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Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

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Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#161

Post by Karunamon »

chris_wot wrote: post #112
chris_wot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that all those who claim IRC is insufficient or is too hard to implement (they say the same about XMPP) don't ever seem to say what is so hard, or mention the features that are missing.

Seriously, what is going on here? It seems any and every comment about IRC or XMPP is being downvoted to oblivion. If someone is astroturfing, I suggest you stop immediately.

Because such comments are at this point inane and uninteresting. As has been mentioned ad nauseum, Slack and friends are winning because IRC is a pain and lacks really basic creature comforts like offline messages and anything but text.

I'm downvoting them as I see them for this reason. Anyone saying "Why not IRC?" to the question of "Slack alternative?" is being willfully ignorant at this point.

Same goes to those who accuse people of astroturfing absent evidence other than "$ideaILike is being downvoted".

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#162

Post by bazingatossr77 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #14
tribaal wrote: post #2

If only there was a well supported, standard, open and interoperable text messaging protocol (with multiple implementations) that companies could host themselves... Oh wait, IRC.

This comes up every time, and as usual you have totally missed the point . IRC is difficult to configure, difficult to host, difficult to use, and does not offer the same feature set as Slack. There is an obvious use case for something like Slack (obviously, because otherwise it would not have millions of users!) and covering one's ears while yelling "IRC! IRC! IRC!" is sort of wilfully ignoring that if it were a sui…

https://www.irccloud.com/

(No I don't work for them. Self-hosted their AMI at last job, found them to be friendly, easy to deal with folks)

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#163

Post by TorKlingberg »

icebraining wrote: post #58
llimllib wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?

"Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data" (2000) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013) http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169

Homomorphic encryption would be great, is it likely to become practically usable soon? That is, is it safe enough against attackers, while allowing useful search?

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#164

Post by yborg »

scrollaway wrote: post #119
rekoros wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a timeline we put together of about 60 incompatible chat services: https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf Our service Sameroom ( https://sameroom.io ) is a commercial solution to the chat incompatibility disaster, not too different from an AC adapter thingy with a bunch of different plugs, one or two per continent. After implementing the protocols of quite a number of these systems (~20), we're seeing a sca…

Thank you, that PDF is incredibly depressing. By the way, well done on sameroom. I came across your product while working on the stuff I mentioned and it looks like an incredibly useful thing. I really wish you would open source it, though. (Or at least open source some libraries for talking to the protocols you deal with. Especially Hangouts.)

Not sure what is so depressing here. According to the chart, a total of nine listed networks died in 50+ years, this is actually astoundingly low.

And all IRC implementations are "interoperable" in the sense that a single client that implements the protocol can connect to any of them, this chart seems to be padding things a lot by calling every IRC server network a "chat service". A number of them also have or have had interconnects with each other in the past.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#165

Post by Zash »

creshal wrote: post #99
scrollaway wrote: post #78

A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. None of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your "integrations", your "plugins", your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts? Some sort of open protocol. Urgh, I've been…

> Some sort of open protocol. XMPP seems to be rather dead, for various reasons, and no real contender for a replacement has sprung up. I guess there always is, and always will be IRC…

I use XMPP every day. All my friends are on XMPP. What makes you think XMPP is dead? What are "various reasons"?

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#166

Post by rekoros »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #135
rekoros wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a timeline we put together of about 60 incompatible chat services: https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf Our service Sameroom ( https://sameroom.io ) is a commercial solution to the chat incompatibility disaster, not too different from an AC adapter thingy with a bunch of different plugs, one or two per continent. After implementing the protocols of quite a number of these systems (~20), we're seeing a sca…

Out of curiosity: are you leveraging such software as spectrum (spectrum.im) and libpurple? These pieces seem to be a good fit for internal gears of your product. Good luck, you are working on an important problem.

Hi Andrey - we're not using spectrum.im or libpurple (but are aware of both). We saw that libpurple now supports Telegram, so we may borrow some ideas from them :)

Thank you!

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#169

Post by zilean »

scrollaway wrote: post #71
Kalium wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRCv3 lacks a logo, a startup, and VC funding. So people who write tech news seem to often be unaware that it even exists.

It's also lacking adoption (which is understandable since it's not "officially released" yet).

I believe twitch uses ircv3.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#170

Post by scrollaway »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #94
scrollaway wrote: post #78

A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. None of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your "integrations", your "plugins", your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts? Some sort of open protocol. Urgh, I've been…

> open source multi-protocol group chat gateway What about Spectrum http://spectrum.im/ ? I am successfully using Spectrum as gateway to Skype (except groupchats ATM, some bugfixing pending) and IRC from my XMPP client apps. What about XMPP in the whole? It looked depressing few years ago, but times have changed, I can help you to catch up with nice novelties.

This is the first time I hear about Spectrum, actually.
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