What a depressing, disappointing move.
An already closed ecosystem is making itself further insulated from open culture and competition.
This further solidifies my position of avoiding the product.
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
201–210 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well for starters IRC doesn't let you keep your hands warm when somebody posts a giphy and your system resource usage goes up to crypto mining levels.
I don't rely on slack at work (we use mostly emails and some skype), I'm also part of a small-ish team, so I have to ask: do people in bigger-ish teams really send gif after animated gif in their work-related slack conversations? And if the answer is "yes", what does that help accomplish?
The more your work chat resembles an attention-addiction-skinner-box social media, the higher engagement numbers it gets.
It's relatively easy to see how these engagement numbers can be leveraged as a sales tool.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team. Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I…
can slack plausibly cause ADA compliance problems re: visually impaired people? or would it end up as "use the browser client with a screen reader and be glad you can do that"
The ADA only applies to certain types of "public" private businesses. Like grocery stores and bakeries, hotels, etc. I have never heard of it applying to any private software (that isn't government related). You can always use some other chat software or none at all.
However, I would imagine that as a company, if you require employees to use specific software as a condition of employment and no accommodation can be made, you might run into trouble as an employer.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just described the Matrix riot client: * https://matrix.org/ * https://riot.im/
Love matrix, but the OP just described the big adoption problem. Non-programmer wants to set it up for his company. How do you do that with a matrix server? Slack makes it pretty damn easy for non-techies to get set up and invite people. Matrix currently does not do that.
Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly, but with Riot.im you can just sign in, create a room, and then invite people to that room.
It gets a bit more complex if you want to run your own server, but that's not something you can do at all with Slack.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#205This is good news for me.
My company was considering Slack - the only reason it was agreed was due to the IRC gateway.
So it looks like slack is out of the question now.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web-based implementation means you only have one codebase for both Slack in the browser and Slack in Electron. So adding Qt in addition to their browser client means they have two disparate clients instead of one client (plus Electron glue code).
And? I am absolutely tired of companies taking a giant dump on the experience of desktop applications. If you're going to make a desktop app make a damned desktop app, stop making everybody accept a terrible electron app because "oh no, I have to do extra work" - give me a break. How many companies still maintain native iOS and Android apps? Lots. Qt even feels (mostly) native on GNOME desktops these days, if you can…
Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go and a native desktop client is sadly not a huge selling point for the sales team.
At the end of the day Slack has to optimize for growth and there's a huge list of features that will bring more ROI than native clients which will require trebling the size of the code base.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did everyone expect? Slack is a proprietary protocol created to make money on its proprietary service. I am glad they are making it more closed as then maybe more people realise that centralising your communications on top a VC funded, for-profit company is not a good idea.
Why is it a bad idea? And I doubt _any_ business has centralized their communications with Slack. I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.
The ~600 person distributed company I work for doesn't use phone or email and obviously doesn't do anything face to face. We relied on IRC for years before switching to Slack so yes, all of our real-time communication is via Slack. We have internal blogs for threaded important async discussion though, but Slack is where our high bandwidth talk done.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have run my own homeserver, you're right it's not simple. However, the main Matrix homeserver has those bridges set up (so if you don't mind using it, you can). But in the context of a corporate environemnt, you have people who are paid to maintain services like this.
Can I bridge my Slack to the main Matrix homeserver ( matrix.org )
Yes, it's even included in the Riot UI.
Note that unlike IRC, where bots or users must be on the same server rooms are completely independent of any single homeserver. There's nothing that says a room belongs to a certain homeserver. So the bridges set up by matrix.org will work with any room, unless you explicitly turn off federation.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#209I'm honestly looking forward to a worthy competitor. Slack has literally been slacking, I haven't seen any noteworthy features in 2 years. And we still don't have a proper client imo, can we please get a native one with some more progress?
Came here to say this.
I was on slack in 2015, took a break and came back in 2017. Nothing changed - no new features, and yet it was less reliable than I remembered.
They aren't even up to date on emoji. I just can't find symbols I expect to be there. Talk about low effort. And yet they had time to redesign the ones they did have (and the new ones are fugly).
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, but, but, then I'd have to touch the same code twice... /s There is definitely a poison in our profession, I definitely have to fight the urge to make sure no future changes will break something, instead of just budgeting time to fix breaking changes later. Especially since no one seems to remember when we all agree something doesn't need to be bullet proof. Just today there was an expression of disbelief when I…
These are not unrelated observations! The same people who expressed disbelief that your UI is temperamental will react the same way if Slack releases a temperamental UI. The difference is that they don't work in the same office as Slack. They'll never hear about all the important, completely justified reasons Slack decided to release a bad UI. They'll just notice it happened, and conclude that Slack must hire incompe…
What is a temperamental UI? It must have something with UX to do I am sure but can’t find anything on the first page of Google about it aside from one page that mention avoiding UIs to be temperamental but firstly that was all that was said it seems and secondly the forum is was posted on was, ironically, completely broken on mobile such that the text could not be seen. The page had a mobile navigation bar and the zoom set to mobil unchangeable but the content is wide like on a regular monitor and cannot be scrolled into view and additionally there is a sidebar so only the first few letters are visible of each line of text. It was about the worst thing I have ever seen on mobile. Obviously they have wrapped a forum solution in their own templates and their templates are responsive but the forum content is not. So I guess the people that run that site don’t browse their own forum in a mobile browser. Anyway I digress.