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Slack's UI is good. Not perfect, but it's quite usable compared to all the alternatives[2]. People always underestimate the value of good UI.
[1] https://twitter.com/zellyn/status/851818007248678912 [2] I've been on IRC on and off since 1993. It's much worse.
It seems kind of funny that an open source project can't find an open source form of communication.
I must've missed the memo which says any conversation around the globe is waiting for my input before it proceeds.
But you may have missed the memo because you're in the wrong time zone, and with Slack, your possibly-relevant input is ignored because you can't participate in real time.
This is my beef with chat. As the OP says, it biases all conversation to those in the same time zone. Fine for some things (like baked goods arriving in some far-off kitchen), but not for others (like a design decision that should have input from stakeholders around the globe).
But it's often used for the reverse.
Full Disclosure: I work at Discourse.
Issue #2, that slack is based on synchronous communication, is something that is always ignored. Sometimes I log in to slack and see a conversation that I want to add something to, but it is 4 hours old with 50+ new messages on varying topics. Even with Slack's new threaded messages it is hard to evolve the conversation after all the synchronous folks have moved on to other topics.
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I don't understand why people seem to thing that chats will solve all the problems. Chatting is having to write the same thing a million times.
It's easier to ask for help NOW and get customized answers NOW than to dig through a wiki/documentation for the answer.
I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc.
All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get a number of people together for a meeting.
It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get your work done you have a problem. I have a high performance computer and I want to keep it that way.
Does Slack's terms of use forbidden creating an off platform archive? If not, given that searchable archives are one of the ways Slack makes money, makes me wonder why there's not an open source way to pull the chats and archive them in a way that's cheaper and independent of Slack.
(a) is fiddly and a bit technical but has been solved-ish for ages before slack existed
(b) is fundamental though. If it's a big archive, it costs real money to provide access & search to. If you break it up, search-ability tends to suffer.
None of this is new, slack is just the latest flavor
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So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).
A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).
A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work...
Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it generally works.