

piquadrat wrote: post #20

Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I participate in (Python/Django/...). What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel (while still maintaining mailing lists, bug trackers and the like). And as much as I hate it, the success can't be denied. Es…

I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#109

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

lindner wrote: post #69
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #9

I feel like more and more people are coming around to seeing the relevancy of distributed federated chat and breaking out of the walled gardens. My person money is on Matrix[0] taking off but I think the general theme of people pulling away from interesting their communication to corporations is a positive. [0] matrix.org

Everyone should be using Matrix. Not just open source developers. It's near feature parity with Slack and it's also one of the best IRC clients around. I used to run ERC in a tmux session just so I could stay connected and not lose messages. No more.

The ease of bridging is great. We've got a minecraft server bridge of all things; being liberated to actually have universal chat is the future for sure.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#110

Post by saosebastiao »

PaulHoule wrote: post #47

What drives me nuts is that there are so many of these things. I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc. All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get…

I feel the same way. Standardization is a feature, but it also comes with its costs (difficulty of extending features). In many places lack of standardization is okay, but I feel like for most chat purposes (especially about programming), plain text over IRC works just fine.

I don't mind Gitter though, because it has a useful feature (code snippets) and it is available through a web app as opposed to a separate install.

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