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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

#601

Post by ascorbic »

cyphar wrote: post #259
s73v3r_ wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has a huge spam problem...

But people posting tonnes of GIFs, emojis, and tagging @all on #general isn't spam? I don't disagree that email has a spam problem (though spam filters have gotten quite good in the past 20-30 years), just that spam isn't an email problem.

It's trivial to ban someone from Slack. The problem with email is how there's no authentication for incoming mail, and it's trivial to spoof the sending address so you can't block them. Sure spam is a problem on most platforms, but unauthenticated ones have it orders of magnitude worse than authenticated ones.

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

#602

Post by cyphar »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #545
cyphar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that the protocol is superior to Slack in general. Whether you have a use for those features is a different point -- those features are clearly already useful to quite a few people. But to answer your question, self-hosting would be useful in making sure that internal communication isn't shared with a third-party. e2e could also be useful (depending on what you work on) if you want to just use the public…

"My point was that the protocol is superior to Slack in general." But that's not the point you made. For it to be better in general, it has to improve the way people communicate.

> But that's not the point you made.

I'm pretty sure it is the point I made when I said: "There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack". Maybe it was badly worded, but the original comment was talking about open protocols being not as good as Slack's protocol (which is why they have their own and aren't use open protocols). My response explained that there are open protocols that are better (in that they have more features), and that Slack not using them is not evidence that they aren't better (rather it's an indication that Slack won't give up the one thing it has full control over).

> For it to be better in general, it has to improve the way people communicate.

I'm not sure I agree that's the only requirement for something to be "better in general". You would probably agree with me that HTTPS is "better in general" than HTTP. Why? To users there is no practical difference other than it being more secure -- which you've ruled out as being something users care about.

Things can still be better while being transparent to most users, while the extra features are useful for a subset of users. Not every protocol improvement needs to revolutionise how people use a particular technology.

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

#603

Post by cyphar »

bb88 wrote: post #245
cyphar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix has an identity key that is shared between devices (hence why you can link up the sub-devices). The reason for having per-device keys used for e2ee that you can verify is so that you don't automatically trust new devices if a users' account is compromised. Each new login creates new e2e keys that only persist with the session. In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly, but the actual concept makes se…

> In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly, but the actual concept makes sense. This seems like a trivial gain for lousy UX, since it's possible the account and the device is compromised.

They are working on the UX side of things. I disagree that it's a trivial gain. Signal works in the same way, except that they only really support having a single device (that's where the safety number changing warning comes from).

Having per-device keys also means that the server cannot decrypt your messages (because the identity key is not used for communication, it's just used to register new keys that clients will encrypt their messages to). Having a global decryption key stored on the server would be a less secure design.

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

#604

Post by blub »

jbob2000 wrote: post #497
blub wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JAWS is Windows-only, so your solution of just targeting JAWS is not a solution at all, since Slack runs on a lot more platforms.

Accessible users are primarily on windows because JAWS runs on windows . It is not a use case for us to test accessibility on anything other than JAWS on windows.

Tell that to the Linux guy with vision impairment complaining here in the comments about slack.

Making software accessible just on Windows is complete bullshit and should be downright illegal.

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

#605

Post by iforgotpassword »

michaelt wrote: post #429
noobermin wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who doesn't use slack, why did we ever move away from chat programs and protocols that worked fine? I don't know why I need to use slack, hangouts, discord, etc, that are just reinventing irc and/or the garden variety instant messaging platforms that already exist.

I don't know why I need to use slack [...] just reinventing irc Features Slack has that IRC doesn't include: * User authentication * Support for multiple concurrent logins by one user * Persistent, searchable history * (Ad-free) file and image sharing built in * Simple integrations, like webhooks, built in. In other words, Slack is like IRC+NickServ+Irssi+Screen+Imgur, except easier to use, in the sense that you don'…

You are trying to try people what they should prefer. This is about openness and choice. If I've been using screen and irssi/xchat/etc for decades I don't want to learn anything new. I don't want a huge app shoved down my throat that's not nearly as customizable and integratable into my workflow as all those tools I already know. The slack app is just a horrible tool designed to get into your way and interrupt your work. Thank god we didn't jump that shittrain on my current job.

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

#606

Post by valeriansaliou »

This opens up a market for someone building a Slack app and putting it on the Slack marketplace, that would relay in/out messages from/to XMPP o IRC. I'd pay for this, I definitely don't want to use Slack from their Electron app that sucks both my battery and my RAM. I'd stick with Adium as an XMPP client connected to Slack.

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

#607

Post by umen »

hvidgaard wrote: post #438
umen wrote: post #404

I don't understand ... im using slack at work , and why should i use IRC or XMPP with slack ? and why it is so bad they cancel it ? realy.. its just tool .. why i need IRC on top of that?

Using IRC "on top" is to avoid using the Slack client at all. I can understand that, and Slack would shut down a lot of critics if they made native clients, and a CLI client.

just to be clear when taking about IRC we are talking about mIRC type right ? native client to what ? i'm using their electron client .. what is wrong about it ? ( memory hangy?)

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

#608

Post by menckenjr »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #161
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…

> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team. You're joking, right? Have you not noticed any of the pain that anybody trying to make cross-platform app goes through, and hence the huge popularity of cross-platform frameworks?

It's painful if you haven't thought it through or have very little money (or want to cheap out on hiring developers who know what they're doing), and it's painful for the developers if management has been BS'ed into believing that a "cross-platform" framework can magically make their bonuses bigger by cutting costs.

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

#609

Post by u801e »

valeriansaliou wrote: post #606

This opens up a market for someone building a Slack app and putting it on the Slack marketplace, that would relay in/out messages from/to XMPP o IRC. I'd pay for this, I definitely don't want to use Slack from their Electron app that sucks both my battery and my RAM. I'd stick with Adium as an XMPP client connected to Slack.

When connecting over the XMPP gateway, have you ever had issues where your client would lock up while connecting and take multiple attempts to establish a connection? I had that problem and ended up switching to the IRC gateway.

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

#610

Post by amedvednikov »

bmaupin wrote: post #489
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

Any plans to support Skype for Business?

Yes! It will be supported very soon.
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