Slack is awesome. It's way better than IRC in many ways. But I agree with the OP. Please don't use it for FOSS projects, use it for your company or other private use cases. But FOSS projects an communities require open tools. Slack won't save your history unless you pay for the service. The pricing is per user which makes it very bad for a FOSS community.
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
201–210 of 499 posts
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#202Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, mes…
> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed. > 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because ther…
Up until very recently Slack had spent essentially nothing on marketing. It spread because, in the words of pg, they built something people want.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed. > 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because ther…
Up until very recently Slack had spent essentially nothing on marketing. It spread because, in the words of pg, they built something people want.
alright, then replace "marketing" with "pretty pictures and rounded corners".
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Up until very recently Slack had spent essentially nothing on marketing. It spread because, in the words of pg, they built something people want.
alright, then replace "marketing" with "pretty pictures and rounded corners".
There have been plenty of very nice looking IRC clients over the years.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#205If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…
> Oh, and did you know that with modest, low volume channels (>200 source? or at least names of networks/IRCds? freenode at least has 19 channels with more than 1000 users currently, and one with just barely more than 2000. ##linux 2072 :It's official! We're now Linux.Chat! | Channel website: http://linux.chat | Pastebin: http://paste.linux.chat | Spammers or trolls? use !ops ". | For op assistance, join ##linux-ops…
Unfortunately, there's little correlation between the number of users joined to a channel and its communication volume. My experience is that the amount of actual communication in IRC tends to be low; many channels have a large user contingent that's simply silently parked there in some dormant screen or tmux session.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#206It's not as simple as "just use IRC". Even in cases where an IRC channel is both available and relatively well-promoted, some communities still seek out other tools. The first example that comes to mind is Reactiflux, a rather large React.js community that recently moved from Slack to Discord[1][2], another closed source app that will probably stay that way[3]. To me, the fact that a community of tech-savvy developer…
For context, we've always promoted IRC for real time communication on React. I encouraged people to setup other mediums for communication and many people attempted but only one took off: Reactiflux on Slack. The official way is still IRC on the website but most people are using Reactiflux which is pretty incredible. Now, we got the bad news a month ago that we've been kicked off of Slack :( So, I started looking at a…
Why'd you get kicked from Slack?
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#207If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…
> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical.
I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#208Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
This is one of the better reasons for opting for open-source alternatives to new technologies. If you have a single person that is even slightly technical, it should be trivial to set up your own IRC server, and then you get complete control over all of your own information. Even with that, you still can choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and so on. Anything common…
> If you have a single person that is even slightly technical, it should be trivial to set up your own IRC server, and then you get complete control over all of your own information.
I'm "slightly" technical and I have absolutely no interest in setting up an IRC server for my project or company. That's time better spent on developing our offerings. While I have no doubt I could set up a server, I also have no doubt that setting it up and maintaining it would drain time unnecessarily.
It's the same reason that I don't advocate for most people to maintain their own servers in 2015.
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#209If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…
But I like the Emacs shortcuts! And "buffer" is a sensible way to describe an opened file. It has worked for decades and will continue to work for decades more! Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!
I, for one, think that reinventing the wheel is a totally great idea and that we should have more npms and less apts
Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects
#210Some open source self-hosted alternatives to Slack: * Rocket.Chat ( https://rocket.chat/ ) * Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) * Mattermost ( http://www.mattermost.org/ ) * Let's Chat ( http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ ) Oh, and by the way, you could have your own Rocket.Chat instance running in Sandstorm in about 30 seconds: https://sandstorm.io/apps Update. And I would love to see a modern federated chat protocol…
Not sure why I would want to self host what is effectively a phone system. I have actual products to build. We could ease time self hosting source control as well -- to what end? I have members of the team spending time (and thus money) setting up something that pleases people philosophically but really adds zero value -- in fact, it actually costs money (through very expensive developer time.)
I don't get the point of complaining about Slack. It works great, it's simple to use and it has an amazing feature set. IRC is pretty terrible. Try doing a drag and drop file transfer. Try using markdown. Try displaying images inline.
I don't get what the problem is with closed source Slack. Do we avoid the phone company because their software is closed source? There comes a point where this FOSS obsession sort of jumps the shark. Worrying about a 'walled garden' for a chat tool is kind of silly. If it bothers people so much, create a FOSS Slack with the ease of use and setup and maybe people would be more interested. But anything that requires me to 'self host' something that amounts to a service means that is a bad use of time. I can pay the Slack guys to maintain chat while my devs work on maintaining our products. IRC is terrible. Try and get someone from your marketing department to use IRC. The neck beard and almost hipster pontification about the 'bloat' of Slack is kind of ridiculous. We have better things to worry about. Slack works on all my devices perfectly. I have a searchable log of everything. I don't have to think or worry about anything. It's simple and works. Until there's a viable alternative that exceeds Slack's ease of use, that's what I recommend people use.