Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#231

Post by morganvachon » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:45 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #222

morganvachon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the Windows app is horrid. One of our older workstations is a quad core i5 with 8GB, nothing special but no slouch either, and the Slack app completely chokes that machine. The employee has to run Slack on her iPhone to be able to get regular work done throughout the day. On our newer workstations it's not quite as bad but it's still noticeable. Our oldest in-service machine is a Core i7 laptop I use when I'm…

Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?

Mainly, reliability was an issue. There were times when the app would show a user logged in when they weren't, or logged out when they were, making it difficult to decide whether to send a message at that moment.

Sometimes when trying to log in it would say that the (saved) password was incorrect, the user would go change it in their Microsoft account and it still wouldn't take it, then a few hours later it was working fine again.

Slack also has much better search, and their support for attachments is dead-simple. Sending a file on Skype was always a chore that felt like it was 1999 all over again, but on Slack it's literally drag, drop, and collaborate.

As I said before, Slack wasn't my first choice but it's a good platform for what it is. I don't like that our conversations and files are stored on their servers, but I doubt anyone at the company is sifting through our stuff looking for dirt or valuable info on a small business with 10 employees.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#232

Post by anonpoi » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:46 AM UTC

Bye Slack, fuck you, hello Riot =)

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#233

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:47 AM UTC

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #34

castis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required to use Slack on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely wouldn't solely on principle.

I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements. Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#234

Post by s73v3r_ » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:47 AM UTC

alex_hitchins wrote: post #119

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…

Why not make your protocol open source so the world can benefit, integrate and improve upon it? If the current open standards suck, there is no reason we can't create new, better open standards. But, I've never used Slack nor would use it as I'm biased towards it's prop nature, especially when it's used (and even promoted) within open source communities.

I'm fairly certain they're not Slack, so they couldn't do that.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#235

Post by s73v3r_ » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:48 AM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #190

ascorbic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email does many things, but "works great" isn't one of them. PGP even less.

What doesn't work great about email? easy to use, easy to set up, easy to modify, easy to switch which software handles your email both server-side and client-side....

Has a huge spam problem...

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#236

Post by s73v3r_ » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #75

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…

> XMPP [...] is fragmented (not every client implements desired extensions), etc. How much I hate this "X is fragmented" argument. When two pieces of software that speak a common set of core protocols and thus can achieve at least some level of interoperability, but there is no perfect feature parity, then OH HORROR, IT IS FRAGMENTED!!1111 The obvious solution? Use a product that does not interoperate with absolutely…

"The obvious solution? Use a product that does not interoperate with absolutely anything at all ..."

You mean use a product with a baseline feature set where you can count on all the clients seeing things the same way and supporting the same thing.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#237

Post by jake_the_third » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:50 AM UTC

bitL wrote: post #223

Step 1: Build your initial product on open technologies, harvest goodwill of enthusiastic people Step 2: Become popular and highly profitable Step 3: Ditch openness of your platform, implying your initial supporters were just useful idiots

As much as I hate to admit it, I was android's useful idiot. I seem to have learned from my mistake though. I never bought into systems controlled by commercial entities afterwards.

Unfortunately, the pool of useful idiots doesn't dwindle with each cycle iteration since there are always a new batch of idiots willing to take the bait (and attack you if you voice your concerns). So this strategy won't loose its effectiveness. Expect to see many iterations in the future :(

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#238

Post by dilap » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:50 AM UTC

Dunedan wrote: post #41

Well, another day of being disappointed by Slack. Aside from missing native clients mentioned in other comments my biggest pain point is their awful implementation of threads. Every time I think: They must be kidding, they can't be serious, that's just a bad dream. A few examples: - The only place where you get noticed about responses to threads is the "New Threads" view, which makes it easy to miss responses, when y…

yeah threads are fucking terrible. it's a shame there's not a way to just turn them off.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#239

Post by dingo_bat » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:51 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #222

morganvachon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the Windows app is horrid. One of our older workstations is a quad core i5 with 8GB, nothing special but no slouch either, and the Slack app completely chokes that machine. The employee has to run Slack on her iPhone to be able to get regular work done throughout the day. On our newer workstations it's not quite as bad but it's still noticeable. Our oldest in-service machine is a Core i7 laptop I use when I'm…

Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?

If you had tried Skype on windows you'd know.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#240

Post by Arathorn » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 12:52 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #145

cyphar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people…

I really wanted to like Matrix but it expects you to independently verify the keys for each device every person is using. If they get a new device, new keys to verify. This is crazy. The keys should be per person, not per device.

Totally agreed that it is crazy; we are working on automatically crosssigning keys between devices, but suffering from rising traffic levels on Matrix meaning that all our effort is getting diverted into fixing scaling issues to keep the bigger homeservers running. Recent funding means that we can increase the paid team to fix it, but we are waiting for folks to serve out notice periods elsewhere before they can start full time. So if you want to help improve our crypto UX please jobs@matrix.org O:-)