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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#741

Post by nobody9999 »

teagee wrote: post #657
nobody9999 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at CF (at new offices, obviously) briefly a couple weeks after 9/11. They had backups and were able to recover data and systems. By the time I got there, they were somewhat functional. The biggest problems were the lack of knowledgeable personnel, not lost data or systems.

Thanks for sharing, for some reason I think about this story a lot. It must have been such an emotionally difficult time for everyone involved in piecing back together their processes.

>Thanks for sharing, for some reason I think about this story a lot. It must have been such an emotionally difficult time for everyone involved in piecing back together their processes.

I was there as a consultant and didn't know anyone there when I went.

I won't provide any details out of respect for those fine people, but the grief was so thick, you could have cut it with a knife. As I said, I didn't know anyone who was there (or wasn't there) but after a day, I wanted to cry.

Re: Slack is down

#742

Post by upofadown »

zenexer wrote: post #642
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

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…

XMPP is supported by a large number of clients, but running a server and getting everyone on clients with comparable featuresets is a nightmare. It’s a cluster of disparate standards, and it’s overwhelming. I’m sure it’s doable if you have the time to invest, but it’s not straightforward if you’ve never done it before. Matrix is pretty straightforward on the server side of things, but the client UX is invariably medi…

>XMPP is supported by a large number of clients, but running a server and getting everyone on clients with comparable featuresets is a nightmare.

XMPP is, well, extensible. If things don't match in the clients then that particular feature just doesn't work. These days all the clients pretty much try to match the feature set of Conversations. That applies to the servers as well. There is a server tester for that:

* https://compliance.conversations.im/

So the tooling is pretty good these days.

The great thing about XMPP is that basic messaging always works. That stuff is just too simple not to.

Re: Slack is down

#743

Post by BlueTemplar »

spicyramen wrote: post #663
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

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…

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

I was recently forced to use Facebook Messenger (thanks God it's soon over), and I'm hating it : it's slow on mobile, even worse on PC, where it regularly makes my whole OS hang requiring a reboot.

Scrolling back is atrociously slow, and it doesn't even seem to have a search feature !

I'd take XMPP alternatives like Conversations, Jitsi, Pidgin any day ! (And Element of course.)

Re: Slack is down

#744

Post by layer8 »

networkimprov wrote: post #689
MattJ100 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that XMPP and Matrix are protocols, not products. Element (the primary Matrix software) definitely has Slack and Discord in its sights. I don't think there are any serious "self-hosted Slack-like" contenders that are XMPP-based right now. You can piece components together (yay, standards!) and I did exactly this for the IETF's XMPP deployment recently. But it's far from being a cohesive easy-to-deploy…

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…

Email is not a chat system, and chat systems are unsuitable for asynchronous long-form threadful discussions. There is some overlap, but combined they form a spectrum of communication modes so wide that it can‘t be covered by a single UI.

Re: Slack is down

#745

Post by BlueTemplar »

josephg wrote: post #737
spicyramen wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

XMPP killed XMPP. Its just not very good. It doesn't work well between different clients and servers. The protocol is a horribly overcomplicated mess of overlapping, partially supported extensions for basic functionality. And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery. (It was invented before the iphone.) There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a pur…

> And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery.

What makes you think so? If Conversations was draining my battery, I would have noticed by now, I'm pretty sure that Facebook Messenger is worse in this aspect...

Re: Slack is down

#746

Post by BlueTemplar »

lallysingh wrote: post #676
spicyramen wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

Spam killed xmpp

What are you talking about ?? You need to confirm each other before communicating on XMPP, spam can't get through that !

Re: Slack is down

#747

Post by Dylan16807 »

dmkolobov wrote: post #660
g00gler wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they in camps along the border? Why are the Uighur? Did the "brown people" break any laws? Did the Uighurs? Are the "brown people" in camps along the border a single, ethnic minority? Are all "brown people" in the country subject to arrest and under surveillance just for being "brown"?

Well, yeah. People _are_ subject to arrest and surveillance for being brown/black in the US.

Not really more surveillance than anyone else. And the discrimination and mistreatment for people in the US is bad but nothing compared to camps.

Re: Slack is down

#748

Post by BlueTemplar »

zenexer wrote: post #642
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

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…

XMPP is supported by a large number of clients, but running a server and getting everyone on clients with comparable featuresets is a nightmare. It’s a cluster of disparate standards, and it’s overwhelming. I’m sure it’s doable if you have the time to invest, but it’s not straightforward if you’ve never done it before. Matrix is pretty straightforward on the server side of things, but the client UX is invariably medi…

I recently finally found someone to try Element with and the experience has been great so far. (Except for the need to go through Google's captcha at some point.)

It even sent a 20 Mo MP4 like a champ, while Conversations sometimes chokes on not that high resolution photographs...

Re: Slack is down

#749

Post by MattJ100 »

josephg wrote: post #737
spicyramen wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

XMPP killed XMPP. Its just not very good. It doesn't work well between different clients and servers. The protocol is a horribly overcomplicated mess of overlapping, partially supported extensions for basic functionality. And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery. (It was invented before the iphone.) There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a pur…

> And it doesn't work at all with low power mobile delivery. (It was invented before the iphone.)

This is plain untrue. Yes it was invented a long time ago, but thanks to the extensibility it has evolved over time just as the way people use it has changed. This evolution is a healthy and necessary part of an open ecosystem.

I know it frustrates people that modern features don't work in stagnated clients such as Pidgin and Adium, but modern clients support all the things you would expect.

Servers and mobile clients have supported mobile-friendly traffic and connection optimisations for many many years now.

> There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a purely technical decision.

Google contributed extensions to XMPP, the same way they contribute to other internet standards. I think they were quite comfortable with this. The XMPP-based Google Talk was their longest-running messaging solution after all...

Re: Slack is down

#750

Post by screye »

013a wrote: post #221
lol768 wrote: post #17

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is c…

Just anecdotal, but as someone who has used Teams continuously for 1.5 years, I can say that it has never been down for me.

That being said, individual instances of the app are notoriously unstable causing random annoyances. But, I am on a very early build of Teams, which is buggy by definition.

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