451–460 of 624 posts
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Does Discord even support XMPP or IRC?
Bitlbee has a plugin: https://github.com/sm00th/bitlbee-discord
That means they may ban accounts for using it.
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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…
Tangentially related, I have to take issue with this: > 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 an…
Simple: usernames. Humans are not phone numbers. Phone numbers are the IP addresses of legacy phone networks.
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Besides that, if slack had IRC enabled and e2e you would be able to connect via IRC and actually verify that e2e is doing its job (ie. connect via irc and see scrambled texts). One problem with all these closed client apps slack (with this update)/whatsapp/telegram is that there is no way to verify/audit it is actually doing proper e2e. Users must trust the X company that they are really doing proper e2e. These apps…
Telegram's client is open-source.
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Tangentially related, I have to take issue with this: > 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 an…
> I don't know that I have a better design in mind Simple: usernames. Humans are not phone numbers. Phone numbers are the IP addresses of legacy phone networks.
A lot of countries require require registering the phone number to your name.
Relying on phone numbers as uniqie identifiers especially in "crypto" hipster apps (Signal) is stupid bordering on malicious
It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies (maybe tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base. To an extent this makes sense, like if there is a new company CEO who has a different vision, etc. But many of these decisions-- dropping Google Reader, the trend to ditch the headphone jack, and now S…
Google Reader didn't bring Google more money, even indirectly. Removing the headphone jack leads to less cables and less open holes in the device. Slack's IRC gateway wasn't very good, and nobody used it, plus its existence allows easy circumvention of some paid tier features, like logging.
Everything has a reason, even if you might not like the reasoning.
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Where can I get a permanent (US) number anywhere? The cheapest I've seen slightly below $2/month, but all the super cheap carriers are very volatile businesses and you can't expect to keep them more than a few years. Seeing as you don't really own phone numbers in the sense you own domain names, any permanence is limited by the life span of your service provider.
Google Voice will let you pay $20 to "buy" a phone number (either a GV number they assign, or another number you port in), which is then yours forever (subject to Google's arcane EULA, I'm sure).
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…
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.
Can't wait to use the term "AIMd" on "Slack" (what a stupid name BTW) in 10 years.
Everybody 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…
email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security
Nobody does, sadly.
Baking it into the protocol like Signal and WhatsApp did means nobody has to want it, they just get it included without having to bolt on any extras.
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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…
> When you have a whole team working on a huge piece of software, Then don't freaking do that. There's no reason to make one huge app with thousands of features that justifies teams of dozens of devs instead of tools that do just one thing (and can be used in a modular way) correctly and nothing more. Actually, there's one terrible reason: the bigger the app, the higher the wall around the garden and that serves as a…