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Slack Calls: Now with video

slackhq.com

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Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#21

Post by vertex-four »

kristopolous wrote: post #18
jamestenglish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment. In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts - superiority by a thousand minor improvements. When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very apparent to me at least…

The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that everyone uses ... or am I totally off?

If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience.

The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and rooms on other homeservers without having to manually connect, create a dozen different accounts, etc.

I think right now, 50% of users are on the matrix.org homeserver and 50% are on their own homeservers. And the upside of everyone being on a homeserver is that everyone essentially has their own bouncer by default - no more having to set up ZNC on some random VPS on a user-by-user basis, you can always message anyone and they'll get your message whenever they reconnect.

Because of its federated model, you can also use it to communicate with other companies and customers as well as internal communications - something Slack/etc aren't really chasing after.

[0] https://matrix.org [1] https://riot.im

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#22

Post by kristopolous »

Navarr wrote: post #6
kristopolous wrote: post #4

Does slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to be negative or incriminate the product. I use and enjoy slack every day.

That's mostly what Slack is and why people like it. IRC was (and still IS) good. Slack is basically a modern way to view and utilize the same basic system. It also made it very easy for developers to integrate components (whereas IRC you'd have to search out some way to do such integrations) - and with the "special" UX that they control they could add things like button actions on messages. A client like Slack for IR…

IRC is a pain, yes. I made a C library to talk to IRC servers about (oh god) 15 years ago that I then put a perl wrapper around ... it provided a notification engine like the slack notifications I see today. But I had to cull all the hacker in me from 15 years ago to get it working right ... not an easy thing at all.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#23

Post by kristopolous »

vertex-four wrote: post #21
kristopolous wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that everyone uses ... or am I totally off?

If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience. The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and room…

Alright let's go further ... so how is this different from XMPP rooms? (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html)

XMPP can support all the other things you've mentioned.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#24

Post by vertex-four »

kristopolous wrote: post #23
vertex-four wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience. The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and room…

Alright let's go further ... so how is this different from XMPP rooms? ( http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html ) XMPP can support all the other things you've mentioned.

While XMPP is wonderful in theory, in practice, it's very difficult to assume that any given set of client+server can support anything, especially once you're talking to people on other servers. Even things like the features allowing messages to be delivered to multiple clients, rather than only one, are rarely implemented according to the standard. Matrix has a reference server and client which supports the entire protocol, so any other implementation will hopefully wind up implementing at least the majority of it, or won't be used.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#25

Post by kristopolous »

vertex-four wrote: post #24
kristopolous wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright let's go further ... so how is this different from XMPP rooms? ( http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html ) XMPP can support all the other things you've mentioned.

While XMPP is wonderful in theory, in practice, it's very difficult to assume that any given set of client+server can support anything, especially once you're talking to people on other servers. Even things like the features allowing messages to be delivered to multiple clients, rather than only one, are rarely implemented according to the standard. Matrix has a reference server and client which supports the entire p…

XMPP hasn't really played out to its promises. Pity, it's such a great set of technology.

There's something to learn from this - there's likely a "right amount" of anarchy, some goldilock zone where people can still be creative and unburdened but not so much that things become fractured, fragmented, and incoherent.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#29

Post by tiv »

joshmanders wrote: post #3

I hope screen sharing comes soon. They bought Screen Hero a while back, and said they were integrating it.

My team uses Screenhero on a daily basis because it's the only screen sharing software we've found that lets us all point (and drive) without having to wait turns or specifically request control. Unfortunately, it has a host of issues and we end up having to restart our daily meeting call several times each day because of them.

I'd hoped that Slack buying them would result in a more polished product, but I haven't heard a thing about it since the acquisition.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#30

Post by danellis »

jamestenglish wrote: post #11
kristopolous wrote: post #4

Does slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to be negative or incriminate the product. I use and enjoy slack every day.

Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment. In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts - superiority by a thousand minor improvements. When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very apparent to me at least…

> So yes Slack is to IRC, as the Ford Model T is to a Mercedes S-Class.

I think you mean the other way around.

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