Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 624 posts

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

#51

Post by jsmthrowaway »

dijit wrote: post #45
ztoben wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. How is it so high? Mine uses around 700MB pretty consistently.

Animated custom emojis seem to be a common thread, animated images in general cause my CPU and memory to spike when using slack. Our network engineer loves this dancing parrot emoji but it basically pins a core on my machine and adds 20-30% of memory to slacks process. I've switched over to using mattermost, it can be (and is) self hosted so I'm not as worried about slack getting hacked (again) and leaking our info/t…

Mattermost is also an example of how not to license software, including a promise not to enforce provisions of the license they have chosen. If one needs a promise, one has probably chosen the wrong licensing structure.

Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.)

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.

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

#52

Post by saagarjha »

elektron wrote: post #10
pc2g4d wrote: post #8

Of course they do. This is exactly the path Google took. Once you achieve enough power in the market, you can throw open protocols overboard. It's a symptom of the centralized world the internet has become.

Companies are just using Micro$oft's playbook. Oh, and spoiler alert, Microsoft still is too: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/Windows... Embrace / Extend / Expunge

You post implies that you're officially affiliated with Slack. If so, are you really comparing yourself to "Micro[s]oft's playbook"? Why can't you work to fix the issue rather than follow the industry standard?

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

#53

Post by tyrust »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #7

For weechat users, there's always the wee-slack plugin [0] which runs on the Slack API, rather than the IRC gateway. [0] https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent for irssi?

Perhaps it's time I give weechat a try :/

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

#54

Post by dijit »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #34
castis wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements. Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.

That's absolutely gargantuan. How can any general purpose application justify 4G of memory, half of a factory macbook pro's memory.

To put this in perspective, I was talking this week to a developer who was essentially apologising to me for a new feature that was going to require insane amounts of memory. This is for a process to handle literally millions of users.

How much memory was it? 3G. Per "instance" of which we need 2... Again, for millions of people.

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

#55

Post by u801e »

drdaeman wrote: post #23

Okay, I get that IRC isn't able to convey lots of modern fancy stuff, but XMPP? Really? I swear, it can do almost anything that fits into stanza exchange logic, as long as one's not afraid of adding an XML namespace (of course, it's being nice to search for already existing XEPs first). Afterwards it's client developers' problem to support shared threaded animated gif sticker emoji reactions or whatever.

The one problem I had with the XMPP gateway is that it would lock up my client for several minutes while trying to connect. I don't have that problem when using the IRC gateway.

But at least I didn't have to deal with inline images and animated gifs over the gateway.

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

#56

Post by dwc »

synack wrote: post #37

Is there a specific list of IRC's deficiencies somewhere? Could we start on an IETF draft to address some of those rather than throw our hands in the air and build yet another walled garden?

One potential problem with that is that for many IRC users, many of the "deficiencies" either don't matter or are bonuses.

Also, see https://ircv3.net/irc/

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

#57

Post by [deleted] »

DanCarvajal wrote: post #48
castis wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Weird, my slack app on windows is currently using 54MB.

[deleted]

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

#58

Post by TAForObvReasons »

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.

This is true of everything, not just centralizing communications. Any VC-funded free service will eventually be forced to find ways to monetize, and open access channels are usually one of the first things to be killed off. Twitter did the same thing with the firehose.

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

#60

Post by dijit »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

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…

Open Protocols usually come about either because the world needs something like that, so multiple companies work together on a standard; or because volunteers take on the work.

Volunteers don't have the marketing budget or, even the technical budget to compete with slack.

It's basically a non-starter unfortunately; and when they do come around (XMPP with push and decent extension is not bad) people are so hung up on the first implementation that they won't look passed previous shortcomings. It's easy to tar something when it doesn't have a marketing team behind it.

Post reply on HN