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

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

#101

Post by merb »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #66
nopacience wrote: post #32

Slack was fine, now it is time to move back to IRC. Some people like slack or telegram because they provide an API for BOTs. Something IRC has been open to since the begining. Non power users might have trouble using IRC with the usual clients (mIRC/irssi/bitchx). Today a family member, not technical and 60+yrs asked about "that tool" that is like whatsapp however it allows users that just joined a group to read old…

A few projects exist that try to be "modern" UIs for IRC (bias: I contribute to Lounge) TheLounge - https://thelounge.chat (FOSS, self-hosted) IRCCloud - https://irccloud.com (mobile clients OS, hosted)

they don't look "modern"..

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

#102

Post by bramd »

cornholio wrote: post #68
jbob2000 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard. What is their moat, what exactly does it offer that it's impossible to replicate using existing libraries and APIs?

What's the standard really depends on which slice of the world/market you're looking at. NVDA[0] is a very capable screenreader as well and does some things even better than JAWS. It's totally free and open source.

[0]: https://nvaccess.org/

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

#103

Post by gelstudios »

Not to simply pile on to the complaints about this, but I rely on the IRC gateway on my paid account for: Memory constrained use Bandwidth constrained use _Attention_ constrained use

I hope there will be a text only or “low latency” mode in the native client.

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

#104

Post by komon »

bramd wrote: post #62
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…

> 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. Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I…

> it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days

A userscript hammered out in a few days is not really that comparable to incorporating accessibility in a flexible and sound way across a codebase.

Where one is dependent on the current representation and types of features in the app, the other touches pretty much everywhere in a code base that might be split across different people or teams that have other business goals to accomplish.

The scale of work is not really as comparable as they may seem at first glance.

So, contrary to what you said about lack of priority and disrespect, I think it's admirable that they take the time to add these necessary accommodations in a way that ensures that they'll be appropriately maintained and present with future iterations.

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

#105

Post by dennisdamenace »

aw3c2 wrote: post #47
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…

What did everyone expect? Slack is a proprietary protocol created to make money on its proprietary service. I am glad they are making it more closed as then maybe more people realise that centralising your communications on top a VC funded, for-profit company is not a good idea.

Why is it a bad idea?

And I doubt _any_ business has centralized their communications with Slack. I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.

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

#106

Post by ascorbic »

akkat wrote: post #73
FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…

email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security

Email does many things, but "works great" isn't one of them. PGP even less.

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

#107

Post by atomi »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…

You want IRC to have a kitchen sink. But IRC is perfect for it's intended scope. You get to use whatever other service you want for sending files or sharing images. All you have to do is link to it.

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

#108

Post by jonursenbach »

tjwds wrote: post #13
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...

Did Slack ever really embrace and extend IRC and XMPP though? It always seemed to be some kind of hack to get your messages there to begin with.

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

#109

Post by Tushon »

DanCarvajal wrote: post #48
castis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required to use Slack on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely wouldn't solely on principle.

Weird, my slack app on windows is currently using 54MB.

Cheeky response w/o actually understanding isn't correct here. Slack's active window sits around that amount on my computer as well, but under the hood it's actually using closer to 670MB with all processes.

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

#110

Post by munificent »

> After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where the gateways can no longer handle all of our features or security needs.

Oops. They misspelled "where we are dominant enough that we have more to lose than gain by being able to interoperate with our competitors."

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