I guess I'll bid farewell to the Slack communities I've been participating in. I'm not interested in using a browser or installing additional software for chat.
You could try to get them to bridge to matrix
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
401–410 of 624 posts
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#402Everybody 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…
All valid points, but this makes me sad:
>and there must be tons of marketing to promote it.
It used to be “build it and they will come”. Open source projects don’t have millions to spend on marketing.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#403What must-have/killer features won't work with IRC/XMPP gateways? Also, even if there is something, shouldn't it be optional then?
I don't mind them wanting to discontinue support for it, it's their business after all. I mind the BS reason.
Feels like a Google Reader scenario...
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#404I don't understand ...
im using slack at work , and why should i use IRC or XMPP
with slack ? and why it is so bad they cancel it ?
realy.. its just tool .. why i need IRC on top of that?
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides building accessibility into frontend/React component toolkits, how do we automate testing for accessibility? I've turned on text dictation and tested apps with a blindfold, but that doesn't scale and I'm not even sure if it's how people really use an app without sight.
Tangent: I think you should really have someone who hasn't seen the app test with the blindfold. Is that double blind, or just single blind plus literally blind?
In a medical context, double blind means neither the patient or the doctor knows if the patient is receiving the drug being tested or a placebo.
I'm not sure how that would work for software, but it sounds like a much larger experiment than is currently customary.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yeah, a feature set doesn't matter if the features are bad. I would never want to use Skype as a platform for an ongoing text chat. (Does Skype even have persistent channels?) Also now that Discord exists, I would never do a voice chat in Skype either. A substantial portion of every Skype call I've ever been on was people apologizing to each other for the bad audio. Discord apparently just has better signal processin…
> Does Skype even have persistent channels?
Skype for Business does. But... not the Azure/Cloud version; you have to host it on-site, and MS are rapidly replacing Skype with the less feature rich (if that's even possible!) 'MS Teams'.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#407Earlier 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.
Animated images and emoji can be disabled in the Accessibility settings. 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.
> but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now
You must be overlooking all the helper processes.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#408Ah, the good old "just when I began to think Slack is pretty decent after all", still remembering fights with Windows office communicator and others.
The reason I use the IRC gateway is primarily to cut down all the extra crap except textual messages, and to be able to message from the console without having to switch windows or launch web pages (I run irssi 24/7 under tmux). This has been a nice sweet spot, with the improvement of seeing message history as well.
The trend for things built in the 10's seem to be constant change and fear for shutting down. Conversely, IRC from the early 90's still works fine. IRC is like water pipes. It doesn't come with flashing lights but it does what it needs to do, does it reliably, and nothing more. And you can buy bottled water in various flavours but if water pipes didn't exist life would be far worse.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of memory to slowly and jerkily send plain text over the internet, and not quite keep up with typing when autocomplete-ing usernames, you know. Stop expecting so much of your computers /s
Things like IRC don't support embedded images, so lets build our own protocol with blackjack and everything else! Oh wait, its a slow morass :(
Except; with IRC it's up to your client to do anything it wants.
Want inline pictures? Well, Textual has had that for a long time, irccloud's webUI too.
Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's Discord’s business model? Slack has a paid-for tier, but I haven’t seen anything like that on Discord.
Discord has a paid subscription, but since they've committed to be ad-free and not paywall off key features... well, there's almost no compelling reason for it. https://discordapp.com/nitro
They also seem to be data-mining the chats, and preparing to sell off data assets.
From the Privacy Policy:
" Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
They are pretty open that they collect a lot of data about you, and this is not even the full list ("not limited to").
"...we may conduct research on our customer demographics, interests and behavior based on the information collected. This research may be compiled and analyzed on an aggregate basis, and we may share this aggregate data with our affiliates, agents and business partners"
Shared for dollars, of course.
"As we develop our business, we might sell or buy businesses or assets. In the event of a corporate sale, merger, reorganization, bankruptcy, dissolution or similar event, your information may be part of the transferred assets."
They can sell your data, including all the chats they have collected.
It is of course a Privacy Policy and not a Business Model strategy document, but it is pretty far-reaching and allows for monetization of anything you do with Discord. You are the product.