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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

#101

Post by lez »

yebyen wrote: post #45
hobarrera wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well for one thing, there's the hassle of maintaining it. Don't get me wrong, I maintain lots of things. It's my full-time job. I count it as a victory every time I can gain some capability without adding some additional thing to maintain. Double victory even better every time I can take something I thought I needed to maintain and throw it on the scrap heap, eg because its functionality was subsumed by something els…

about the security issue, you're wrong: if you want to host it for your company, put it behind a VPN or defend the site with a password on the HTTP level. This prevents all attacks from outside.

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

#102

Post by lewisl9029 »

9point6 wrote: post #16
Karunamon wrote: post #11

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?

Yes. Telehash. http://telehash.org/

From the same developers who designed and built XMPP.

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

#103

Post by toddkaufmann »

Omnipresent wrote: post #87

Offtopic What are some resources for getting started with meteor. Being able to build a chat apps like these seems powerful.

Go to https://www.meteor.com/ and Start tutorial. After installed you can go through the tutorial in an hour or two depending how deep you go, and it comes with a number of examples (show with "meteor create --list").

Discover Meteor has some more; they were giving their book away (see https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/we-made-our-book-free/ -- first 4 chapters are free).

That may be enough for the basics. Then look at telescope, or one of the chat apps listed here or search on github. Also plenty of conference talks on youtube.

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

#104

Post by shampine »

engelgabriel wrote: post #59
shampine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for me, I was able to get to the confirmation email, now it is just stuck in a loop.

Sorry guys.. this was just our development server.. we were planning to release it in 3 weeks time :)

No worries, I guess I'll try again in 3 weeks. :)

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

#105

Post by yebyen »

lez wrote: post #101
yebyen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one thing, there's the hassle of maintaining it. Don't get me wrong, I maintain lots of things. It's my full-time job. I count it as a victory every time I can gain some capability without adding some additional thing to maintain. Double victory even better every time I can take something I thought I needed to maintain and throw it on the scrap heap, eg because its functionality was subsumed by something els…

about the security issue, you're wrong: if you want to host it for your company, put it behind a VPN or defend the site with a password on the HTTP level. This prevents all attacks from outside.

That also hinders remote access and promotes a sense of false security with users who don't know better. Better to tell them to use a secure channel for sensitive things. Then again if you thought slack was really secure I could set how you might think that.

There are both arguments. We have a VPN but don't let just any user on it. Then again I'm not sure if I want those people on slack with me either. The times when we want to use slack can tend to not overlap with the times we want to worry about whether the VPN works or if I can connect to it. We even use slack to organize a distributed disaster recovery and coordinate it!

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

#106

Post by hobarrera »

yebyen wrote: post #45
hobarrera wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well for one thing, there's the hassle of maintaining it. Don't get me wrong, I maintain lots of things. It's my full-time job. I count it as a victory every time I can gain some capability without adding some additional thing to maintain. Double victory even better every time I can take something I thought I needed to maintain and throw it on the scrap heap, eg because its functionality was subsumed by something els…

> Well for one thing, there's the hassle of maintaining it.

You're confusing FLOSS with self-hosted. You can use free software, but hire it as a service. Example: https://githost.io/

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

#107

Post by hobarrera »

aroch wrote: post #32
hobarrera wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> Because it Just Works(tm) and there's no fiddling or faffing about necessary.

That's what marketing would have you believe. For example Hangouts broke the ecosystem horrible, and now xmpp and hangout users can no longer intercommunicate (and wonder why their messages are silently dropped).

Users complain that they need 6+ apps to keep in touch with friends.

The real answer, IMHO is "Because they market it as 'just works'.".

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

#109

Post by Karunamon »

scott_karana wrote: post #36
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #33

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.

Once you realize that everything on an IRC service is tied to a user account, it makes a bit more sense. And extending from there, different user accounts are responsible for different things. (The *serv accounts on most networks).

I always thought it made sense in a way - it makes for a very neat separation of concerns and makes the stack more modular, since you can now use almost any combination of IRC daemon and services package.

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

#110

Post by scotty79 »

yebyen wrote: post #60
scotty79 wrote: post #55

The fact Slack is a thing is evidence of how horrible dominant IM companies are at their business.

Dominant IM companies are a thing? I know this is serious, but maybe I misread your intention. The thing that makes Slack greater than all of the dominant IMs is that IM is their whole business. Everyone else is busy "improving" gmail if you're Google, or monetizing voip/video chat, or (whatever it is that SalesForce does besides Chattr), meanwhile Slack is just chat, and whatever else you expected chat to encompass.

> Everyone else is busy "improving" gmail if you're Google, or monetizing voip/video chat

Yes. Instead of improving, they do voice, video, profile pages, silly pictures replacing your text and all that crap.

The only actual innovation I've seen to IM is ability to edit your last message.

Last people that tried to improve the actual IM chat were Google Wave but it crashed and burned because they fixated on everybody seeing as what everybody is writing when they write it (which was something nobody wanted).

Today, almost 20 years after ICQ people default to Skype even though it's closed crap for that purpose.

Any IM company that had some users had potential to become twitter or even facebook, but instead someone fresh came and stolen their lunch while they were playing with crappy voice and sponsored news feeds while accumulating bloat on their software.

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