51–60 of 397 posts
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This and the number of apologists seems a little suspicious indeed.
Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them an "apologist"...
One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is encryption. A Slack alternative that's end-to-end encrypted (at least for private messaging between users) and has encryption for chatrooms would be worth my time.
This sounds like a fun thing you could do directly in Slack with a chrome extension. Kills a lot of the server based features - search, pulling in webpages, lots of integrations, but it seems like those would break in your end-to-end world no matter what.
One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is encryption. A Slack alternative that's end-to-end encrypted (at least for private messaging between users) and has encryption for chatrooms would be worth my time.
It's good to see a bit of a variety – we all know that monoculture ends up being a bad thing, and there are obvious downsides to applications hosted by third parties (though of course in some cases it's not a problem!). Of course, there's no real network effect with applications like this either (beyond integrations support) so there's a relatively low bar to switching when compared to something like Facebook. I do h…
Mattermost claims to have "Native Applications". ( http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native ) Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application." Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.
If only there was a well supported, standard, open and interoperable text messaging protocol (with multiple implementations) that companies could host themselves... Oh wait, IRC.
It's good to see a bit of a variety – we all know that monoculture ends up being a bad thing, and there are obvious downsides to applications hosted by third parties (though of course in some cases it's not a problem!). Of course, there's no real network effect with applications like this either (beyond integrations support) so there's a relatively low bar to switching when compared to something like Facebook. I do h…
Mattermost claims to have "Native Applications". ( http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native ) Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application." Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.
The Slack native app for desktop was horrible last year, but right now it's acceptable, apart from annoying notifications polluting the application switcher.
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Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them an "apologist"...
Eh, the number of downvotes I'm seeing for a contrary opinion to article about something not really controversial is also pretty weird. Seems like evidence of a concerted promotional push on HN to be honest, if only anecdotally.
Hell one of the downvoted comments is just "IRC comes to mind"... Just hand waving away all of the problems that something like slack is trying to solve, which the article talks about.
One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is encryption. A Slack alternative that's end-to-end encrypted (at least for private messaging between users) and has encryption for chatrooms would be worth my time.
Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf
Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013)
For talking about a race, Wired seems to have neglected a crucial technology: ircv3[1]. I'm not very fond of IRCv2, and have moved away from it where I previously used IRC. But IRC is popular, has a lot of clients, and v3 has a lot of promise. Why didn't the author bother to mention it? [1]: http://ircv3.net/
IRCv3 lacks a logo, a startup, and VC funding. So people who write tech news seem to often be unaware that it even exists.
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This comes up every time, and as usual you have totally missed the point . IRC is difficult to configure, difficult to host, difficult to use, and does not offer the same feature set as Slack. There is an obvious use case for something like Slack (obviously, because otherwise it would not have millions of users!) and covering one's ears while yelling "IRC! IRC! IRC!" is sort of wilfully ignoring that if it were a sui…
It really isn't hard to use. Firefox has a great extension called Chatzilla that makes it wonderfully easy to use. Maybe it's hard to host, but you can just claim a channel on freenode if you need to.
I can tell anyone in any kind of role (senior to junior, technical to non-technical) on my team to "Download (the/a) client for X and join #channel #channel2" "Follow the directions to set it up so changes on this Trello board are posted to #channel" and reasonably expect they will succeed if X is Slack, but not if X is IRC.