Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

blog.okturtles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#141

Post by seagreen »

akerl_ wrote: post #43
seagreen wrote: post #37

Well there's part of the problem. "Should I use Slack or this long list of open source options, all trickily alike?" The open source team (which I would prefer to win) would do much better if their message was "use this one, canonical, excellent option."

You say that like there's not fragmentation on the closed-source side as well, with Slack, Hipchat, Skype, etc. The reason there's competition is because ~"let's only field one perfect option" sounds great if you think you're the one with the perfect product, or you're a user whose needs are exactly like that product's pitch. In reality, user needs are diverse: there's no singular perfect product.

In general you're totally right!

In this particular case though, note the title of the article. Wouldn't it be much more convincing as "A Superior Alternative to Slack (Which Happens to be Open Source)"?

EDIT: You're second point definitely does apply here though.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#142

Post by ocdtrekkie »

seagreen wrote: post #141
akerl_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that like there's not fragmentation on the closed-source side as well, with Slack, Hipchat, Skype, etc. The reason there's competition is because ~"let's only field one perfect option" sounds great if you think you're the one with the perfect product, or you're a user whose needs are exactly like that product's pitch. In reality, user needs are diverse: there's no singular perfect product.

In general you're totally right! In this particular case though, note the title of the article. Wouldn't it be much more convincing as "A Superior Alternative to Slack (Which Happens to be Open Source)"? EDIT: You're second point definitely does apply here though.

I think it should absolutely be noted that being open source is a key mark of superiority over Slack.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#143

Post by chris_wot »

justinhj wrote: post #134

I was recently at a small development studio that closed down. We used slack to communicate and liked it. I set up an alumni team and the whole team joined up to keep in touch and it's still active months later. Is anyone going to argue that if I'd sent out the irc channel that anyone would have tried to connect?

Why wouldn't they?

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#144

Post by aklemm »

chetanahuja wrote: post #140
vvpan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm left speechless... Oh please. Without even knowing much about the protocol, I am almost positive that it's bandwidth requirements are well below even a relatively light modern webpage and likely well within 2G range.

> "Without even knowing much about the protocol" > "I am almost positive that it's bandwidth requirements are well below even a relatively light modern webpage and likely well within 2G range. " I'm pretty sure this this is almost certainly the least, or at least within range of, quite likely the least definitive statement I might have ever read (or at least one of the lesser definitive of statements I've read within…

We see what you did there.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#145

Post by lfowles »

allannienhuis wrote: post #109
lfowles wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes? I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.

Slack's design is exactly the opposite of ephemeral. Everything you post, including documents, is indexed and searchable.

Ok, that makes more sense. I had something like Skype in mind... in theory I have my entire Skype history, but going back more than 100 lines or so is cumbersome. I'd rather teach my wife how to grep logs than to deal with that.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#146

Post by rtpg »

gkoberger wrote: post #97
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.

Slack already has the ability to do the opposite: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec... There's some startups like https://grove.io/ that do it. I think the biggest problem is the people who use IRC aren't the type of people to pay. Additionally, walled gardens are pretty nice when it comes to making a cohesive experience. As soon as you build on top of something else, you're beholden to its…

Isn't there a more fundamental issue that IRC does not map to Slack? Mentioned over and over, but Slack backlog is crazy useful, and I don't think IRC the protocol has any mapping for that. There's also things like permission sets that don't map 1:1 (but you can find workarounds, of course)

There's also the whole way notifications work... basically Slack and IRC are only the same (or even similar) on an extremely superficial level.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#147

Post by mikeokner »

1123581321 wrote: post #40
pnathan wrote: post #3

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

For us, it's the difference between only developers using chat and the whole company using chat.

Sounds like a good reason to keep using IRC amirite?

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#149

Post by meowface »

zokier wrote: post #21
hellbanner wrote: post #7

I'm seeing "No e2e encrypted DMs" as one of the cons for most of these.. anyone have a solution?

For the usecase I see these to be useful, I don't see lack of e2e such a huge concern. I would assume that in most cases the server would be more or less trusted in the context they are used in, so TLS style client-server security would be adequate. In other words, if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promi…

>if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promises it gives.

Why not, though? Assuming logging is disabled by both parties and the E2E is working as intended, you have something that's almost as secure as in-person conversation. The only weakness is if someone has malware actively on their machine recording the conversation as it's occurring... but then you also have many other issues.

Post reply on HN