29 ms·

Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The people who clamor about IRC's death evidently don't spend much time in FOSS communities, especially system software. It's absolutely pivotal in those areas.
• pmx 11y ago
  I know of at least one tech company using slack as a support channel. It's not a great experience for the user at all. I love slack as a company communications platform but I totally agree that it's not well suited to being used as an open communications platform.
• zdw 11y ago
  Amen. To add to the list, there's also Bitlbee (https://www.bitlbee.org https://www.bitlbee.org) that acts as an other protocol (AIM, MSN, XMPP/Jabber, Twitter, etc.) to IRC translator, so you can consolidate all your short messaging into one IRC client. The ZNC + Bitlbee combination is quite powerful. Additionally for iOS users, there's a push notification client available for ZNC, which is pretty handy.
• munchor 11y ago
  Completely agreed. I love Slack and it makes sense for a lot of things, but not for FOSS projects. If you're looking for a great IRC Client look into IRCCloud[1]. It has a really nice and easy-to-use interface plus it allows you to be always logged in, just like with Slack. [1]: http://irccloud.com http://irccloud.com
• wldcordeiro 11y ago
  To add to this, don't use Gitter for FOSS projects either. I've been seeing lots of projects abandon IRC for Gitter.
  • SeriousM 11y ago
    In addition, Gitter is open source, has many client apps and, it, or really need, a irc bridge
    • e12e 11y ago
      I'm sorry, the Gitter server part is open source? AFAIK it's a closed source service?
• polarix 11y ago
  Isn't another huge thing that Slack solves the need to set up a local client? Why is that not addressed in this article, I wonder if the author really doesn't see it as a problem?
  • pmx 11y ago
    There are lots of web-based IRC clients out there
    • d0m 11y ago
      Which is part of the problem. People don't want "a lot of web-based IRC clients", they want only one and it has to be amazing.
      • chris_wot 11y ago
        The things slack can do (at least according to this article) that IRC can't are do small it's negligible. If slack is web-based, then what is to stop someone from making a web-based IRC client with all the features and good UX design of slack?
        • hbosch 11y ago
          And there is: http://shout-irc.com http://shout-irc.com IMO Shout is a UI improvement over Slack for the sheer fact that it is 100% customizable.
          • chris_wot 11y ago
            You realise you just increased traffic on their demo by like 1000%? :-) Pretty nice though.
          • giis 11y ago
            shout-irc looks good. do they have persistent logs?
        • 11y ago
• jadeddrag 11y ago
  And same goes for hipchat.
• d0m 11y ago
  > Problems with IRC that Slack solves Main thing that Slack solves as far as I'm concerned is a great and uniform client on every platform. Don't get me wrong, I love irc. This is where I started learning everything I know about computer. I tried many times to get various team on it and it always failed. I think it's mainly because the learning curve is too big for non-technical/busy people, and that there's no good and uniform clients on all platform.
  • userbinator 11y ago
    I think it's mainly because the learning curve is too big for non-technical/busy people Really? Does using Slack not require opening a client application and logging in, like just about every other realtime messaging platform? I know many "non-technical" people who use IRC.
    • syaz1 11y ago
      As opposed to IRC's NickServ, ChanServ, and their variants depending on the server? Expired nick, exposed passwords due to insecure authentication mechanism, no standard client, and so many more I can cite. I love IRC and grew up with it. But don't compare it to Slack for technical knowledge requirement.
      • chris_wot 11y ago
        I thought SASL integration was pretty secure!
      • manish_gill 11y ago
        I know people who don't understand what a Server is and even they can use IRC. Not saying that it's as simple and convenient as Slack, but making it out to be this huge complex thing is being disingenuous.
        • cdcarter 11y ago
          My PM was able to set up Slack integration with Trello and Github in a few moments, and found that connection incredibly useful. She didn't have to KNOW that she wanted it, she just saw it on the list of possibilities. She didn't have to go looking for instructions, she just hit connect. She didn't have to ask me or one of the other consultants to stop billing project time to set up some tech for the office, she could do it herself. In my firm at least, Slack is an incredible tool for our PMs and owner, and it also works well and covers all use cases for the consultants.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• parasubvert 11y ago
  This seems to be similar to the argument of "don't use Github or Bitbucket, use your own hosted Gitlab". Some of the complaints are a bit petty (really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden?) IRC is better for occasional participants that wish to remain anonymous and/or use less screen real estate, but Slack is generally a better experience for regulars and way less hassle than hosting your own server/bots. Ymmv
  • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    >really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden? It is, actually. I contribute to dozens of open source projects, and I am joined to hundreds of IRC channels.
    • parasubvert 11y ago
      Fair. My point is that you have a fairly unique set of requirements, such that there is a tradeoff in tooling to cater to part-time/open contributors vs. a core/extended team doing active engineering. You bring up some reasonable points, even though I disagree with asking teams to not use Slack (as I vastly prefer it to IRC these days, but I am focused on open source collaboration with active engineering teams). I think a compromise would be for teams that want open contribution or a chat support channel to turn on Slack's IRC gateway.
  • dsr_ 11y ago
    This is more like "don't use BitKeeper, use git".
    • ebiester 11y ago
      No, it's more like "don't use BitKeeper, use CVS." My first experience with IRC was 1994, I believe. I get IRC. However, slack has been a better experience. The biggest advantage has been persistent history and search for any member of a slack team. A new employee should have access to a conversation from a year ago.
  • davexunit 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  • hobs 11y ago
    Maybe by default, but given the author talks about the dozens of different bots available, logging the chat is a trivial thing to do, and most irc clients automatically log. In the case of linode, (at least back in the day I remember) they automatically post those online for anyone to search in case you could learn something from someone else asking questions in their irc channel. Does slack do that for you?
• shubhamjain 11y ago
  > has only one client I haven't used Slack's Gateway feature [1] but it seems Slack does allow you to connect with standard IRC and XMPP protocols. [1]: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...
  • apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
    It does but you lose a lot of little features that other people using Slack will expect you to have and be able to see/interact with.
• sktrdie 11y ago
  Main problem with IRC is that it's not "always on" and I really need this feature. Sure you can use IRCCloud or SSH/Screen into a server, but they both cost money while Slack is free.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    How is Slack free? You have to pay per user or apply for an exemption if you are a non-profit. IRCCloud is free by default and you only pay to unlock some extra features. https://slack.com/pricing https://slack.com/pricing https://www.irccloud.com/pricing https://www.irccloud.com/pricing
    • sktrdie 11y ago
      Slack is free, we use it for free and it's always on. IRCCloud's free service disconnects after 2 hours of inactivity.
    • nicksergeant 11y ago
      Slack is free without archival of messages and other "premium" features.
    • saiko-chriskun 11y ago
      are you missing the very large, purple "free" tier?
  • p0nce 11y ago
    You can setup IRC bouncers pretty easily.
  • rascul 11y ago
    Check out Shout http://shout-irc.com/ http://shout-irc.com/
  • pmontra 11y ago
    If you don't care losing the chat history after 10,000 messages, then Slack is free. 10k seems a big limit but it's only a few days away if you start integrating bots for GitHub, Bitbucket, Frontify etc. On a project a customer of mine disabled all those integrations because we couldn't go more than one week back into the past. Thery were not willing to pay Slack and we were losing track of decisions and accountability. When that happened we started writing down more things into Google Docs and the conversation shifted naturally from Slack to the comments of the docs. That had the (IMHO positive) side effect of reducing the time spent chatting about the project and of increasing the time spent to actually build stuff.
• AdamGibbins 11y ago
  There's also a hard user limit on free accounts - 5000 iirc.
• raverbashing 11y ago
  - The Slack client is an improvement over IRC ones. I don't remember free IRC clients (GUI) for Mac OS or Windows (there's Pidgin, but still...) - File transfers and snippets are not so essential, but they make working simpler - You can connect to slack using IRC or XMPP https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...
  • Nyubis 11y ago
    HexChat is a pretty great free client for Windows. It's basically XChat.
    • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
      HexChat supports OSX, too.
• l1ambda 11y ago
  What about gitter.im?
  • giis 11y ago
    users need a github account to use gitter.
    • Touche 11y ago
      They need accounts for Slack as well. In fact they need an account for every Slack, at least with Gitter you just have to have a GitHub account.
• frik 11y ago
  IRC and mailing lists and forums is pretty much were open source communities live and work together for several decades. Competitors want to reach out to such communities and vendor lock-in them. Nothing new, had been tried before with MSN Messenger, AIM, Skype videochat, etc. though IRC will hopefully stay about such waves and fades - it's a rather simple protocol, has a good file transfer mechanism and thousands of native, it cannot be censored (words filtered) and web clients for every platform and needs (incl bots).
• userbinator 11y ago
  I hadn't even heard of Slack before this article, but definitely IRC. Perhaps it would be opposite for the newer generation? IRC is also my preferred protocol for realtime messaging, for the reasons mentioned in the article and also the fact that it's extremely simple - you can even use it with nothing more than a network terminal like netcat. My second preference would be the older versions of MSNP (before they started stuffing XML into everything...)
• emergentcypher 11y ago
  Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
  • scrollaway 11y ago
    Agreed, but with that said... IRC has serious issues, and dancing around them or pretending they're not there is not helping. I talk a bit about them here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToBsQ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB... The reason Slack exists and can be so successful yet entirely proprietary is a symptom that IRC is not good enough and that has to be fixed. It is the manifestation of the papercuts we, IRC users, have been having for a long time now. (late edit: If you are interested in fixing this problem, email me, see my profile.) There are very promising efforts on IRCv3 (http://ircv3.net/ http://ircv3.net/) ongoing. I hope they eventually go live to the bigger clients and networks so that we may actually have a good foss alternative to slack (and I don't mean something like Mattermost. Like SirCmpwn said some comments below, having one browser tab per project REALLY SUCKS when you contribute to a lot of projects. I'm in over 20 channels myself, and I do my best to keep that number low...).
    • ChuckMcM 11y ago
      I really resonate with this position. IRC is open source and it has had problems FOR DECADES. IM programs from third parties add genuinely useful features which people clearly want. So rather than call for a general boycott of Slack (a negative approach) why not call to fix IRC?
      • sdegutis 11y ago
        IRC is just a well-established and battle-tested server/client protocol. I'm eager for the day when a competing open source server/client protocol emerges and takes over. I imagine all it would take is a really good reference implementation server and client that everyone can just start using, right?
• paulryanrogers 11y ago
  If IRC's limitations are too cumbersome to workaround there is also XMPP.
  • scrollaway 11y ago
    IRC's limitations are not those fixed by XMPP. Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280611
• mynegation 11y ago
  There is a chance to repeat git success story. Remember what happened? 1. Everyone uses cvs or svn. 2. Bitkeeper comes along with a good DVCS, gets adopted by Linux. 3. Linus rants about closedness of BK, reimplements it as git. 4. Git takes life on its own gets wildly popular and makes way for many awesome things such as github and gitlab. Replace svn by irc and bitkeeper with slack. Figure out the rest.
  • Zeebrommer 11y ago
    www.matrix.org?
  • phjesusthatguy3 11y ago
    2.5 Tridge starts implementing a Free version of the bitkeeper software so the Linux project doesn't have to rely on closed-source software to build their Free project, and Bitmover revokes the no-cost license given to the Linux project, just like they said they would.
  • jzd 11y ago
    Rocket Chat. Already use it at my company.
• vonklaus 11y ago
  It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC now. * Integration has never been a problem ... build bots. I feel silly and naive, should I know how to set this up? Maybe it is really easy and well documented, and I am an edge case here, but i don't know how to do this. I clicked 3 buttons to setup github for slack. It was very easy and I didn't haystack through building a solution to something that exists. Scope creep on tooling is dangerous as an aside. Thos takes that off the table. * persistence again, I have to set up an alternate tool to download the content. i assume this would backup the whole channel so any user could reference it, but it comes by default for free with slack. if each user must have a seperate tool, or go to a seperate place to see a conversation (which may be less searchable) it adds friction. * code snippets actually super reasonable to use pastebin. slack is at least as annoying for code as pastebin, if not more. * etc The point is, not everyone lnows as much as the author about IRC who is likely quite a talented developer who grew up on it. An 18 year old likely won't have used irc as much as older generations given the plethora of tools and chat clients. FOSS is a choice and a philosophy and that should be given some degree of consideration. Utility, workflow and getting new devs onboard and contributing is important. I agree with the author that it bears consideration, but slack or hipchat are much easier than IRC.
  • chris_wot 11y ago
    For buildbots, it's not that hard. See http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html Instead of using slack, use IRC Cloud.
    • ebiester 11y ago
      Does IRC Cloud allow new employees to get the entire history of the channel? I can't see how it would from looking at its page.
• terravion 11y ago
  Are there IRC clients that work well in poor connectivity situations? I.e. does IRC or any IRC client support sent, received, read confirmation the way that What'sApp or Google Hangouts reports this information?
  • Drup 11y ago
    With a properly configured bouncer (ZNS is rather easy to setup), it will work regardless of the client.
• unoti 11y ago
  > I put a lot more faith in something that’s been going full speed ahead since the 80s than in a Silicon Valley fad startup. That's how I felt during the dot bomb era when I heard that General Electric had been eclipsed in market cap by one of the new startups, Amazon. Although IRC has an old heritage, it's arcane and user-hostile. To some extent it wants to be that way, to help keep the unwashed masses away. IRC isn't as easy to use as Slack for things like persistent history accessible from mobile and desktop, and integration to git. That's why alternatives are gaining ground. If this situation bothers you ideologically, there's actually something you can do! You can help open source alternatives be as easy to use and integrate as Slack is. If your goals are less ideological and you just want your team to immediately get on the task of solving business problems, consider Slack.
• shmerl 11y ago
  Agreed. No more proprietary IM services please.
• programminggeek 11y ago
  IRC kind of sucks. The experience is worse. That's why people keep making these different tools - Campfire, HipChat, Slack. It's not just a technical thing. It's an experience thing. IRC is technically fine, just way too nerdy to be main line of business software these days.
  • aeharding 11y ago
    Businesses with nontechnical employees vs FOSS teams is the distinction. Use Slack or whatever for your business if it works for you.
  • chris_wot 11y ago
    So what you are saying is that the client software is not intuitive. You do know that all that needs to occur is to make a nice client?
    • detaro 11y ago
      Sure. "all that needs to occur" is pretty useless if it hasn't occurred.
      • chris_wot 11y ago
        Which means IRC itself doesn't suck, only the UIs we have made so far.
  • pmlnr 11y ago
    There is nothing wrong with IRC. The IRC clients, you're talking about, are a bit tricky, indeed. Someone should come up with an IRC client for the non technologically advanced instead of reinventing the wheel.
  • tyfon 11y ago
    Twitch.tv is using IRC in their main line of business (their chat). It seems to work fine for them and it is easy to write custom bots etc for it as it is based on an open protocol.
• mariuolo 11y ago
  Do I sound backward if I thought it was about Slackware?
• snorrah 11y ago
  Are any particular irc networks recommended for FOSS collaboration? I'm guessing channel and Nick services should probably be a prerequisite but other than that, where do people prefer to congregate?
  • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    Freenode. http://freenode.net/ http://freenode.net/
• nzoschke 11y ago
  We use Slack to support the open source development for Convox (open source PaaS). The main benefits are: Mobile client with push notification First class photos, files, code snippets Moderation tools Same tool for private organization chat Users that use Slack for the jobs seem to really like Slack for community support The downsides are: No invite system. Needs an hack app Unsupported use case for community chat Closed system. Exclusionary compared to IRC So far the productivity gains feel worth it. I can only guess Slack doesn't mind this usage will provide better public chat offering someday. A few people have given the same feedback about using IRC over Slack, however so it's on my mind. Would chatting in both work?
• ash 11y ago
  Some open source self-hosted alternatives to Slack: * Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/) * Zulip (https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/) * Mattermost (http://www.mattermost.org/ http://www.mattermost.org/) * Let's Chat (http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/) Oh, and by the way, you could have your own Rocket.Chat instance running in Sandstorm in about 30 seconds: https://sandstorm.io/apps https://sandstorm.io/apps Update. And I would love to see a modern federated chat protocol to take off. Something like http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/.
  • Drdrdrq 11y ago
    Let's chat: no mobile, no push notifications. Very fancy and not so useful UI (imho). Don't know others yet, thanks for the list.
    • mintplant 11y ago
      Rocket.chat has web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux clients, with push notifications.
      • __david__ 11y ago
        I haven't figured out how to get the iOS client to connect to a custom chat server. It seems to only support the main rocket.chat server.
        • apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
          Unless things have changed, you have to recompile the mobile apps with the address of your own server and distribute them yourself.
  • lectrick 11y ago
    Matrix looks interesting!
  • briandear 11y ago
• giis 11y ago
  Anyone here tried https://botbot.me/ https://botbot.me/ for logging?
• Uptrenda 11y ago
  The author makes a huge list of all the things Slack does and then goes on to suggest time-consuming ways to hack standard IRC clients to do the same thing. The question is: why in this day and age should we have to do that? Have you ever noticed just how many open source projects are still using shitty software from the 90s? No doubt, some of that software is actually quite good but I will argue most of it exists primarily as a result of tradition. In other words: a lot of it isn't the best way to do things presently, and perhaps if we stopped using such mediums as: mailing lists, newsgroups, and IRC channels to run our open source projects then presumably our projects might be filled with more diverse people than dinosaurs that still roam our mailing lists. I don't know why developers do this: but they assume because they have the skill to do just about anything with technology that other people who also have the skill ought to take the same time to do as they have. But honestly: even developer time is too valuable to waste on pointless shit. We ought to be trying to make things easier to use.
• agmcleod 11y ago
  I just also want to make the argument that github is a walled garden, so is google code. They're proprietary systems that we're able to use and take advantage of. I use github and I love it, but it can still have the same potential issues as slack.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    I don't think that's true. GitHub is a frontend for the open git protocol. You can take your repositories and move somewhere else with next to no effort. Heck, almost all of my repositories exist in multiple situations. All that being said, I've personally been doing more things on a private git server and less things on GitHub.
  • brazzledazzle 11y ago
    It's less of a walled garden if you don't use it for issues, wiki, etc. and just use it as a repo.
• synthmeat 11y ago
  I find it surprising that everyone apparently thinks that it goes without saying that Slack's interface is superior to other choices. It is full of visual noise. You end up in desparate need of splitting most types of information streams in separate channels because of it, and then before you know it, you're channel-hopping all day long. For core functionality - chatting - I've found that most IRC clients I've used are superior to it. Hell, even Facebook's chat is superior. It'd take fully redesigned fully native client idiomatic to every platform abounding with customization options to make me take a stroll through that garden. Not web client and especially not some Electron (is it?) desktop client that looks more like afterthought than carefully crafted experience.
• jordz 11y ago
  Completely agree with this. We use Slack for our Business Communication and love it, we pay for it so we can see all our messages and it definitely has its place. (Office Managers, Project Managers, Directors, PR are all in it, super simple and easy for them) For Open Source projects or just general communities IRC is the best medium suited to it. Yes IRC has its issues but maybe that's because no one has brought it forward with the kind of velocity other projects seem to have these days. I don't boycott Slack teams I just find it difficult to manage more than 2 teams in the client so I just don't, I like channels in IRC. I can flip between them regardless of server or team and can see the entire history.
• bobbygoodlatte 11y ago
  Hacker News: is closed source is a walled garden requires a "Y Combinator" account to communicate Most people don't use software because of the driving philosophy behind it — they use it because it solves a problem of theirs. If a tool is the best one for the job, you should use it. And if Slack has a substantially better UI for communication, maybe developers of IRC clients should try to build a better UI rather than complain about adoption of Slack.
  • e12e 11y ago
    In all fairness, while the currently running incarnation of HN isn't open, earlier versions of Arc and hn/news (along with forks) is open source, eg: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ And there are clones, like lobste.rs: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters Then there's the API, that allows anyone to export data. So while I get your point, and agree with it to a certain extent, it's also not entirely fair.
• Pxtl 11y ago
  IRC? Really? That's your solution? Not some kind of self-hosted Wave-like tool or something? Not something web-based?
  • e12e 11y ago
    Technically, there's no contradiction in using IRC and something "web-based" - there are a number of decent IRC web clients.
• Arathorn 11y ago
  [Slightly naughty crosspost from https://drewdevault.com/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html#comment-2337758257 https://drewdevault.com/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.h...] There are an increasing number of plausible FOSS alternatives to Slack out there like Zulip, Mattermost, LetsChat, RocketChat etc. Classic IRC simply doesn't compete in terms of the featureset, glossy clients and web-dev friendliness. However, most of the FOSS Slack clones miss one vital point: they just provide a random custom API to their clients which may not even be published. Despite being FOSS software they're not actually promoting Open Communication - they are just building yet more silos that fragment your conversation history and contacts/contactability even further. If you want to pick your own client, or pick your own server, or interoperate with other comms networks (other than naive bridging), you're generally out of luck. This is why I personally believe it's vital to support open standards for communication like Matrix.org or XMPP or IRCv3, and build glossy clients and services on top, so that rather than being locked into a single server & client from any given project, we retain the freedom to pick the clients, servers, services and service providers that we want rather than being forced into using particular ones for particular communities. A good start would be for the Zulips and Mattermosts of this world to federate with Matrix or XMPP out of the box, even at the lowest-common-denominator functionality set, to support open communication rather than causing yet more fragmentation. [Disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org]
• legohead 11y ago
  Wouldn't Slack be ideal for FOSS projects? My fear would be of losing sensitive data when using Slack, but with a FOSS project this isn't an issue. Slack is a tool, like a debugger or IDE, which aren't all open source. If you are working on a government project with secret clearance, then these issues make sense. Otherwise, the article feels like it has more of a "whippersnapper" message.
  • dlisboa 11y ago
    I disagree with some of the things in this article (mainly that IRC is necessarily better for your company) but Slack isn't ideal for FOSS projects. It's a very long way from ideal. Main reason being: Slack is a company and as such they can change their policy at any time. There isn't any specific right granting FOSS projects any status. Slack can ban the users they want, can deny access to accounts they want, they can be sold to other companies and can be bankrupted, bring it all crashing down. Slack isn't a tool, it's a service. It's not in any way whatsoever like a debugger or IDE, even if those may be closed source. A tool is something you have and can use. You might not own its manufacturing but you own its potential use. Like a hammer you didn't make but is yours to do anything with. You can use it a million times if you want. Slack is someone else's hammer that you pay to use. That's a service. The fact that they allowed you to use it for free for some undefined period of time doesn't mean you own it or dictate any rule of its use. It's still their hammer. They can stop you from using it at any point in time. FOSS projects are supposed to be inclusive, open, transparent and fully decided by an owner or a community. Giving away control to a third party with no contract whatsoever is a terrible idea and a good way to break many of those premises. Slack is being used for FOSS because of the failings of IRC noted by others in this thread, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Certainly not when the audience for Open Source is already very accustomed to IRC. Slack is great for the turnkey solution it is, it offloads that IRC configuration you'd have to do, and it's easier to introduce non-technical people to. It's good for paying customers that have a clear contract with the company and as such gain certain rights. It's not, in any way, ideal for other cases. It might fit them, but it's not a great idea.
• Yuioup 11y ago
  Unfortunately, you managed to pull off a Streisand. So... what is Slack? And where can I use it? Sounds useful.
• pronoiac 11y ago
  I've noticed many hosts call out IRC in the TOS, as IRC is prone to DOS attacks. And is there Giphy integration? Or editing of posted comments?
• mshenfield 11y ago
  Slack is the wrong choice for large community projects for one pragmatic reason: the 10,000 message limit for free teams. I participate in a large developer community that lives on Slack. Conversations are deleted quickly on less active channels like #lisp or #volleyball, sometimes within a day. This is frustrating when trying to connect to like minded people and also maintain a record and resource for community members. And at $6.67/user/month it really isn't viable to upgrade. I can't speak to the quality of projects like Mattermost [1] and Zulip [2], though I'm excited by their concepts. IMO trying these, or using a hosted service designed for community projects like Gitter [3] are necessary alternatives. [1] http://www.mattermost.org/ http://www.mattermost.org/ [2] https://www.zulip.org/ https://www.zulip.org/ [3] https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/
  • pmontra 11y ago
    Yes, the 10k limit kills it. After that you can still search old messages and find them but you lose the context because you see only a few lines around them. Either your FOSS project has a budget to pay Slack or you're bound to lose any valuable knowledge and decision buried in the archive.
• spankalee 11y ago
  This post is completely disregarding the ease-of-use of Slack (and other silo'ed chat rooms), mainly due to it's pretty monolithic structure. Yes, there are many things that Slack does that _can_ be done with IRC, but they require significantly more coordination between various parts than Slack. I'd love to see an alternative to Slack not just a clone, as easy to use and administer, and built on an open protocol. Individual teams should be an easy entry point for a tool like that.
• peterjmag 11y ago
  It's not as simple as "just use IRC". Even in cases where an IRC channel is both available and relatively well-promoted, some communities still seek out other tools. The first example that comes to mind is Reactiflux, a rather large React.js community that recently moved from Slack to Discord[1][2], another closed source app that will probably stay that way[3]. To me, the fact that a community of tech-savvy developers won't use IRC exclusively is a pretty good indication that IRC is not enough. [1] https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-... [2] https://github.com/reactiflux/volunteers/issues/25 https://github.com/reactiflux/volunteers/issues/25 [3] https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/648379244570013696 https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/648379244570013696
  • vjeux 11y ago
    For context, we've always promoted IRC for real time communication on React. I encouraged people to setup other mediums for communication and many people attempted but only one took off: Reactiflux on Slack. The official way is still IRC on the website but most people are using Reactiflux which is pretty incredible. Now, we got the bad news a month ago that we've been kicked off of Slack :( So, I started looking at all the options and frankly, all the alternatives I tried had a really bad user experience. Sure, they had all the features of Slack but the polish was not there. Until I randomly stumbled upon Discord, a chat app for gamers. It turns out that it does everything that we used Slack for, has better perf than Slack... Before we even made the switch officially, people were already using it organically in favor of Slack which is a testament of its qualities. I highly recommend using Discord for your open source project!
    • peterjmag 11y ago
      Hi Christopher! :) Thanks for expanding. To clarify, I didn't mean to imply that moving to another closed source solution was the wrong decision. In fact, Discord seems like a great tool for the job. I just wanted to use the migration as an example of how/why some groups don't switch "back" to IRC or other open source solutions, because their needs are better met by something proprietary. I'm a big proponent of open source, but I'm also all for using the right tools, whether that means open, closed, or some combination of the two.
• jbarciauskas 11y ago
  I'm responsible for a medium to large FOSS project. I noticed that Wordpress had recently moved to Slack, and asked someone I knew over there how engagement had changed after the move. He reported they saw about a 10x increase in users moving to Slack (100 -> 1,000). (https://twitter.com/HypertextRanch/status/627122747664113664 https://twitter.com/HypertextRanch/status/627122747664113664) I get the arguments about not using it, but my priority is providing the best tools to the community to enable them to work together productively, as well as providing the most effective forum to encourage more people to get involved. How can I ignore that sort of order of magnitude increase in the number of people who can engage in real-time with the project?
  • Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    I've heard the Wordpress tale and I would guess that it's more related to the announcement and press around it generating attention than it is the merits of either platform. A lot of people who didn't know Wordpress had a chat room probably joined up.
• unfamiliar 11y ago
  None of the problems listed seem like problems to me. All of the solutions that make IRC fill this role seem like they will require more work and time to set up than I am to put in just to get communication set up. Slack just works. So unless I am going to be working on something highly sensitive that I can't trust a third party reading about, I'm going to keep using it. Wouldn't the best solution be to adapt one of the existing open source slack clients to use a local server? Then we have all of the feature set and none of the security and privacy concerns.
• KirinDave 11y ago
  If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the so called "distributed" design of IRC makes it very brittle and easy to deny service. Oh, and did you know that with modest, low volume channels (>200 <1000, some networks tolerate more) you can make IRC networks struggle? Turns out that their lousy distributed design hurts more than helps when single channels get heavy. Slack also offers a logging service that, for what it's worth, is configured correctly and secured by default. For organizations with 1-3 technical staff, maintaining and securing a reasonable approximation of Slack's feature is probably time better spent working on your product. IRC is a classic example of the "it's broke but we don't fix it because it's familiar" mentality of old school services. While it may be a good choice for running low-volume (<500 users) public communication. Most tooling around it is woefully inadequate and often tedious to use for small software-oriented teams where Slack thrives. But if you're genuinely concerned about security, HipChat will sell you a whitelabel product you can host and monitor and its setup is quite good for what it is.
  • tormeh 11y ago
    But I like the Emacs shortcuts! And "buffer" is a sensible way to describe an opened file. It has worked for decades and will continue to work for decades more! Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!
    • jarek 11y ago
      I, for one, think that reinventing the wheel is a totally great idea and that we should have more npms and less apts
      • KirinDave 11y ago
        I, for one, think that the march of technological experimentation and progress should stop unless we can convince specifically jarek of the value of any given project, as jarek has demonstrated that they want to become the arbiters of all value judgments.
• BogusIKnow 11y ago
  Been a heavy IRC users in the 90s, no a Slack user. There just is no comparison for me. Do I miss channel wars, nickbots, take overs and hacks? No.
• ninjakeyboard 11y ago
  http://gitter.im http://gitter.im is well suited for github projects!
• orofino 11y ago
  Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc. All of this is what folks in this thread seem to be missing. I've used IRC for a very long time, but have NEVER been successful at getting wide adoption of IRC for communication. I am well aware that I'm trusting a third party with out information. I'm aware that alternatives exist and you can get them to work. That doesn't matter when I have to try to explain to my CEO how to /join #channel. There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another. </rant>
  • Hello71 11y ago
    > 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed. > 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because there are so many options for servers, whereas Slack only supports one server. > 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. webchat was invented for a reason > 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc. IRC has had mIRC-style colors supported and even adjustable by the majority of clients for at least 10 years. I don't know what "messaging" means. If you mean "private messaging", pretty much every chat software in the world has that. AOL and ICQ have that. You can put emoticons in your text manually if you want. It was on IRC that the concept of chat bots was invented, not on Slack. > There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another. Yes, it is about how much money a for-profit company has to spend on marketing and copy as opposed to a standards organization.
• brazzledazzle 11y ago
  One thing even private organizations should think about is the potential for chats on Slack to embarrass the heck out of them. Slack doesn't let an organization sunset and delete private chats/DMs after a certain amount of time. When employees think they aren't overheard they start to get very frank with each other (which is good, I think frank and direct communication is important). But sometimes they say things that are ignorant or even their frankness can reveal things about the company that are embarrassing. This isn't even a theoretical scenario anymore, look no further than dumps from recent hacks. I like Slack's default-to team member privacy but you can implement these features without compromising that. I opened a case with Slack about it but they closed it with the standard "consider it in the future" response that I expected (which I don't hold against them, I can't say I wouldn't have done the same). It may take a breach of Slack's infrastructure and subsequent leak of private chats for them to make the changes needed for organizations to protect themselves from this. It might only take user education to protect a company from this, but in the end if you're a big enough organization there are going to be people that don't care, hate the organization or are just to jaded to take the ramifications seriously.
  • daenney 11y ago
    Looking at this page it seems entirely possible to configure a DM retention policy: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Setting-up-custom-message-and-file-retention https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin... It seems to by default use the team retention settings.
    • brazzledazzle 11y ago
      Thanks a bunch for this. I'm surprised the person helping me didn't know about this (unless it's fairly new) but I should have put more effort into researching it myself.
• EGreg 11y ago
  At Qbix (our company) we believe that there will be a platform for social apps the way that Wordpress is for blogs. We just recently met with a VC who was impressed with our platform pitch, saying he hasn't seen something large in our space that's open source yet. Slack specifically came up as something that Andreessen Horowitz made a big bet on. I'm not going to say much (unless someone asks) except that: * It's open source and on GitHub (http://github.com/EGreg/Platform http://github.com/EGreg/Platform) * It is designed to put control back in people's and communities' hands. It should be installed by communities, or they can choose us to host, like wordpress.com does * Each community can release its own client app, BUT you can also have client apps which provide a seamless experience ACROSS communities and let you do identity + connect with friends + get notifications across communities! * This was not easy to build. It took us over four years. We started before Diaspora* and we built an open platform on which app developers can build apps which communities can install, and which can aggregate social experiences across communities. The apps can be ANY social apps and the platform takes care of all the underlying details, including app versioning, user identities, "finding your friends" in each new community, registration/password stuff, email / mobile notifications, native app integration and caching, and much more.
• jarmitage 11y ago
  While we're on it, can anyone recommend a good open source calendar app with decent web and mobile interfaces? (if there is one) I'm building internal tools for the record label I make music with. We're going to try self-hosting Zulip vs. Mattermark for collaboration, and it would be great to have a calendar that integrates well.
• bdcravens 11y ago
  And yet the author links to his Github profile.
• jedberg 11y ago
  This is the perfect counter example to "Open source is better". IRC has been around for 20+ years. But a company that is just a few years old blows it away feature-wise. Sure, you can do all the same stuff in IRC, but look right at the article for why you wouldn't. The answer to every "missing feature" in IRC is to install some extra software and then maintain it. I'm don't want to waste time doing that, I've got products to build and maintain. The closed source option is better because they have a financial incentive to keep it that way. And I'm happy to pay for that because it saves me time and lets me work on things for my customers instead of myself. I'm a huge fan of open source and used to be a zealot about using open source to run my business. But I've started to see the light in my old age.
  • randomsearch 11y ago
    > This is the perfect counter example to "Open source is better" Agreed. I think one of the main reasons for this is that cohesive design comes from dictatorships, not from distributed decision-making, i.e. design by committee. The strength of open source is that it is usually "good enough", rather than "great" or "the best it can be".
  • netcan 11y ago
    I generally agree, though I'm not sure financial incentive is the reason. Open source has really shown that financial incentive is (A) complex and (B) not the only thing that motivates people. If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult. If your goal is something fairly objective OS is really amazing. Take VLC's "play everything everywhere" goal. Fantastic, objective goal for and OS project that really plays to its strengths. Linux is, I guess, the canonical example. It's fantastically successful relative to closed source competitors on every front that is objective. But, its consistently been unsuccessful as a consumer desktop. That said, I don't think IRC is dead either. Some people/communities prefer IRC.
    • mike_hearn 11y ago
      What you're trying to say is that open source works best when there's little or no design work involved and little or no product vision required. Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so suddenly the "copy UNIX" goal was no longer relevant. But Windows was made by Microsoft, or "the great satan" as Stallman memory called it. So simply switching the goal to "copy Windows" wasn't possible because Windows and UNIX were very different and anyway, lots of people hated Windows. Linux had picked up a lot of semi-technical and technical users who didn't care much about FOSS purity but loved the club feeling that using an obscure OS brought them. The end result was big splits and bizarre, illogical design decisions being made simply because "do it like Windows did" was ideologically unthinkable, even when Windows had basically got it right (or at least, less wrong).
• GPGPU 11y ago
  This is a silly argument. You can extend it to "Please don't use cellphones for FOSS projects" because some big evil Corporation owns your cellphone company and your cellphone isn't "open source." And certainly don't drive your car, which contains hundreds of patented items and closed source software to your FOSS programming job! And don't let anyone with a pacemaker or hearing aid work on your project either! There's closed source software in that!
• incepted 11y ago
  I understand the urge of certain people to fight Slack but if you think irc is a legitimate alternative, you probably don't understand the problem enough to offer a suggestion. More credible alternatives would be Hipchat or Gitter but anyone who has used these two tools know that they are still way, way behind Slack in functionalities and user friendliness. Slack is succeeding because it's a great tool. Want to beat it? Create a better tool and people will migrate to it for its merits, not because it's open source.
• heavenlyhash 11y ago
  Come to the Matrix! [1] - Open! Free on both the beer|culture axis! - Modern! (There's actually control structures in the protocol. Imagine: a chat protocol that's actually ascii safe! (Yes, yes, unicode too: the joke is, IRC isn't even ascii safe.)) - Many platforms! (The matrix.org site has a full client list; I'm personally using it via a linux desktop client (that also works on windows and mac), the web, my ipad, and my android phone.) - IRC bridged. (I use it constantly in this mode. It's a better IRC experience than any other IRC client I've used, honestly. Even in rooms with 100s/1000s of people. Consistent logs, instantly accessible from multiple computers/clients, no need to set up bouncers, and so on.) - File uploads, images, videos. All of it. A friend streamed me a video from his halloween party last night via the Matrix client on his iPhone. It worked. - Did I mention it even supports webRTC? That's right: it's also a completely functional skype replacement. (Yes, pending your browser's support and all that jazz: that said, it's a more complete product than most of the other webRTC demos floating out there.) The entire protocol is just... good. On the nerdier deep end of things: It's the first federated chat standard I've seen proposed that actually has reasonable message IDs baked in and loose timing systems that's both available during a partition and can reach consistency afterward (messages list their last-seen messages, and so act like vector clocks, an accepted good solution to problems in CAP territory). You could actually take two systems with clock skew and have them reach a single, reconciled view of the world, even after netsplits. Compared to IRC (or XMPP) this is either magical or a deep relief, or both. I discovered Matrix while I was in the process of writing a chat client of my own for XMPP. I abandoned the project (and XMPP, as well, though that's a subject all its own [2]). Matrix already did everything I ever wanted. Really, really well. Not affiliated; just a happy user who's never found any better platform for communicating openly. --- [1] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org | https://vector.im https://vector.im [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968
  • sandGorgon 11y ago
    I'm curious if you ever evaluated something like Pubnub or Pusher and how matrix stacks up versus them (as a self hosted chat API for mobile platforms)
  • rrix 11y ago
• draw_down 11y ago
  I agree Slack is a poor fit for this. But god, using Slack makes it painfully obvious how shitty IRC is. I almost wish people would stop mentioning them together. I hate IRC and I have since the 90s, it's just bad.
• rekoros 11y ago
  We (sameroom.io) bridge channels/room in Slack, IRC, Gitter, and several other systems (about 14). It's a commercial venture, mainly aimed at helping large companies manage the lack of federation between team chat factions. However, we do what we can to support open source and we'd be happy to provide sameroom functionality to open source projects. Please reach out on sameroom.io/contact to take us up on the offer.
• tolmasky 11y ago
  I will add one silver lining to all of this (since I agree with everyone talking here that IRC is "hard"), Slack is also hard. That is to say, we're still in low hanging fruit phase. I don't know if I was just doing it wrong, but when I had to join the Slack channel for a FOSS project, I found it very confusing: 1. I had to be invited or something? (Still don't know if this is the case always) 2. It still remains a mystery to me exactly how Slack treats different accounts (or are they all the same account?) for different projects. It makes me like sign in to them differently but then they all show up together? 3. The Slack app is great or whatever, but its cool when a project can just embed an IRC channel, and even just make you an automatic account, right inline on their site and not have to deal with signup for anything. If someone wanted to enter this space, they still could. Just make something that allows you to have one "Account" that would work across the board, had an embeddable widget so there's no "going" to the chat, its just there on the project page, has bots and emoji or what have-you. Maybe Gitter is working on this (already has all these abilities?). But suffice to say, I find it funny (sad?) that the discussion is around how easy Slack is vs IRC when IMHO Slack is still pretty hard and confusing.
• ajarmst 11y ago
  Scans as a case of the "I like X better than Y, therefore X is objectively better than Y" rationalization fallacy. Someone else could easily use the same set of facts to argue the opposite case: "irc doesn't support code snippets, so ....". The political argument that you shouldn't use a closed-source product also irritates me. I use a tool because it's the best tool for s job, and FOSS is very often the winner there. But if the FOSS option isn't the best choice, don't tell me I should be using it anyway. I don't attach moral weight to a choice of licensing model.
• zanny 11y ago
  Somewhat tangential but relevant, what the hell happened to XMPP, period? Wasn't it supposed to be our one communication account we do groupchat, video calls, IMs with persistence, and file transfers over? Why did it just up and die with nobody working on it and nobody using it? http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html exists. Its groupchat, it could probably be amended to support inline code, and its persistence model lets a server chose to broadcast the message history or not. And it is incredibly more user-friendly to make an XMPP account through a GUI client, have username@server, then join group@server for groupchat. No /join, no /register, no port management or #channel management. Hell, any reasonable XMPP client would default to your current server for groupchat so when you click "join chat room" you get the server part prefilled and you just enter the group name (or pick it from a list of groups - the protocol supports channel announcements). I get that XMPP is a horrible format (XML) and horribly bloated (committee) and horribly old (1999?) but if its that broken why can't we make another protocol for peer to peer realtime communications? Why isn't webrtc becoming that transport? Why do we keep getting these one shot web startups trying to replace open protocols every other weekend for a quick buck?
  • upofadown 11y ago
    Well XMPP groupchat does in fact work (as you say). So the question would be; how does it compare to Slack? ... and IRC?
  • scrollaway 11y ago
    Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280611 It's sad. But the only thing that can be done is work on an actual protocol that will solve these problems. It's a big burden to bear, and more often than not, building something that will bear such a burden just kills it outright (cf... xmpp.)
    • ZenoArrow 11y ago
      > "But the only thing that can be done is work on an actual protocol that will solve these problems." What about the Matrix protocol (referenced in other comments made in this discussion)?
• donatj 11y ago
  I hear a lot of people talking about the problems with IRC, and I truly wish someone would enumerate them. It works great for our needs but I'm very curious the ways it isn't working for some. We use a self hosted IRC server, along with an IRC bot written in Go for everything from automated deployments to chat logs to weather and traffic and bus schedules.
• ceronman 11y ago
  Slack is awesome. It's way better than IRC in many ways. But I agree with the OP. Please don't use it for FOSS projects, use it for your company or other private use cases. But FOSS projects an communities require open tools. Slack won't save your history unless you pay for the service. The pricing is per user which makes it very bad for a FOSS community.
• ausjke 11y ago
  using irc on a daily basis, I wish it supports some basic tags such as <pre>, <code>, <img> and <video>, to make it more like a html chat IM...but anyway I like it and use it all the time.
• nerdwaller 11y ago
  > requires users to have a different tab open for each project they want to be involved in This isn't true, down the left side bar you can select other teams if you've signed into more than one. I'm not suggesting we should only use slack, but at least they do make it fairly easy to navigate.
• jkot 11y ago
  I am surprised nobody mentions Jabber, it is better alternative to Slack than IRC
• jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect. This is trivially true by the [material implication, modus ponens, modus tollens, other name, etc] truth table. However, if you study the truth table a bit longer, you will realize that you should stop reading any text which contains fallacious or self-contradictory logic. While the conclusion may be "correct", it is correct despite all of the other text you read (so, go find a logical argument [instead of relying on known bad information]). The text you read can tell you nothing about whether the conclusion is true. Fallacious reasoning needs to be identified, targeted, and destroyed. Edit: I've been rate-limited, so any fallacious (or non) arguments posted in response will need to wait a while for a proper response (some have already been typed up).
  • KirinDave 11y ago
    Indeed. So if someone doesn't actually make a claim, but then another party begins to rebut said claim as if it were part of a formal argument, that's called a Straw Man Argument or "Burning a straw man" colloquially. That's what you're doing. We should identify it, target it, and destroy it. Actually I don't really think that it should be destroyed. It's human nature. We find any post-facto justifications for our gut reactions all the time. If we can't find one, we tend to distort what we saw to create one. It's part of human cognition.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      It should be logically destroyed; the full path of destruction should be visible to all though. You have claimed a Straw Man, but in my 20 second analysis, I do not believe you have identified it. (as in, quote the actual text containing the Straw Man)
      • jsprogrammer 11y ago
        Downmods. No quotes. No specifics. As usual.
        • 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• mdumic 11y ago
  I call FUD. Something to the effect of "Please people, don't drive cars, they are not FOSS". My company pays for Slack and we get a ton of value from it. Kthxbai!
• davexunit 11y ago
  Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done. The company I work for uses Slack, and luckily there is an IRC bridge to connect to so I can keep my workflow in Emacs rather than having to use a clunky web interface, but there are many special Slack things that they don't render correctly in plain text form so I feel like a second-class citizen. If this is the future of text-based communication, I don't want to participate. I like IRC. I like that things aren't centrally logged by default. I like the bots that I've been interacting with for many years (that I find to be better than whatever Slack bot I've come across, by the way.) I like Freenode as an IRC network. I like the variety of clients available (I prefer ERC, a client written in Emacs Lisp.) Could we use some sexy web clients to get less technical people on board? Sure! Should we use a proprietary, centralized, surveillance system until someone else fixes IRC issues for us? No way! We must reject Slack because it isn't a tool for the people, but a tool for profit.
  • mike_hearn 11y ago
    What makes you think IRC isn't centrally logged? You realise that the Freenode staff have root on all Freenode servers, right? It's not actually a decentralised network at all, it just looks superficially like one from the outside: they could log whatever they wanted at any time. I'm not even sure the servers use encryption between each other. If they do I didn't see any mention of it on the freenode website. Heck, given that SSL isn't even a default for many IRC clients, I suspect that in practice it's vastly easier for governments to eavesdrop on IRC than on Slack which is fully SSL, always.
    • xena 11y ago
      The software is very simple and doesn't have the ability to log messages like that. I maintain a fork of the ircd freenode uses and that simplicity has actually been a bit of a pain as things grow.
  • 11y ago
• tptacek 11y ago
  If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because it's closed-source, fine. That's a reasonable argument. If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because Slack is in fact pretty bad at those workloads, fine. I agree! I think Slack does a pretty bad job at any group application where most of the people communicating don't already know each other. Where you go off the rails is in suggesting that IRC is competitive with Slack. IRC is awful. It's a medium dominated by 7-bit clients with tiny message limits that provides virtually no useful metadata and no works-by-default history or search --- both things that virtually every open source IRC support channel b a d l y needs. IRC does exactly one thing better than Slack: it's easier to join a new IRC channel than it is to join a new Slack project. The rest of IRC's "features" are red herrings, many of them more harmful than helpful. Surely by now someone has built a Slack-like, perhaps with decent IRC support, that big open source projects can champion as a Slack- and IRC alternative. It will be much easier to keep open source projects from trying to fit their square pegs into Slack's round aperture when people give up on promoting IRC.
  • partiallypro 11y ago
    Usually you'll have a bot gather the channel's history that you can ping and most IRC clients collect the history locally. In the use cases that -most- people use Slack for, it's identical to IRC. I don't use IRC anymore, I use Slack but only because it's convenient. IRC is all over the place like the majority open source projects. Slack is clearly inspired by IRC, but it's in a pretty package and works OOB. Not sure why people are shitting on Slack or IRC here.
    • kylec 11y ago
      > Usually you'll have a bot gather the channel's history that you can ping and most IRC clients collect the history locally. In the use cases that -most- people use Slack for, it's identical to IRC. Yeah, that's not nearly the same. What I love about HipChat (and I'm sure Slack is the same, but I don't know) is that you can connect from any device and see the room history when you join a room. Going to some website to scroll back to see what people were talking about before you joined is annoying, especially so on a phone.
• wfzimmerman 11y ago
  Tide, please don't rise.
• eddiezane 11y ago
  Slack is starting to be used as the communication platform at events now as well. Most of the hackathons and conferences I've attended recently have used it and added all of the attendees. It's worked really nicely for communicating announcements and updates with the added benefit of allowing attendees to socialize before, at, and after the event. It's also really changed how things like mentorship are done [0]. The problem I've had is the lack of any form of SSO. With all the events, FOSS projects, and actual organizations I'm up to 19 Slack accounts. Having to signup and create a new account almost every weekend is getting crazy. [0]: https://medium.com/mhacks-hackathon/hackathon-mentorship-can-be-better-425d9a190ce4#.92mrjzcjg https://medium.com/mhacks-hackathon/hackathon-mentorship-can...
• anon5_ 11y ago
  > that Heroku hack What is the "that Heroku hack?" mentioned in that article
  • jnpatel 11y ago
    I was also curious about this. As the article mentions, Slack doesn't make it easy for your organization to allow open registration. People have developed hacks around this by running a server on Heroku [0], or using Typeform combined with Slack's API [1]. 0: https://github.com/rauchg/slackin https://github.com/rauchg/slackin 1: https://levels.io/slack-typeform-auto-invite-sign-ups/ https://levels.io/slack-typeform-auto-invite-sign-ups/
• INTPenis 11y ago
  I think it's perfectly fine for FOSS projects to use non-FOSS. This article is a wee bit on the fanatical side for my taste, and I'm the guy who bought the lemote. ;) A public FOSS project should be able to use whatever they want for bug management, issue management, support, and other things that do not affect the core project in any way if compromised or monitored. Especially if the company behind said product even give out discounts or free usage accounts to such projects like Atlassian or github.
• kumarharsh 11y ago
  I agree to most of the points you make, except that none of those points would work in real world without a LOT of effort. I've summed up my thoughts on this topic here: https://medium.com/@kumarharsh/please-use-slack-for-foss-projects-bf9d53ce3f7d#.ea6xotd8m https://medium.com/@kumarharsh/please-use-slack-for-foss-pro...
• stephenitis 11y ago
  Just wondering here can someone explain to me why campfire didn't move to fill the need of IRC/slack better? was it ever truly competitive in this space? I was casual fan of 37 signals/Basecamp.
• hk__2 11y ago
  I run a large FOSS project; we use both Slack and IRC. Working with maintainers in 3 or 4 different timezones you can’t afford to lose your IRC session if you don’t want to miss messages. As pointed in the article however Slack is for teams, not communities. We use IRC for open discussions and keep internal discussions on Slack.
• berns 11y ago
  Some of the features mentioned here: persistent log, powerful search, comment editing, easy onboarding and invites, code blocks; some even ask for thousand of users in a chat room and moderation tools! Wouldn't this communities be better served by a modern forum, like Discourse instead of a chat?
• yeukhon 11y ago
  Yeah, IRC clients are hard to use, too many are command-line based, although on Linux you can still find a few with GUI, but not as pretty as Adium on Mac OSX. Your mileage may be different, but when I was working at Mozilla everyone used IRC and it was not a huge burden because most people really just do /join or pm a person. As long as you provide a documentation on how to use IRC, you are golden for the most part. If you mandate people to use IRC and have resource available to help troubleshoot or setting up IRC, you are good. If you need to set up some complicated things with IRC, well, it is tough, but you are on your own. Slack's interface is not very impressive, very messy in my opinion, but that's me. There are businesses out there offer IRC as a service, so that's another option. Final point: I really don't care about FOSS vs OSS vs Proprietary. As long as the company truly respects my data privacy and security, and is easy to use, I can give zero damn about either of three. It's 2015, we need to stop arguing and actually make things better. Business needs to focus on improving product experience and security. But you know what, some people do, that's fine, none of my business anyway.
• yokohummer7 11y ago
  It seems that the author is following his own lesson faithfully: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r3m6q/please_dont_use_slack_for_foss_projects/cwktw5j https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r3m6q/please_...
• late2part 11y ago
  I don't use Slack because they had a significant security breach and I'm not convinced they are doing things differently or better since then.
• digitalpacman 11y ago
  I've used IRC a lot. For work and for projects. The experience is always horrible, and the clients always suck. We switched over to using slack for projects and for work and everything got instantly better. It takes seconds to setup and destroy places to chat that are private. It also takes seconds to search your entire history, on any device, and find what you talked about 3 weeks ago. Sharing code that doesn't get removed is amazing. It's a pain in the ass when the IRC client removes code and tells you nothing. I've sent entire messages to people which "get blocked" because the message is too long or contains code, and it never gives feedback. I agree account creation in slack sucks though, and the author is correct that slack is not built for FOSS projects.
• makecheck 11y ago
  If you want to communicate with a person or organization in ways that don't involve online chat, you have a variety of standard ways for doing so: - E-mail address - Phone number - Mailing address What is it about chat protocols that has resisted convergence on anything as remotely standard as these other methods? I mean, I could tell somebody that I spray-painted hieroglyphics on my house and that "there are 3 shipping companies in the world that know how to find my house using hieroglyphics so please ship through one of them", yet somehow my "address" has remained the sensible way to handle that problem. The problem isn't Slack or IRC or any other client, it's that we have any choices at all. At this point we don't need choices for chat protocols any more than we need a choice of ways to put an address on a house. The technical community needs to start loudly criticizing clients that aren't converging on some standard, and standardize more and more behaviors every year until it really doesn't matter what people are using.
  • kbenson 11y ago
    So, in the US: > - Phone number Originally supplied through a monopoly. > - Mailing address Government assigned. > - E-mail address Originated on a government funded and used network, but eventually settled on open standard. Having the ability to impose usage until a critical mass is achieved and being first seem to both be criteria.
• xtat 11y ago
  Honestly I still prefer irc
• m3talridl3y 11y ago
  Fact: IRC doen't persist chat messages on the server, so to view old messages you need to install a bot that provides you with the last n messages... and you have to manually query the bot for them. No thanks. Have you people heard of this thing called "mobile"? Spotty connections are the new normal. Having the last N messages autoloaded when I view a channel is a necessity.
• j_s 11y ago
  Apparently Slack has become the new BitKeeper!
• nhumrich 11y ago
  I hate irc. I hate it for one main reason, nobody uses it. Now, before you say "over x million users" I mean use, like I actually talk, not just sit there logged on. I have tried to join a lot of open source or product channels on irc (pypi, python, docker, wercker, kubernetes, etc.) And every time without fail, I join the channel and there are over 50 people signed in and I'm like "awesome people actually use this channel", then I proceed to ask the question the prompted me to lognin in the first place. After four hours and no answer or response at all, I usually have to go home, or shut my computer down. I don't have a desktop running 24/7 just so I can irc. So once I log off, I know I'm never getting an answer. I might try again if I have another burning question, but with a couple of tries and no luck, I eventually give up. Now slack on the other hand I've never had this problem. I don't know what it is, but some of the same communities switched over to slack (i.e. kubernetes) and once they were on slack, I was getting responses and discussions from multiple people within 15 min or less. The beauty is even if the channel wasn't as active it would still be a million times better because I can shut down my laptop, and get notified on my phone when someone replies. I can then continue with the conversation publically or privately, even if the two of us are on other sides of the world, because history is saved and I don't miss anything I'm notified on, even if I'm not logged in anywhere.
• cydrobolt 11y ago
  I can't agree more with this headline. I can concede that IRC isn't the most modern of technologies, but it is effective and well-developed at what it does. There is a FOSS ecosystem that can be achieved with IRC, which cannot be achieved with Slack. As a FOSS project, you can commit to only using free and open software when you also use IRC, as software such as atheme or charybdis are all open. Additionally, Slack is more privatized, with a less opportunities for enhancement (e.g IRC bots, IRC webchat, many clients). All users also need to sign up prior to use, which is just simply not viable. IRC manages large influx of help-seekers or project members well with its op-voice-user and ban/quiet system, allowing for channel operators to handle the high amount of users without a problem. On the other hand, Slack fails at all of these points, as it is intended for internal team usage and struggles with this specific usecase. Furthermore, most FOSS contributors are also not contributors to a single project only. For instance, I personally contribute to a variety of FOSS projects, and it is extremely easy for me to coordinate with all of those projects simply by opening a new channel on my freenode or OFTC network in my IRC client. Slack lacks this, requiring a new tab for each project and really lacking support for FOSS operating systems such as Linux distributions, a problem that is likely not going to be fixed due to its closed-source one-client structure.
• spectrum1234 11y ago
  Nothing to see here. Just another engineer who is so obsessed with engineering they think UX doesn't matter.
• tatter 11y ago
  irc.buttes.org #flashsupport. tell them tater sent you
• z3t4 11y ago
  I think you would be better off using a full fledged forum. Then use a chat (IRC or whatever) on top of that for real time communication. Where the important stuff goes to the forum, and general talk in the chat.