Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#481

Post by forgotmypw » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:32 PM UTC

ndarilek wrote: post #277

blindgeek wrote: post #229

Earlier 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…

I also dislike Slack. Slack is just IRC, but reinvented with one centralized provider of everything and clunky, inaccessible UIs that they can change around however they want whenever they want.

(My accessibility issue is much smaller: I merely avoid using the mouse cursor, because the keyboard is much lighter on my wrists and hands than the mouse, trackpad, or trackball.)

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#482

Post by sriharis » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

aw3c2 wrote: post #464

ankitank wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Why would one want to use Relay instead of Mattermost?

Relay is actually hosted mattermost. Just a means to offload maintenance and uptime to someone working on it full time.

The part of software in Relay that makes mattermost SaSS is open source too.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#483

Post by sriharis » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

nqzero wrote: post #379

ankitank wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

i see the comparison to slack, but how does it compare to mattermost ?

Relay is actually hosted mattermost. You'll get the benefits of mattermost, except with us taking care of the hosting :).

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#484

Post by cup-of-tea » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

tommorris wrote: post #459

akkat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security

> 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.

But what Signal and WhatsApp has is not PGP. Not even close. It turns out security isn't trivial.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#485

Post by sriharis » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #11

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…

We've built Relay chat (http://relay-chat.com)! And I believe it addresses some of these concerns.

Basically, it is hosted mattermost. We've written our story of how we created Relay by escaping slack: https://medium.com/@deobald/we-created-relay-by-escaping-sla....

There are bux fixes, and feature improvements pouring into mattermost from around the world, and we get them in. We're building integrations, bridging services and other slack features (which will also be open source) into it on high priority.

There's https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge, which provides bridges from mattermost/relay to practically all other messaging platforms out there including IRC, Telegram, Gitter, etc. We're building a SaSS for this too.

Disclaimer: I'm a part of the Relay team.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#486

Post by bmaupin » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #436

amedvednikov wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype and others. It's only ~100 KB(!) It will be out of alpha this month. https://eul.im

I was excited when this came out, but I'm ambivalent about it now. First of all, it doesn't actually solve the issue I mentioned, since it's not actually "native" in the sense I was talking about; it's just a cross-platform Go app. Second, it's not open source, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable trusting such an app with my login credentials.

I haven't actually looked at the binary but supposedly it's written in C.

> What language is eul written in?

> C. There's also some Objective-C for macOS UI.

https://eul.im/

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#487

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #134

dennisdamenace wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a bad idea? And I doubt _any_ business has centralized their communications with Slack. I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.

> I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication. Slack's rise continues to baffle me. It's not good or widespread enough to replace email, Skype messenging, SMS or phone calls - so it's yet another thing I have to stay on top of at work. My life would honestly be easier without Slack.

It is better than E-mail for instant and group communication, it is better in everything except audio/video calling that Skype. SMS and phone calls are not even in the same ballpark in terms of solving group communication problems.

Disregarding the technical side of things, Slack is a great tool and it is quite understandable why it stuck: people like it.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#488

Post by dpcx » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

amedvednikov wrote: post #435

saagarjha wrote: post #11

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…

I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype and others. It's only ~100 KB(!) It will be out of alpha this month. https://eul.im

This looks like something useful, but it doesn't work on MacOS 10.12. Any chance of that happening?

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#489

Post by bmaupin » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

amedvednikov wrote: post #435

saagarjha wrote: post #11

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…

I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype and others. It's only ~100 KB(!) It will be out of alpha this month. https://eul.im

Any plans to support Skype for Business?

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#490

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

aw3c2 wrote: post #47

saagarjha wrote: post #11

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.

I suppose most companies use Slack for ephemeral communication. If it blows up, you can just move somewhere else. It was still probably worth it as it is dead simple to set up.