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

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

#581

Post by Arathorn »

Jach wrote: post #574
bennofs wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with matrix plus bridges? I am uniformed, so don't take this question to imply there are no problems

As someone also relatively uninformed, when my team moved to Slack I was hoping to get a Matrix integration going. But I don't have admin rights to install the needed integrations on the slack side (and I think we're at max integrations anyway, somehow, why is that a thing...). Though recently I found a different type of slack-matrix bridge that works via user-puppeting, https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-…

One solution is for matrix.org to provide a hosted instance of matrix-puppet-slack - although we (matrix.org) are not very comfortable doing so because we'd start gathering everyone's slack credentials, which is quite a lot of responsibility. It'd be much better if everyone could run their own and have responsibility for their own bridges. In practice we haven't had much bandwidth for bridge work over the last year but hopefully this will change soon.

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

#582

Post by Arathorn »

hillna wrote: post #152
cyphar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people…

Is there a weechat plugin for Matrix that currently supports e2e encryption? Last I checked, it was using an older version of the encryption that was not compatible with recent Matrix servers. I would love to use weechat for Matrix, as I'm not a big fan of the Riot client.

Not yet. The older version hasn't been updated to the version which Matrix actually uses these days, sadly.

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

#583

Post by sattoshi »

mmagin wrote: post #179
Grollicus wrote: post #4

Is Slack the Platform where you can have multiple accounts with the same displayname? A bit surprising to hear them talk about security

WAT? How does that go, if I try to message @username, where does it go then?

Display name != Username

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

#584

Post by tvararu »

mwcampbell wrote: post #508
tvararu wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I'm aware of today is to learn to use assistive technologies and use them on the right combinations of browser/OS/version. These are recommendations for common combinations. [0] I've given the CI deal a good amount of thought. You'd have to go through the trouble of: - Provisioning a Windows VM with specific versions of browsers (e.g. IE11) and AT (e.g. JAWS 17, the versions differ quite significantly) -…

I wouldn't recommend using JAWS and IE for CI. For this purpose, I think it would be much better to use NVDA ( https://www.nvaccess.org/ ) with any browser that can be controlled by a test framework like Selenium. (NVDA supports all the major browsers now.) Then, to feed the text-to-speech output back into your test framework, you can write a simple TTS driver for NVDA, in Python.

That would be a lot easier. I've assumed that NVDA would be the easiest to plug into for obvious reasons but have not looked into it specifically.

I used JAWS and Windows IE11 as a specific example because that's a popular combination with screen reader users. If something works well in NVDA and FireFox on Linux it does not follow that it will work in other combinations, at least in my own testing with things I've worked on in the past. Though targeting the low hanging fruit to begin with is how I'd also start if I was building something for this in earnest, ideally I'd want to automate testing with all the popular combinations that I expect users to have.

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

#585

Post by ocdtrekkie »

lolikoisuru wrote: post #579
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A file download is a pretty big commitment for an "explanation". I'm going to pass on that. :/

What browser do you use that can't play webm?

Clicking that link in Firefox immediately offers up a file download. So does IE. I'd test with Edge, but my Edge is broken. :( I'm guessing you use Google's browser and Google doesn't assume Google's video format is a download when passed as a URL?

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

#586

Post by CaptSpify »

fps wrote: post #522
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.

Phones? It's been 10 years since I worked at a company that gave me a desk phone, and it was archaic and useless then. Email is mostly a dumpster fire because of inflexible clients like gmail or outlook with terrible filtering and clumsy rules engines. At my current company, the main way to reach someone is Hipchat. We have a large percentage of remote workers, so face to face works for some people, but not everyone.…

> Email is mostly a dumpster fire because of inflexible clients like gmail or outlook with terrible filtering and clumsy rules engines.

Then why don't you switch to a good client? The reason email works so well is that you have that freedom!

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

#587

Post by CaptSpify »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #230
cyphar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people…

"There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc." How does that translate to superior communication between my coworkers and I? Most of that stuff does not matter to people.

> Most of that stuff does not matter to people.

It does matter, you just haven't realized it yet.

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

#588

Post by Arathorn »

jmagoon wrote: post #563
edaemon wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly, but with Riot.im you can just sign in, create a room, and then invite people to that room. It gets a bit more complex if you want to run your own server, but that's not something you can do at all with Slack.

It's very possible I'm misunderstanding as well, but when you create a room on the Matrix homeserver, the only option you have is to make it so users on another homeserver cannot join that room, which means your only security is other matrix users not knowing your room name. For a small corporate team that wants to pilot a chat program, like in the original comment, the gulf between Slack setting up your own private…

This is indeed a massive misunderstanding: rooms in Matrix can either be publicly joinable by default or be invite-only (just like in IRC). There's also a separate question of whether a room is locked to a given server (i.e. made unfederatable), but this is an extreme measure taken if you know the room will contain stuff you never want to ever leave that server. You can now also create communities to group your company/project's rooms together even if you're primarily using someone else's homeserver.

Separately: we're working on providing a "one-click" homeserver hosting option with a free trial precisely of the kind you're asking for.

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

#589

Post by azinman2 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #519
spdionis wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"parens parens parens parens parens parens parens some code here parens parens parens"

The regularity of Lisp's syntax suggests an interesting way to render it in speech, at least for blind people who happen to have a good ear for music. Set the TTS engine to monotone (i.e. no attempt at natural intonation), and increase the pitch for each level of parenthesis nesting. So it would basically be singing the code, going up a note or two for each level of nesting. It would sound weird, but I think it could…

I like that direction, but it also sounds like it might be hard to know the reference points. I wonder if it'd be easier to separate if you used musical notes in conjunction, where the octave/note/chord/scale is mapped to the indentation?

Even better would be tools that are aware of indentation, that you can't see the indentation, and help you debug problems without having to make it so explicit all the time. It could get really weird / grinding to have to listen to monotone speech that's constantly changing pitch.

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

#590

Post by e12e »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #500
e12e wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On paper I like matrix, or prosody (xmpp/jabber) with extensions (ditto irc + logging bots etc). But after looking a bit at rocket.chat along with the api - it's hard to recommend something else as a self-hosted, open slack alternative. I'm not enthusiastic about the stack/mongodb dep - but boy is the api nice and documented, and their docker-compose a joy to get started with: https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/do…

Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mattermost? How does it compare? About three years ago when open source Slack alternatives were starting to hit, Mattermost and Rocket.Chat were the top options. GitLab even ended up bundling Mattermost with their Omnibus installer (and were going to bundle Rocket.Chat as well, had they made it possible to support Postgres, but I don't think that's the plan any longer).

Not really. I'd prefer matrix (open protocol, federated) - but I seem to recall after reluctantly accepting that rc is a great product, I had a look.

And that bundling code inside a mysql container felt like it fell well short of the simple rc setup of db+app via docker compose...

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker-preview/blob...

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