251–260 of 624 posts
Of course they do. This is exactly the path Google took. Once you achieve enough power in the market, you can throw open protocols overboard. It's a symptom of the centralized world the internet has become.
https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2016/8/8/hey-apple-any-pro...
Great, 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.
I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…
Moxie Marlinspike has a blog post about why protocols like XMPP aren't good enough to support modern messaging apps. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich medi…
> addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers
Phone numbers are owned by telecoms, not users. Sometimes they're transferable between telecoms, but not always. I, in particular travel internationally often and do not maintain phone service in the same country continuously. I've had to change phone numbers with Signal and Whatsapp a couple times now and have not found it to be a particularly friendly experience.
I got a free Google Voice number and might use that in the future, but I had to tie that to another US-based phone number. What will happen if someone else starts using that number, especially if they also connect a Google Voice account to it?
I don't know that I have a better design in mind, but using a phone number as an identity has some nasty edge cases.
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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 ?
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.
Spritesheets can be disabled under Advanced.
Maybe it helps, sorry I have no before/after but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now and I deal with an high number of very active channels.
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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 req…
Killing battery life of their users isnt a business reason?
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> 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…
So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche…
Mmm, while this wouldn't have impacted my decision in the slightest, I am mostly glad that I have moved over to Discord for everything I used to do in Slack.
Is there a specific list of IRC's deficiencies somewhere? Could we start on an IETF draft to address some of those rather than throw our hands in the air and build yet another walled garden?
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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...
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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…
Slack initially integrated with IRC and XMPP because they were more popular than Slack. Now that Slack is much bigger than all IRC and XMPP traffic combined, the integration is no longer worth its weight in code. If Matrix were overwhelmingly more popular than Slack, they would integrate with Matrix. But Matrix isn't more popular than Slack. (Matrix isn't even as popular as IRC, despite being a better product than IR…
Bait
> Now that Slack is much bigger than all IRC and XMPP traffic combined, the integration is no longer worth its weight in code.
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