701–710 of 840 posts
I'd be a little nervous if I'd recently bought Slack for $20B. It's not like there aren't alternatives. You could even imagine someone has a live bridge between Mattermost and their Slack team, making the switchover seamless.
Why be nervous? Outages happen. If this were a string of major issues over a few weeks or months, that might be cause for concern, but a single incident is not.
I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…
You bring up a good point, however, which is that we _could_ use open source, non-centralized alternatives for many of the online products we consume, but we choose not to, and so we increasingly become slaves to corporations that actively seek to narrow our choices. Another example of this is the push from big sites like Reddit to use their apps rather than just use a browser - it’s not about functionality, it’s abo…
That doesn't happen for no reason. The vast majority of open source products I've used have terrible usability. I simply don't want to use them. I don't want to be beholden to corporations and walled gardens, but for me, the existing alternatives are worse in too many ways.
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Or, or... and bear with me here... or, packaged click-button solutions with paid (contractually obligated) dedicated product support is a better use of our short time, more often than not.
>support is a better use of our short time, more often than not Not when it's down.
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This is actually the use case I've been trying to get to for some time. Unfortunately, I need it to "just work" to get my non-techy friends interested, otherwise they'll go right back to Discord. Like I said, it's close, I just don't think it's there yet.
I'd say it's almost in "just works" territory for everyone except the person who has to actually administer the homeserver (me). I absorb a lot of the complexity for my friends. The only thing that's a little cumbersome is requiring them to enter a custom server URL when the register/log in for the first time.
I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…
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It's largely overlooked that the success of Slack & MS Teams is partly due to the cybercrime portal that email has become. IOW, you don't get phished in your org's Slack chats. To prevent phishing, any chat service will suffice; an open protocol isn't necessary, as you don't intend to engage with ppl outside your org. The essential problem IMO is how to replace SMTP. No one has proposed and implemented an alternative…
Why would you replace it? Will not disabling all public un-authenticated submissions on your mail server suffice? You can also prevent delivery to outside world (and error out on submission so that users are notified) if you really like. Result will be your own private mail server. And you can keep using all the normal MUA's on desktop and mobile.
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Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.
IME, Slack is far more likely to lose my message than iMessage. I believe that's part of the point being made above.
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You bring up a good point, however, which is that we _could_ use open source, non-centralized alternatives for many of the online products we consume, but we choose not to, and so we increasingly become slaves to corporations that actively seek to narrow our choices. Another example of this is the push from big sites like Reddit to use their apps rather than just use a browser - it’s not about functionality, it’s abo…
Or, or... and bear with me here... or, packaged click-button solutions with paid (contractually obligated) dedicated product support is a better use of our short time, more often than not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would bet it's just the influx of traffic post holiday with systems that haven't been updated in so long maybe some annoying memory leaks have crept up and gone unnoticed or some other bad state that was exacerbated by return to work day for most NA folks. Code freezes were good at identifying bugs that only show up after long periods. Doubt anyone releasing big changes Monday morning.
I haven't worked at Slack, so I can't speak with high confidence. A traffic spike is a possible reason, but I'm willing to bet that it's not the reason: > Doubt anyone releasing big changes Monday morning. This is definitely an engineering best practice, and by best practice, I mean something that Uber's, I mean Slack's SRE team strongly pushed for, and got politely overruled on. After a code freeze is lifted, it's q…
Did you mean that literally? E.g. is it common at Uber that engineers can release changes to production on their own?