Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
241–250 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#242Earlier 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.
For the love of Pete! It's a frigging IM client: 800MB is absolutely not a reasonable amount of memory for it to be consuming, and I don't care how long your message history is.
A big part of why this occurs is Electron. Same with any app that's basically a browser app: memory usage is out of control relative to what the application does.
Case in point: https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ (disclaimer: I wrote this). Uses 284MB, for a version of a vector arcade game from 1980. Same issue with my version of Asteroids too: https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/. Some of this is down to the idiotic way the Web Audio API handles compressed audio, but with Asteroids I have to pre-render a lot of images because canvas 2D performance isn't that great with drawing primitives. Even excluding these issues, and allowing for several canvas layers at 1366 x 768 x 32 bits per pixel, double-buffered, and the thing still seems to consume quite a bit of RAM.
Welcome to the wonderful world of JS/CSS/HTML5 apps.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm dumb, I really don't see it in the UI.
I read https://medium.com/@RiotChat/slack-bridge-improvements-44c52...
I don't see a way to "add a slack" in Riot.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this is about to break because of the current announcement?
I don't believe so. emacs-slack uses their official OAuth2 + Websocket integration https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack#how-to-get-token-the-...
This is, incidentally, an argument about how a well-designed system like emacs can make writing a truly-native app easy: so easy that some random guy was able to take the API and write a client for a text editor (granted, the greatest & best text editor the world has ever known …).
If it's so hard to write native macOS, Windows, gtk+ or Qt apps — maybe that's a fault of those development environments. Granted, 'display sequences of text, optionally with some images' is kinda in emacs's wheelhouse.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Matrix has an identity key that is shared between devices (hence why you can link up the sub-devices). The reason for having per-device keys used for e2ee that you can verify is so that you don't automatically trust new devices if a users' account is compromised. Each new login creates new e2e keys that only persist with the session. In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly, but the actual concept makes se…
> In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly, but the actual concept makes sense.
This seems like a trivial gain for lousy UX, since it's possible the account and the device is compromised.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's absolutely gargantuan. How can any general purpose application justify 4G of memory, half of a factory macbook pro's memory. To put this in perspective, I was talking this week to a developer who was essentially apologising to me for a new feature that was going to require insane amounts of memory. This is for a process to handle literally millions of users. How much memory was it? 3G. Per "instance" of which…
I know most of this thread has been about making fun of Slack, but I wanted to write a somewhat serious response to this. I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. When one developer is working on a program, the person tends to be able to keep track of program flow, memory usage in their head and know when things are about to go out of bound, memory shoots up, etc. Whe…
> I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason.
You're not wrong, but perhaps that's an indication that software companies should use language & environments which enable them to have fewer developers, and enable those developers to keep track of things like resource usage?
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#247[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#248Great, I feel like an idiot. I advocated slack, because it granted the freedom to choose a client. Now I helped lock-in others.
Suggestions for alternatives, that I could migrate to? The requirements are: mid sized teams, desktop and mobile, all major os. People used web based client, native clients, irc gw, and bots. We need search and archive. Self-hosting is an option.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run Slack in a browser tab . Their native apps are basically electron tabs. I wonder how many people used xmpp and irc gateways in relation to all of their active users ?
Only Slack can answer that, but considering that Slack is commonly used at many technology companies I'd say that the number is probably reasonably high. I tend to find that software developers tend to have a much lower tolerance for non-native/poorly optimized/proprietary software than most people.
That may be true for greybeards, but I've found the opposite with people of the younger generations.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#250Seems like alot of us have an issue surrounding walled gardens. We too see the problem and have recently launched https://m.io to tackle the lack of interoperability across teams and platforms. For now we're allowing for anyone to chat across teams and with users that are on other enterprise messaging platforms like Cisco Spark.