51–60 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.
They did hard code a limit, the API has a specific error for that. They just choose not to disclose it, and to advertise with the phrase "Slack is free to use for as long as you want for teams of all sizes."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from what others already mentioned: One key issue with IRC is the mobile or multiple device story.
Only if you use plain IRC. If you use something like irccloud, that is prevented. Which can be thought of as a "webwrapper" for IRC. I have been using it for some time now and I enjoy it. (I'm not affiliated with irccloud in any way)
The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only mak…
You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.
* Free
* Handles thousands of users seamlessly
* Archived via bot same as free Slack
* No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes
* Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from
* Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities
It's called IRC.
Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back!
A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack:
* Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search.
* Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels.
* Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar.
* File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.
They did hard code a limit, the API has a specific error for that. They just choose not to disclose it, and to advertise with the phrase "Slack is free to use for as long as you want for teams of all sizes."
There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use…
- no history while you are not in a channel
- lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX
- no mobile notifications
Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.
There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use…
* no built-in file uploads
* a bot is required for archiving
* a bot is required for notifications
* no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies
* the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking.
It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your own solution, or using a lot of other software to accommodate everything and everyone.
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If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup. There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar busi…
It's an open protocol. Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface.
> There's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else.
I believe that NickServ takes care of this.
As far as logging, and file-sharing. Yeah you're onto something. IRC isn't as bad as people make it out to be :/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup. There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar busi…
I contend that my question was slightly snarky. As someone who moves from computer to computer a lot, having a unified client is quite critical. With IRC and Bitleebee, I can combine a lot of protocols in one client, keep it running in a screen, and access it via SSH. I realise my setup is hardly common, and I contend that the main issues with IRC are the clients and the account systems. However , both those issues (…
At which point you're not really using IRC. You're using the Bittleebee-commands-over-SSH protocol.
This protocol has a number of issues: it requires having a server with a unix user account running on it (which is a massive attack surface, no-one can offer a server like that for free or it will be used to DDoS other people etc). Its phone apps are poorly integrated and drain battery. Its UI in general is very undiscoverable; the logging interface is still pretty awful (e.g. tracking of how far you've read is pretty poor). Sending files or voicechatting is even harder than it is in vanilla IRC.
> both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Slack offers an IRC gateway, which gives about as good an IRC experience as any extended-IRC protocol ever could.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from what others already mentioned: One key issue with IRC is the mobile or multiple device story.
Only if you use plain IRC. If you use something like irccloud, that is prevented. Which can be thought of as a "webwrapper" for IRC. I have been using it for some time now and I enjoy it. (I'm not affiliated with irccloud in any way)