Is Slack the Platform where you can have multiple accounts with the same displayname? A bit surprising to hear them talk about security
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
361–370 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who doesn't use slack, why did we ever move away from chat programs and protocols that worked fine? I don't know why I need to use slack, hangouts, discord, etc, that are just reinventing irc and/or the garden variety instant messaging platforms that already exist.
Discord is amazing, there really isn't a good replacement right now. Before that it was a mess/mix of IRC/Skype/Teamspeak/Whatsapp, now you can combine all that in one great client from a company that actually seems to care about its users. It's my favorite monthly Paypal charge!
When I combine the feature set of IRC/Skype/Teamspeak/WhatsApp, I come up with text chat + voice/video conferencing, which e.g. Skype already provides. Is the difference that the client is great?
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who doesn't use slack, why did we ever move away from chat programs and protocols that worked fine? I don't know why I need to use slack, hangouts, discord, etc, that are just reinventing irc and/or the garden variety instant messaging platforms that already exist.
Discord is amazing, there really isn't a good replacement right now. Before that it was a mess/mix of IRC/Skype/Teamspeak/Whatsapp, now you can combine all that in one great client from a company that actually seems to care about its users. It's my favorite monthly Paypal charge!
not self-hostable. also, why is it a problem to use different tools for different use cases?
chances it will be around in 10 years? I would say 25%.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm not the original poster, but assuming you're referring to Skype for Business, the main problem with it is that they don't have a Linux client. The only solution on Linux that implements audio, video and screen sharing is Sky ( http://tel.red/ ), and it's incredibly flaky.
Skype for business on Windows is very bad as well. Lots of scaling issues, incorrect status, freezing, etc.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How come you don't use Rocket.Chat or Mattermost or Matrix?
no care for privacy I guess.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#366Earlier 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?
The current iteration of Skype for Linux is a bloated web/Electron app. I really liked the bare-bones interface of the previous version and would have loved to opt out of animated emoji and the other UI changes, but not updating a program that's continuously connected to the internet didn't feel like a good idea.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#367Earlier 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?
1. Yes, they do. We even have a bot to post the top giphy result for a search query.
2. It's absoletely as assinine and distracting as you imagine.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the original poster, but assuming you're referring to Skype for Business, the main problem with it is that they don't have a Linux client. The only solution on Linux that implements audio, video and screen sharing is Sky ( http://tel.red/ ), and it's incredibly flaky.
Skype for business on Windows is very bad as well. Lots of scaling issues, incorrect status, freezing, etc.
As often as not, that's a result of shit infrastructure behind the Skype for Business deployment itself, rather than the client itself. There are a number of baffling restrictions baked into the server and protocol itself, and a real production-grade deployment is a byzantine mess that would give Cthulu nightmares.
It doesn't help that the client hasn't had much more than cosmetic changes in at least five years, and is largely abandoned for Microsoft's kludgey Slack competitor.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#369I'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…
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.
Relay is an alternative to slack.
Relay is open source, built on top of Mattermost. This means you can host Relay yourself. https://relay-chat.com/
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a , they…
Go host your own messaging tool:
Relay is an alternative to slack. Relay is open source, built on top of Mattermost. This means you can host Relay yourself. https://relay-chat.com/