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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

#191

Post by leonroy »

Zash wrote: post #165
creshal wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

Having used and developed with XMPP day in and out for the past 9 years I'd have to agree with the sentiments towards XMPP being on life support.

It's a real damn shame because XMPP is pretty awesome. It's open for one, can be made super secure with OTR (client-2-client encrypted chats), has numerous protocols and implementations for stuff as diverse as message archiving, Audio/Video signalling, file transfer, chat (of course), presence and an absolute boat load of other stuff: http://xmpp.org/extensions/index.html.

There are two big issues as far as I can see with XMPP which really hurt it:

1. XMPP was incredibly poor at handling high latency, intermittent network connections (like cellular). Connections would time out, reconnections would take ages and all in all it really hammered battery life. As a consequence mobile app developers moved very quickly onto REST/JSON (yes there was XEP-0198 - Stream Management - but implementations of it were thin on the ground and even then it wasn't perfect).

2. There just isn't any interest amongst new developers or newer projects at least in an XML based chat protocol when REST/JSON is so attractive. Anyone who has had to write a god damned XML parser knows what I'm talking about.

Things are a whole lot better now. XMPP has fixed a lot of session and battery life issues since then but to be honest I'm just not feeling it when I go to XMPP meetups. Feel like I'm attending a wake for an old friend and it really is sad because if there was ever gonna be one protocol to rule them all XMPP was far and away the best candidate.

Who knows, a couple years from now large companies and governments might finally wake up to the fact that they have 100 different sucky (probably) REST based APIs amongst all their apps which are not remotely compatible and offer poor archiving and retrieval (like they did in the 90s when they forced Microsoft to open up their Office document format). XMPP might come to the fore again then (wouldn't put money on it though). More likely something similar (and not XML based) will take its place.

It's anyone's guess really, suffice to say the present situation does feel like a complete and utter mess and will really start biting us in the ass when compliance asks 'how do I archive/retrieve this pot pourri of data'.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#192

Post by ne0phyte »

munin wrote: post #80
tribaal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience of IRC clients seems like a bad one, I'm sorry about that. Have you heard of irccloud.com? You should check it out. My mum could use it (I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a happy customer).

irccloud isn't free, open source, or self hosted, so why not use slack instead?

The question should be "why not use a self hosted irc client instead". At least developers will use IRC anyway to get and stay in touch with open source projects and the countless communities that have their own irc server/channel. Why not use one protocol that's widely used?

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#193

Post by pyre »

creshal wrote: post #188
Zash wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the servers available for it suck. All the clients available for it suck. I know, I'm using it daily too, but I don't see it gaining more traction that it already has ever again.

What sucks about (e.g.) Adium? I haven't had any major issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be too actively updated. My biggest complaint is lack of protocol support for other things (e.g. GTalk vs. Hangouts), but that's on libpurple, and the lack of open protocols by the providers.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#194

Post by pyre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #15
matthewmacleod wrote: post #5

It's good to see a bit of a variety – we all know that monoculture ends up being a bad thing, and there are obvious downsides to applications hosted by third parties (though of course in some cases it's not a problem!). Of course, there's no real network effect with applications like this either (beyond integrations support) so there's a relatively low bar to switching when compared to something like Facebook. I do h…

Mattermost claims to have "Native Applications". ( http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native ) Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application." Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.

> I use both Slack and Hipchat

I've had a lack of issues with Slack, but HipChat seemed to have updates every other day and crash a lot when I used it.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#195

Post by leonroy »

pyre wrote: post #193
creshal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the servers available for it suck. All the clients available for it suck. I know, I'm using it daily too, but I don't see it gaining more traction that it already has ever again.

What sucks about (e.g.) Adium? I haven't had any major issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be too actively updated. My biggest complaint is lack of protocol support for other things (e.g. GTalk vs. Hangouts), but that's on libpurple, and the lack of open protocols by the providers.

Developer interest is on the wane in pretty much every XMPP project out there. That's the main issue.

XMPP is very much alive in large businesses, especially for system to system interop, but as far as client to server goes I don't see a compelling XMPP client - where's voice, video, chat archiving for example? Compare any XMPP client to Skype for instance and they're not even remotely close.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#196

Post by pyre »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #52
rottencupcakes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a fun thing you could do directly in Slack with a chrome extension. Kills a lot of the server based features - search, pulling in webpages, lots of integrations, but it seems like those would break in your end-to-end world no matter what.

Presumably you'd have access to the plaintext after decrypting it at the other end of the channel. Why wouldn't client-side search work if you wrote the entire app?

> Why wouldn't client-side search work if you wrote the entire app

It depends on how "deep" you want to search. Also, to get Slack's functionality, you need to be able to search through history that your client might not have "seen" yet because you were not in the channel when it happened.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#197

Post by leonroy »

creshal wrote: post #188
Zash wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the servers available for it suck. All the clients available for it suck. I know, I'm using it daily too, but I don't see it gaining more traction that it already has ever again.

btw. very much agree most of the clients are inadequate but if I could humbly pimp Openfire (I'm a dev there): https://github.com/igniterealtime/Openfire

And ejabberd of course (powering WhatsApp): https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

You'll see that on the server side at least XMPP is very well catered for.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#198

Post by 55acdda48ab5 »

Between phone conferencing, email, and shared desktop video conferencing, I don't get what more is needed in professional contexts.

I don't even get IRC or IM. "Chat" is noise and distraction. Write proper emails or arrange phone calls.

What exactly are people using slack for? I don't get it.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#199

Post by pyre »

leonroy wrote: post #195
pyre wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks about (e.g.) Adium? I haven't had any major issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be too actively updated. My biggest complaint is lack of protocol support for other things (e.g. GTalk vs. Hangouts), but that's on libpurple, and the lack of open protocols by the providers.

Developer interest is on the wane in pretty much every XMPP project out there. That's the main issue. XMPP is very much alive in large businesses, especially for system to system interop, but as far as client to server goes I don't see a compelling XMPP client - where's voice, video, chat archiving for example? Compare any XMPP client to Skype for instance and they're not even remotely close.

> chat archiving for example

This requires a central server though. This is more a function of the service providing XMPP to you than the client. If you want the functionality on the client, it presumably requires some sort of interop between client and server that I'm not sure it part of the XMPP spec.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#200

Post by mikerichards »

shakeel_mohamed wrote: post #95
mikerichards wrote: post #48

Regarding IRC... I started using Gitter a few months ago and have used various IRC clients for over 20 years. I was blown away on how much better the UX was in Gitter compared to IRC. The history, the notifications, the markup, the UI...you name it. And Gitter is a pretty crappy client. If there was a nicely implemented client, it would be even more impressive.

I've been using Gitter for a few months now, I think it's just polished enough to use consistently. If it were even slightly unstable I'd have to stop using it.

Until recently, Gitter had some weird bug where it the process would be in the background after you closed it, and you thinking that it was gone, would try to fire up another one it would just go to a background process or something.

But Gitter has other issues - mostly of the UX kind. One of them is that you can search for other rooms, but you can't really save that search. You have to start over everytime. Also, the default of sending you an email for every freaking message when you star a room is absolutely atrocious.

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