16 ms·

Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

498 points by butterfinger 11y ago

tribaal 11y ago
If only there was a well supported, standard, open and interoperable text messaging protocol (with multiple implementations) that companies could host themselves... Oh wait, IRC.
- chipperyman573 11y ago
  Slack is IRC, it just is a really nice interface that makes it easy to automate and makes it easy to share files/code/etc.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    I mean, it's not actually IRC, even though it could've been. It's a custom server that speaks a custom protocol, as far as I know.
  - atomical 11y ago
    Slack is not IRC. The gap between them is so huge that they are distinct. Push notifications and message sync are key features.
  - tribaal 11y ago
    Oh, TIL. So I can point my run-off-the-mill IRC client to a slack server and partake in cat pictures exchanging and almost-NSFW-but-not-quite with my fellow coworkers, yes? Otherwise whatever it uses inside its walled garden is completely irrelevant I'm afraid.
    - detaro 11y ago
      They have an IRC bridge you can connect your IRC client to. It probably can't do all the things (because IRC has no way of expressing them, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't spend too much effort on it), but it works.
    - wan23 11y ago
      You actually can use a regular IRC client with Slack. Though obviously anything that isn't supported natively by IRC comes through as a URL or encoded somehow. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connectin...
  - jonathankoren 11y ago
    That's Slack's main feature. Well that and gifs. IRC on the other hand is James has left the channel. Bill has left the channel. Samantha has joined the channel. Samantha has left the channel. filled with worthless status updates Martha has gone idle that make it Bill has joined the channel. terribly easy to Bill has changed the channel topic to "ZOMG! Ponies!" miss things Martha has become active Martha has left the channel.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      Messages just like that show up in Slack whenever someone joins or parts the channel, changes the topic, etc. Not sure this is a valid complaint.
      - navait 11y ago
        Well, in Slack, you don't leave by disconnecting, so that lowers the volume of people joining/quitting because they moved their laptop. It doesn't help that IRC tends to get used in places where massive amounts of users are expected. I feel some of the newbie clients should just hide by default join/quit spam.
    - rarepostinlurkr 11y ago
      You can turn all of those notices off; I've not seen those sorts of updates in channel for years & years.
      - jonathankoren 11y ago
        True, but most clients have it on by default. Also on public IRC you tend to have a channels of 80 people, all idle.
- munin 11y ago
  if only getting external collaborators or non-technical users into IRC didn't involve sending them a 15-step howto on configuring screen and ssh and could be as simple as "check your email and click the link you get" and, if only there was push button per channel access control set up out of the box so that some users can join some channels but not others! no, not channel keys, those are busted (what do we do when someone stops being involved in a channel? rotate the channel key?) there's way more in slack than IRC, so there needs to be way more in a slack killer than IRC...
  - tribaal 11y ago
    Your experience of IRC clients seems like a bad one, I'm sorry about that. Have you heard of irccloud.com? You should check it out. My mum could use it (I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a happy customer).
    - munin 11y ago
      irccloud isn't free, open source, or self hosted, so why not use slack instead?
      - ne0phyte 11y ago
        The question should be "why not use a self hosted irc client instead". At least developers will use IRC anyway to get and stay in touch with open source projects and the countless communities that have their own irc server/channel. Why not use one protocol that's widely used?
        munin 11y ago
        because they're not user friendly, and my company wants to stay in touch with more than the developers. with slack, we can have all the admin and sales staff in the same virtual space as developers and operations - how easy is it to do that with IRC?
  - groovy2shoes 11y ago
- mattnewton 11y ago
  if only IRC was sufficient for the needs of modern workplaces. We use it, but it requires you do things like write a bot just to send a message to someone who is offline or store history so you can refer to it later.
- nodamage 11y ago
  Every time Slack is mentioned here someone brings this up. I can't help but think they've missed the point. User experience is important.
  - smadge 11y ago
    I think their point is that open standards are good for user experience. Can you imagine if each browser implemented their own hypertext format instead of html? Or Stylesheet language beside css? Or they used their own application protocol instead of http? Or if email wasn't federated; Can you imagine not being able to send emails between networks, so nodamage@gmail.com couldn't email smadge@myuniversity.edu? No matter how good the user experience of these nonstandard protocols and formats were, the user would suffer.
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  This comes up every time, and as usual you have totally missed the point. IRC is difficult to configure, difficult to host, difficult to use, and does not offer the same feature set as Slack. There is an obvious use case for something like Slack (obviously, because otherwise it would not have millions of users!) and covering one's ears while yelling "IRC! IRC! IRC!" is sort of wilfully ignoring that if it were a suitable solution, Slack would never have taken off.
  - levemi 11y ago
    Doesn't matter, article should mention IRC given the breadth of the introduction, especially when talking about chat from an open source perspective.
  - tribaal 11y ago
    Maybe slack gets enough momentum to overtake IRC. Right now it looks a lot like Google Wave to me.
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      You are seriously out of touch if you really believe that.
      - whitegrape 11y ago
        Yeah, comparing it to Google Wave probably is a bit too much. In my neck of the tech woods HipChat is still pretty hip. I suspect that by the time we discover Slack, something else will have taken Slack's place as the new wave. Meanwhile I'll just keep visiting the same IRC channels outside of work that I have been frequenting for a decade. Will Slack be around in 10 years? Maybe. Will it be the poster-boy of internal chat? Unlikely.
    - monkey88 11y ago
      Completely a Google Wave derivative.
  - DeepYogurt 11y ago
- mfringel 11y ago
  Design counts. Execution of that design counts. User Experience counts.
- pavanky 11y ago
  Offline messages with IRC is a bit of a pain to set up and scale easily.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- levemi 11y ago
  Doesn't mention IRC, doesn't mention Discord. I'm suspicious that a PR firm pushed this to a journalist.
  - tribaal 11y ago
    This and the number of apologists seems a little suspicious indeed.
    - levemi 11y ago
      Where I work, not even a very large startup, we spend a lot of venture money on a PR firm. It's pretty common for a PR firm to push content to journalists and blog writers and really it works nicely most of the time. It bugs me in this case though if it is a PR fluff piece.
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them an "apologist"...
      - levemi 11y ago
        Eh, the number of downvotes I'm seeing for a contrary opinion to article about something not really controversial is also pretty weird. Seems like evidence of a concerted promotional push on HN to be honest, if only anecdotally.
        Klathmon 11y ago
        I'm sorry but from where i am it's not "contrary opinions" being downvoted, it's useless dribble. Hell one of the downvoted comments is just "IRC comes to mind"... Just hand waving away all of the problems that something like slack is trying to solve, which the article talks about.
        levemi 11y ago
        It's not even that great of an article, and yet it's the top post on HN? I hope at least dang looks at the data. I'm sorry it's pretty suspicious. Like what is so notable about this post that it warrants being at the top? Above the living social layoffs and the various other way more interesting things on the front page right now. Worst case, it turns out being a legit article, in which case it's cool. Eh, no big deal.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  You mean the same IRC that doesn't include basic features like the ability to receive messages if you aren't currently connected? The same IRC that has horrible scaling issues once you try to really use it? The same IRC that is a miserable experience to setup, administer, search, and even use? Stop touting IRC as the "perfect" chat system. It's far from it.
  - coroutines 11y ago
    Traditionally offline message caching would be the responsibility of a bouncer, or something like memoserv. There is an interest to make this responsibility part of the server in IRCv3, though. IRC scales much, much better than Slack. Unreal or InspIRCd or Charybdis whatever - Slack fails miserably for hundreds of thousands of users in one "team"/network. I do agree administering/configuring IRC servers has to get nicer. I personally want an IRC server that exposes a REST API for online configuration (no rehashing of a config file).
    - soared 11y ago
      99.9% of Slack users don't give a shit about hundreds of thousands of users in on network. Slack scales better than IRC at anything other than absurd rates.
      - coroutines 11y ago
        I don't understand your point - Slack can't scale for extremely large teams well. I've watched the desktop and web app grind to a halt on the first load of a channel because it's still loading in channel history/offline messages. Beyond that, when trying to tab-complete a nickname this similarly almost freezes the desktop app. This has been my experience as part of a team on Slack that has 4000+ users. These are client-side problems, really - but I don't see how you can say Slack scales better when all of its [great] features come at a cost that limit how large a team can be. The larger the team, the more noticeable it becomes. The history should load in progressively as needed. Switching channels within the same team should be instant. I don't know how you fail at tab-completing nicknames and commands, but somehow they made that slow. I get the feeling rendering is not on a separate thread in the desktop app. Anyway, you're right that not everyone needs to be on 7-9 networks with the ability to talk to everyone among those. Slack is great for teams of like 500 people and less (imo).
- saidajigumi 11y ago
  Messaging protocols are largely fungible these days, which makes them irrelevant implementation details. A major reason for the success of Slack is around the end-to-end UX. It's not "perfect", whatever that means, but it has met important needs that the "well, we already have IRC!" portion of the world has apparently never dreamed of.
- api 11y ago
  IRC lacks message persistence across devices and sessions, which is a hard requirement today. It could be implemented but would require distributed storage, queueing, etc. between servers.
maaaats 11y ago
I work in consultancy, and the client I currently work for has us working on-premise using air-gapped computers. No internet, only intranet, meant finding new ways to communicate. So far Mattermost works well. We have it integrated with Jenkins, Stash etc. and do the typical "chat-ops" things.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
It's good to see a bit of a variety – we all know that monoculture ends up being a bad thing, and there are obvious downsides to applications hosted by third parties (though of course in some cases it's not a problem!). Of course, there's no real network effect with applications like this either (beyond integrations support) so there's a relatively low bar to switching when compared to something like Facebook. I do hope to see some work on better user interfaces. Our team recently switched to Slack from Hipchat - many features are better, but the desktop UI is really unpleasantly sluggish. It seems unreasonable for a chat application to stutter and freeze on even small amounts of data. The trend for wrapping web UIs in desktop apps is not a good one, in my experience. Hopefully open equivalents will encourage the development of native clients.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Mattermost claims to have "Native Applications". (http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native) Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application." Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.
  - benologist 11y ago
    What's wrong with that? VSCode is also such a thing, high performance and beautiful apps are obviously possible.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      That's true, but when you roll a "one size fits all" HTML app across all platforms, it's much much less likely to follow operating system conventions and very easy to get layout details wrong. For example, Hipchat's settings overlay (https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png) which should: • Be a separate window • Be sized properly for its contents instead of having to scroll • Use tabs along the top for the settings categories • Not have clipped left edges on all of the checkboxes • Put the close button in the top left corner of the window like the rest of the OS Compare to settings in Textual, which is an actual native application: https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png Beyond the design aspects, there's also the issue of performance (the OS's UI layout system is well optimized for doing UI layout) and battery impact. The average "Energy Impact" of Hipchat as measured by Activity Monitor is 24x as high as Textual's. Twenty four! That puts it in 3rd place, beaten only by Google Chrome and Spotify (which IIRC is a similar "wrapped our webapp in CEF or electron). Hipchat does a bit more than Textual (inline image display), but not enough to justify its abuse of my battery life.
fweespee_ch 11y ago
Hopefully Mattermost and Rocket.Chat both build mature, robust HA systems since their features [honestly] are on par with Slack. Then move into SaaS hosting of their service in VM clusters across ~3 regions. :) Really, the only thing that stops me from wanting to use these services at $DayJob is the fact I have enough stuff I have to maintain. I'd really rather just pay $99/month for a 10-20 person team.
- __david__ 11y ago
  I set up rocket chat on my home server as a test and it's been great. I use it to chat with my family. So far the maintenance has been very minimal.
  - fweespee_ch 11y ago
    I deal with production stuff at my $DAYJOB and it needs to run for 6+ months without a single on-call event for me to consider it minimal.
    - __david__ 11y ago
      I've had zero problems with the server (like memory leaks or random crashing), but the iOS app started complaining when the server was roughly 3 months out of date. To stop the errors there I had to upgrade the server code (which was itself pretty simple). That doesn't meet your criteria, but I've find it pretty minimal by my standards.
cookiecaper 11y ago
This is one of those applications that is always being rewritten somewhere. JWZ's law may even be relevant here: "Every program expands until it reads mail". It seems there is always a large group people out there working on messengers. The question really is what made Slack special. Why is it the Slack revolution and not the HipChat revolution? What about the veneer has allowed it to become a pervasive trend, expanding into non-tech companies and being hailed as a permanent replacement for most emails? This is the only interesting question around Slack, since, as numerous other commenters have pointed out, it doesn't really bring anything to the table that the messaging space hasn't seen a good number of times before.
- auntyJemima 11y ago
  Revolution? Drinking the kool aid much? My team has it. We've had it for a month or two now. There has only been a handful of posts and most of them are "TGIF" posts.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    >Drinking the kool aid much? As you can tell from my post which states that Slack doesn't offer anything unique or special, uh, no, I'm not drinking the kool-aid.
    - auntyJemima 11y ago
      I realize you're skeptical too, but I'm saying I wouldn't even go as far as to call it a revolution. Call it a trend if you'd like, that's giving it too much credit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- frio 11y ago
  It could've been the HipChat revolution. It was so close to being just that. As a user of both HipChat and Slack, however, the difference is vast. Slack had a rich API an integrations well before HipChat did; presents rich content substantially more attractively; had first-class mobile support off the bat; tracks unread messages when you're offline (this one is extremely frustrating in HipChat); made being a member of multiple teams simple; had a much smoother signup process... etc. The organisation I work for got on board the HipChat train just as Slack was gaining momentum. While it's cheaper, I think if we'd had Slack we'd have much greater adoption.
ShaneBonich 11y ago
It's already here - Bitrix24. Light years ahead of Slack. Free for unlimited users without silly restrictions on search and other crap. And GASP it comes with actual work tools beyond IM.
- JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
  That landing page has way too much going on to the point that it's hard to focus on what it's trying to tell me.
- benevol 11y ago
  Note that it's not open source.
- taurath 11y ago
  It looks like it has 500 features on the screen and it tries to do everything for you. Its not even in the same ballpark as slack.
hammerandtongs 11y ago
matrix.org with the vector.im and android client have been pretty great so far. Matrix has solved the right engineering problem first which is the persistence of the chats across all of your clients.
DeepYogurt 11y ago
IRC comes to mind.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is encryption. A Slack alternative that's end-to-end encrypted (at least for private messaging between users) and has encryption for chatrooms would be worth my time.
- llimllib 11y ago
  Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?
  - icebraining 11y ago
    "Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data" (2000) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013) http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169 http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169
    - TorKlingberg 11y ago
      Homomorphic encryption would be great, is it likely to become practically usable soon? That is, is it safe enough against attackers, while allowing useful search?
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Homomorphic encryption is about doing computation on encrypted data, but you don't need it just to search. All you need is some way to get the server to send you the encrypted blocks which contain the messages you want (and which you can decrypt); you don't need the server doing computation on the encrypted data itself. A simple solution: divide the data into N blocks. Create an index that maps words to blocks (e.g. word "hello" is on blocks 36, 43, 84). Then encrypt the blocks and the index and upload them to the server. When you want to search, you just download the index, decrypt it, then use it to identify the blocks you need to download from the server. The first paper I linked has some more advanced techniques of the same sort.
whitegrape 11y ago
It's been built: http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
- soupbowl 11y ago
  I've been using matrix for a few months replaced our XMPP setup with it. XMPP feels like the stone ages compared to matrix.
navait 11y ago
For talking about a race, Wired seems to have neglected a crucial technology: ircv3[1]. I'm not very fond of IRCv2, and have moved away from it where I previously used IRC. But IRC is popular, has a lot of clients, and v3 has a lot of promise. Why didn't the author bother to mention it? [1]: http://ircv3.net/ http://ircv3.net/
- Kalium 11y ago
  IRCv3 lacks a logo, a startup, and VC funding. So people who write tech news seem to often be unaware that it even exists.
  - mmastrac 11y ago
    Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is true - there's little to write about for pure tech projects like that when there's no flashy video to show off. You'd have to figure out how to message it to reach a wider audience which honestly seems difficult to me.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    It's also lacking adoption (which is understandable since it's not "officially released" yet).
    - zilean 11y ago
      I believe twitch uses ircv3.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        Wow, you're correct. I did not know that. Fun!
        coroutines 11y ago
        Twitch is fairly-conforming to IRCv3... they don't prefix their non-standard capabilities with their domain in CAP LS. :> I'm sad because I applied to Twitch directly stating what I'd want to work on with the IRC portal and never got a response. My entire work history is IRC. XD
andrey_utkin 11y ago
What about reusing and polishing XMPP and existing decent software for it? About donating money to people who develop it all these years? No, we'll spread FUD upon XMPP or just ignore it but will proceed to use and abuse its legacy behind the closed doors. http://risovach.ru/upload/2016/03/mem/novyy--shablon_108583764_orig_.jpg http://risovach.ru/upload/2016/03/mem/novyy--shablon_1085837...
- imglorp 11y ago
  For one thing, XMPP is complicated and difficult to implement.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    There appear to be a lot of XMPP apps out there that seem to show otherwise.
  - andrey_utkin 11y ago
    I'd like to refer to my own reply to another reply in this thread, I believe it is very relevant for what you're saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300811
  - Zash 11y ago
    It may look intimidating at first, but it's really very easy once you get the basics. HTTP and IRC on the other hand look easy at first, then you get past that and there's just more and more complications and edge cases and horror. Like all the various cache headers and behaviors in HTTP, or how all IRC networks have their own dialect that's subtly different. I once tried to work on an IRC server interface, I read all the RFCs, wrote code, then tested with a client. Nothing worked, so I had to resort to replay what the client sent to a different network and reproduce whatever they did. If you go read the XMPP RFCs, you should be able to write a client or a server that gets along pretty well with the rest of the XMPP world.
  - kyberias 11y ago
    This may be the primary reason for the multitude of protocols. Everyone thinks every existing protocol is complicated and thinks that they can implement it better. Or: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
mikerichards 11y ago
Regarding IRC... I started using Gitter a few months ago and have used various IRC clients for over 20 years. I was blown away on how much better the UX was in Gitter compared to IRC. The history, the notifications, the markup, the UI...you name it. And Gitter is a pretty crappy client. If there was a nicely implemented client, it would be even more impressive.
- shakeel_mohamed 11y ago
  I've been using Gitter for a few months now, I think it's just polished enough to use consistently. If it were even slightly unstable I'd have to stop using it.
  - mikerichards 11y ago
    Until recently, Gitter had some weird bug where it the process would be in the background after you closed it, and you thinking that it was gone, would try to fire up another one it would just go to a background process or something. But Gitter has other issues - mostly of the UX kind. One of them is that you can search for other rooms, but you can't really save that search. You have to start over everytime. Also, the default of sending you an email for every freaking message when you star a room is absolutely atrocious.
ex3ndr 11y ago
If someone want performance, simplicity and encryption, take a look at our project: https://actor.im https://actor.im
- Qwertious 11y ago
  The download page lists "Mac OSX, Linux x86", Linux x64, Windows x86, Windows x64". The average user does not know what x86 or x64 means, and if they assume that the larger number is the latest (because duh) then they'll be causing problems down the line by installing the 32bit version on their (probably 64bit) machines. Traditionally, this is solved by autodetecting their OS and giving them a big link in giant UX-ey button form as "recommended", and only mentioning the other platform links in smaller letters below that. So, I don't think it's quite ready for grandmas yet.
tambourine_man 11y ago
We need open protocols. Then let a thousand clients with different paradigms bloom
- vannevar 11y ago
  For reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, chat has been reinvented more times than perhaps any other common Internet utility, and every time it is, there are no shortage of investors lined up for it. I think the cycle is largely driven by fashion, as youth get online and demand chat apps that are distinct (if not different in any meaningful functional way) from the existing ones.
  - abraae 11y ago
    Perhaps because "chat" is the oldest human activity there is, so the idea that chat will ever be "done" is a chimera.
    - vannevar 11y ago
      If the medium is the message, then yes. A chat on ICQ is different from a chat on WhatsApp, because the app itself is part of the tribal identity. Like slang for existing words. So even if the functionality stays identical (and I would argue that it has, there's only so much you can do with a chat app), the cultural context of the app is different.
  - tambourine_man 11y ago
    Yes, I have thought about that as well many times. AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage… Perhaps because the hard part of creating an online chat is the network effect and scaling, everyone thinks they can have shot. With so many being thrown at the wall, eventually a lot of them stick.
  - moonshinefe 11y ago
    I have the same thought. Heck, voice and video chat, file sharing, even primitive forms of 'integrations' (in the form of IRC bots and the like) have been around for many years at this point. I remember the Yahoo messengers and the MSN messengers of yore having a majority of the features that I see in the modern chat clients. It really perplexes me that these new chat services are apparently worth so much money. Yes, you took some trends and put everything into a convenient package. Is that alone worth billions of dollars? The actual technical innovation is minimal.
cybette 11y ago
What about Telegram? It's partially open source (clients only for now) and provides end-to-end encryption.
- whitegrape 11y ago
  http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-back-we-know-maths/ http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-bac...
  - cybette 11y ago
    Thanks for the link. However it is quite old, and Telegram was responding to the discussions and comments, demonstrating at least some respect for the feedback and perhaps doing something about it. Is there a more recent audit? I came across this - https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard - a while back but it doesn't seem very thorough. Then there's also Ricochet: https://ricochet.im/ https://ricochet.im/
- sschueller 11y ago
  Why not all open source like actor.im which is very similar to Telegram?
abecedarius 11y ago
No mention of Zulip? It's the first to come to mind for me if you ask for an open source Slack competitor.
scrollaway 11y ago
A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. None of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your "integrations", your "plugins", your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts? Some sort of open protocol. Urgh, I've been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn't understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn't understand why IRC isn't the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it's just people talking past each other. Every new attempt at making "the slack killer" makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc. PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  We are actually trying to make open protocol in https://actor.im https://actor.im with federation with https://matrix.org https://matrix.org. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Yeah, I heard about it. It looks very promising, good luck.
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    I haven't looked into actor much yet, but the last time I looked at Matrix, my main concern was how much implicit trust users needed to place in homeserver providers (messages and user profiles are stored in plaintext). Unless this has changed, I don't find it viable for any app that values user privacy. Even federated networks eventually gravitate towards a large degree of centralization once the tech becomes mainstream (see email). If any servers are used at all in a privacy-minded app, they need to be zero-knowledge as far as I'm concerned, for actual user data at the very least, if not metadata as well (I realize the latter is an unsolved problem). How does Actor handle user data and message storage?
kin 11y ago
I dunno, I love being able to easily switch between different teams. Plus, they've just introduced audio, and video is next. Everyone is talking about open protocols but when you're client agnostic you have to store/manage data somehow so surely Slack with its integration friendly mentality could go in that direction?
parfe 11y ago
In my org we started using slack and the people who talk the most say the least. Important conversations already took place on our internal jabber server. People with nothing to say never connected, but now with animated gifs and embedded youtube they use slack for entertainment. Never thought I'd see Eternal September in a professional environment.
- thearn4 11y ago
  In our team, we created a "random" channel for animated gifs, unrelated links, etc. to keep from cluttering the work-related ones. So far, it seems to have worked well.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
shmerl 11y ago
So, is any of those projects proposing something better than XMPP as IETF standard, or may be someone is proposing to improve XMPP further? Without interopearibilty it will be just +1 to the sea of incompatible solutions.
beyti 11y ago
adblock blocker on wired, so upset
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I don't mind them, normally, but in the case of Wired their detection is broken for uBlock. It continues to detect the blocker as on, even once disabled. So, reading Wired is now impossible for me, even if I accept their ads (which, I tend to be fine with for companies I trust not to be too invasive, and not to have ads that make noise or start video without warning).
  - ar0 11y ago
    Ghostery counts 27 trackers for me on this single Wired article, 19 of which are classified as "Advertising". I would not call this "not to be too invasive".
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      I didn't look too deeply, but yeah, that's ridiculous. I don't need any Wired article that much.
      - alexschleber 11y ago
        Exactly. The whole piece is < 900 words, mentions about 4 meaningful pieces of info (current Slack stats, names of 3 OSS competitors and a line or three about their rationales, history, 1-2 added features). Hardly "must-read" territory. For those ~15 lines of unwrapped text, the whole page is 1900 lines in total.
  - moonshinefe 11y ago
    Wired is 80% garbage articles and intrusive ads / trackers these days. I don't recommend it.
- Royalaid 11y ago
  I just ship the articles to instapaper
it33 11y ago
Connect IRC with Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge You can also talk to Mattermost team on #matterbridge on Freenode.
benevol 11y ago
Has anyone compared Rocket.Chat VS Mattermost? What are the significant differences (advantages/disadvantages)?
caffed 11y ago
:-) https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
ausjke 11y ago
Could not read this from wired.com due to my router has adblock enabled. Wired says if you don't let us do ads you can't read on. How did they detect that?
supergeek133 11y ago
Oh man this entire field is madness... especially when you realize this when trying to get ahold of someone: I'll try Slack... let me check Skype... no maybe they're on HipChat... SMS... oh hell I'll just call them!
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  Yes it is fairly ridiculous. Which is why an open protocol / non-closed environment would help solve this. Yeah, IRC is from the 80s and is lacking some modern features, but at least it was a fairly unifying chat system in its day. No one company owned it, most people could use it trivially, and there were many different clients out there to suite one's taste. There's still a market for wrapping a protocol in a nice web app UI and hiding the complexities from the user, which is why this closed chat systems trend is getting frustrating. Can't different chat services communicate with each other easily, without the need for a bridge?
  - supergeek133 11y ago
    People want to make money, pretty straightforward. If I build something closed and people adopt it, I might get acquired!
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "Can't different chat services communicate with each other easily, without the need for a bridge?" If more chat services supported Matrix.org we could get there. http://matrix.org http://matrix.org https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients Someone's suggested it in the Mattermost suggestions site: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/10208583-integration-with-matrix-org https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...
amelius 11y ago
What I conclude from this is that open-source developers are all hungry for good specs (for a killer application). Therefore, wouldn't it be nice if there was a website where product designers (not software developers) could post their product designs, so that the developers have something to work from?
pcocko 11y ago
We started to use Slack in our company but it wasn't adopted by most of the people. Desktop version requires too much resources and it was unacceptable. We backed to Skype again. Has anyone ever had same experience?
55acdda48ab5 11y ago
Between phone conferencing, email, and shared desktop video conferencing, I don't get what more is needed in professional contexts. I don't even get IRC or IM. "Chat" is noise and distraction. Write proper emails or arrange phone calls. What exactly are people using slack for? I don't get it.
- adrianpike 11y ago
  They're all different when it comes to communication bandwidth and effectiveness. We need to discuss something visual as a five-person team? A phone conference is the wrong medium. We need to collaborate on a significant technical document? Slack is the wrong medium. We need to have a searchable back-and-forth discussion, interleaved with other things that are vying for our attention? We should probably use a chat tool.
  - 55acdda48ab5 11y ago
    > We need to have a searchable back-and-forth discussion, interleaved with other things that are vying for our attention? This is email. > We need to discuss something visual as a five-person team? A phone conference is the wrong medium. Shared desktop conference, such as gotomeeting.
    - adrianpike 11y ago
      If those work for you and your team, that's great! However, the growing number and popularity of alternatives should be a strong signal that they do not work for every team.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
wslh 11y ago
I think the Achilles heel of almost every open source projects is [end-]user experience. The first time I used Slack I was sure it was trivial to replicate the software (not the business) by a small team of developers but a short time after I realized a lot of UX details that a normal open source team will not prioritize ever (e.g. conversationally educating the user about new features). Probably the weakest point of Slack is their price. A similar open source SaaS offering will not be free so Slack has margin to compete.
luckydude 11y ago
This is why I sort of hate open source. Slack is doing a great job, their prices are right. So why is it OK to destroy that? With what is going to be not as good stuff? I'll get down voted to hell but come on. It's cheap, it's good, so why not let the guy make a living? And for the record I don't even know who the guy is (or woman is). I just hate the "it's cool, lets rip it off attitude". Because the ripoff is rarely better than the original.
- BlahBoy3 11y ago
  So you have a problem with open source putting out alternatives, but you're perfectly fine with the free market, in which companies put out competing products all the time? I'm not trying to start a flame war here, I'm just curious as to why you think that a community of programmers working together to develop a competing product is any worse than a company like HipChat doing the same thing. I, for one, welcome this kind of collaboration.
- mmel 11y ago
  Do you really hate open source? or is that just an exaggeration? I find it hard to believe anyone could actually hate open source.
  - luckydude 11y ago
    Nah, I use open source every day, I've contributed to it. I just don't like that as soon as something becomes popular then it's a target. It's always bothered me that open source seems to copy more than innovate. I'm sure there are open source projects that invented something new but it's hard to think of them (for me at least). But I can think of zillions of copies of closed source things (linux, gcc, etc). In the case of slack, it seems sort of mean spirited to try and clone it. They give it away for free for most people and charge for some sort of extra functionality and it's cheap, $7 or $8/month/person. I can understand something like Postgres, Oracle is expensive and cumbersome. But slack? Really? For the record I have no connection to the slack people, don't know them other than what I've read in the press.
- moonshinefe 11y ago
jessegreathouse 11y ago
I wish we could just hurry up and come to the ultimate conclusion that we always had everything we needed with IRC. I can't understand why we're still in the jungle of high level applications replicating a low level protocol. I get that IRC never had a particular client that galvanized the protocol as much as the many iterations of proprietary real time chat that has came and went over the past 10 years, but honestly the problem isn't the protocol, the problem is that no one was making clients meant for the mainstream.
altitudinous 11y ago
This reads like that old XKCD where someone tries to build a standard that unifies all the existing 14 incompatible standards but it just becomes the 15th incompatible standard itself - https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Getting a critical mass of people to use a chat system is the defining factor of success, not the technical genius or features of the system. Slack is successful because it IS one of those standards that a critical mass of people use and is modern. There are plenty of systems that are far superior. However they are failures because they didn't achieve the critical mass of users.
trengrj 11y ago
If we are going to go with the name Open Sourcers why not make it Open Sourcerers.
_pmf_ 11y ago
Too bad Google insisted on dead-birthing Wave by throttling access via beta invitations. It generated incredible hype, but a lot of people (including me) could not use it due to this bullshit; maybe they can acquire Slack and reengineer it using the much more mature Wave foundation.
alex_duf 11y ago
I know what we need: an open protocol so that people can chat easily, whichever company you work for, wherever you are... We should call it IRC or XMPP :) Seriously I know XMPP is pretty un-popular, but deep inside I kind of wish it was the default protocol everybody used to communicate...
ursus_bonum 11y ago
I don't know why people think Slack is any good to begin with. It's fine at first but the more people use it the more unwieldy it gets. Email's pretty crappy but at least with email I get small, contained threads of conversation that can be searched and organized easily. Slack is like having a few giant never-ending email threads. It's horrible. And there's still no voice.

498 points by butterfinger 11y ago

If only there was a well supported, standard, open and interoperable text messaging protocol (with multiple implementations) that companies could host themselves... Oh wait, IRC.

chipperyman573 11y ago
Slack is IRC, it just is a really nice interface that makes it easy to automate and makes it easy to share files/code/etc.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  I mean, it's not actually IRC, even though it could've been. It's a custom server that speaks a custom protocol, as far as I know.
- atomical 11y ago
  Slack is not IRC. The gap between them is so huge that they are distinct. Push notifications and message sync are key features.
- tribaal 11y ago
  Oh, TIL. So I can point my run-off-the-mill IRC client to a slack server and partake in cat pictures exchanging and almost-NSFW-but-not-quite with my fellow coworkers, yes? Otherwise whatever it uses inside its walled garden is completely irrelevant I'm afraid.
  - detaro 11y ago
    They have an IRC bridge you can connect your IRC client to. It probably can't do all the things (because IRC has no way of expressing them, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't spend too much effort on it), but it works.
  - wan23 11y ago
    You actually can use a regular IRC client with Slack. Though obviously anything that isn't supported natively by IRC comes through as a URL or encoded somehow. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connectin...
- jonathankoren 11y ago
  That's Slack's main feature. Well that and gifs. IRC on the other hand is James has left the channel. Bill has left the channel. Samantha has joined the channel. Samantha has left the channel. filled with worthless status updates Martha has gone idle that make it Bill has joined the channel. terribly easy to Bill has changed the channel topic to "ZOMG! Ponies!" miss things Martha has become active Martha has left the channel.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Messages just like that show up in Slack whenever someone joins or parts the channel, changes the topic, etc. Not sure this is a valid complaint.
    - navait 11y ago
      Well, in Slack, you don't leave by disconnecting, so that lowers the volume of people joining/quitting because they moved their laptop. It doesn't help that IRC tends to get used in places where massive amounts of users are expected. I feel some of the newbie clients should just hide by default join/quit spam.
  - rarepostinlurkr 11y ago
    You can turn all of those notices off; I've not seen those sorts of updates in channel for years & years.
    - jonathankoren 11y ago
      True, but most clients have it on by default. Also on public IRC you tend to have a channels of 80 people, all idle.
munin 11y ago
if only getting external collaborators or non-technical users into IRC didn't involve sending them a 15-step howto on configuring screen and ssh and could be as simple as "check your email and click the link you get" and, if only there was push button per channel access control set up out of the box so that some users can join some channels but not others! no, not channel keys, those are busted (what do we do when someone stops being involved in a channel? rotate the channel key?) there's way more in slack than IRC, so there needs to be way more in a slack killer than IRC...
- tribaal 11y ago
  Your experience of IRC clients seems like a bad one, I'm sorry about that. Have you heard of irccloud.com? You should check it out. My mum could use it (I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a happy customer).
  - munin 11y ago
    irccloud isn't free, open source, or self hosted, so why not use slack instead?
    - ne0phyte 11y ago
      The question should be "why not use a self hosted irc client instead". At least developers will use IRC anyway to get and stay in touch with open source projects and the countless communities that have their own irc server/channel. Why not use one protocol that's widely used?
      - munin 11y ago
        because they're not user friendly, and my company wants to stay in touch with more than the developers. with slack, we can have all the admin and sales staff in the same virtual space as developers and operations - how easy is it to do that with IRC?
- groovy2shoes 11y ago
mattnewton 11y ago
if only IRC was sufficient for the needs of modern workplaces. We use it, but it requires you do things like write a bot just to send a message to someone who is offline or store history so you can refer to it later.
nodamage 11y ago
Every time Slack is mentioned here someone brings this up. I can't help but think they've missed the point. User experience is important.
- smadge 11y ago
  I think their point is that open standards are good for user experience. Can you imagine if each browser implemented their own hypertext format instead of html? Or Stylesheet language beside css? Or they used their own application protocol instead of http? Or if email wasn't federated; Can you imagine not being able to send emails between networks, so nodamage@gmail.com couldn't email smadge@myuniversity.edu? No matter how good the user experience of these nonstandard protocols and formats were, the user would suffer.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
This comes up every time, and as usual you have totally missed the point. IRC is difficult to configure, difficult to host, difficult to use, and does not offer the same feature set as Slack. There is an obvious use case for something like Slack (obviously, because otherwise it would not have millions of users!) and covering one's ears while yelling "IRC! IRC! IRC!" is sort of wilfully ignoring that if it were a suitable solution, Slack would never have taken off.
- levemi 11y ago
  Doesn't matter, article should mention IRC given the breadth of the introduction, especially when talking about chat from an open source perspective.
- tribaal 11y ago
  Maybe slack gets enough momentum to overtake IRC. Right now it looks a lot like Google Wave to me.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    You are seriously out of touch if you really believe that.
    - whitegrape 11y ago
      Yeah, comparing it to Google Wave probably is a bit too much. In my neck of the tech woods HipChat is still pretty hip. I suspect that by the time we discover Slack, something else will have taken Slack's place as the new wave. Meanwhile I'll just keep visiting the same IRC channels outside of work that I have been frequenting for a decade. Will Slack be around in 10 years? Maybe. Will it be the poster-boy of internal chat? Unlikely.
  - monkey88 11y ago
    Completely a Google Wave derivative.
- DeepYogurt 11y ago
mfringel 11y ago
Design counts. Execution of that design counts. User Experience counts.
pavanky 11y ago
Offline messages with IRC is a bit of a pain to set up and scale easily.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
levemi 11y ago
Doesn't mention IRC, doesn't mention Discord. I'm suspicious that a PR firm pushed this to a journalist.
- tribaal 11y ago
  This and the number of apologists seems a little suspicious indeed.
  - levemi 11y ago
    Where I work, not even a very large startup, we spend a lot of venture money on a PR firm. It's pretty common for a PR firm to push content to journalists and blog writers and really it works nicely most of the time. It bugs me in this case though if it is a PR fluff piece.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them an "apologist"...
    - levemi 11y ago
      Eh, the number of downvotes I'm seeing for a contrary opinion to article about something not really controversial is also pretty weird. Seems like evidence of a concerted promotional push on HN to be honest, if only anecdotally.
      - Klathmon 11y ago
        I'm sorry but from where i am it's not "contrary opinions" being downvoted, it's useless dribble. Hell one of the downvoted comments is just "IRC comes to mind"... Just hand waving away all of the problems that something like slack is trying to solve, which the article talks about.
        levemi 11y ago
        It's not even that great of an article, and yet it's the top post on HN? I hope at least dang looks at the data. I'm sorry it's pretty suspicious. Like what is so notable about this post that it warrants being at the top? Above the living social layoffs and the various other way more interesting things on the front page right now. Worst case, it turns out being a legit article, in which case it's cool. Eh, no big deal.
Klathmon 11y ago
You mean the same IRC that doesn't include basic features like the ability to receive messages if you aren't currently connected? The same IRC that has horrible scaling issues once you try to really use it? The same IRC that is a miserable experience to setup, administer, search, and even use? Stop touting IRC as the "perfect" chat system. It's far from it.
- coroutines 11y ago
  Traditionally offline message caching would be the responsibility of a bouncer, or something like memoserv. There is an interest to make this responsibility part of the server in IRCv3, though. IRC scales much, much better than Slack. Unreal or InspIRCd or Charybdis whatever - Slack fails miserably for hundreds of thousands of users in one "team"/network. I do agree administering/configuring IRC servers has to get nicer. I personally want an IRC server that exposes a REST API for online configuration (no rehashing of a config file).
  - soared 11y ago
    99.9% of Slack users don't give a shit about hundreds of thousands of users in on network. Slack scales better than IRC at anything other than absurd rates.
    - coroutines 11y ago
      I don't understand your point - Slack can't scale for extremely large teams well. I've watched the desktop and web app grind to a halt on the first load of a channel because it's still loading in channel history/offline messages. Beyond that, when trying to tab-complete a nickname this similarly almost freezes the desktop app. This has been my experience as part of a team on Slack that has 4000+ users. These are client-side problems, really - but I don't see how you can say Slack scales better when all of its [great] features come at a cost that limit how large a team can be. The larger the team, the more noticeable it becomes. The history should load in progressively as needed. Switching channels within the same team should be instant. I don't know how you fail at tab-completing nicknames and commands, but somehow they made that slow. I get the feeling rendering is not on a separate thread in the desktop app. Anyway, you're right that not everyone needs to be on 7-9 networks with the ability to talk to everyone among those. Slack is great for teams of like 500 people and less (imo).
saidajigumi 11y ago
Messaging protocols are largely fungible these days, which makes them irrelevant implementation details. A major reason for the success of Slack is around the end-to-end UX. It's not "perfect", whatever that means, but it has met important needs that the "well, we already have IRC!" portion of the world has apparently never dreamed of.
api 11y ago
IRC lacks message persistence across devices and sessions, which is a hard requirement today. It could be implemented but would require distributed storage, queueing, etc. between servers.

maaaats 11y ago

I work in consultancy, and the client I currently work for has us working on-premise using air-gapped computers. No internet, only intranet, meant finding new ways to communicate. So far Mattermost works well. We have it integrated with Jenkins, Stash etc. and do the typical "chat-ops" things.

matthewmacleod 11y ago

It's good to see a bit of a variety – we all know that monoculture ends up being a bad thing, and there are obvious downsides to applications hosted by third parties (though of course in some cases it's not a problem!). Of course, there's no real network effect with applications like this either (beyond integrations support) so there's a relatively low bar to switching when compared to something like Facebook. I do hope to see some work on better user interfaces. Our team recently switched to Slack from Hipchat - many features are better, but the desktop UI is really unpleasantly sluggish. It seems unreasonable for a chat application to stutter and freeze on even small amounts of data. The trend for wrapping web UIs in desktop apps is not a good one, in my experience. Hopefully open equivalents will encourage the development of native clients.

wlesieutre 11y ago
Mattermost claims to have "Native Applications". (http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/#native) Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application." Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.
- benologist 11y ago
  What's wrong with that? VSCode is also such a thing, high performance and beautiful apps are obviously possible.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    That's true, but when you roll a "one size fits all" HTML app across all platforms, it's much much less likely to follow operating system conventions and very easy to get layout details wrong. For example, Hipchat's settings overlay (https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png) which should: • Be a separate window • Be sized properly for its contents instead of having to scroll • Use tabs along the top for the settings categories • Not have clipped left edges on all of the checkboxes • Put the close button in the top left corner of the window like the rest of the OS Compare to settings in Textual, which is an actual native application: https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png Beyond the design aspects, there's also the issue of performance (the OS's UI layout system is well optimized for doing UI layout) and battery impact. The average "Energy Impact" of Hipchat as measured by Activity Monitor is 24x as high as Textual's. Twenty four! That puts it in 3rd place, beaten only by Google Chrome and Spotify (which IIRC is a similar "wrapped our webapp in CEF or electron). Hipchat does a bit more than Textual (inline image display), but not enough to justify its abuse of my battery life.

fweespee_ch 11y ago

Hopefully Mattermost and Rocket.Chat both build mature, robust HA systems since their features [honestly] are on par with Slack. Then move into SaaS hosting of their service in VM clusters across ~3 regions. :) Really, the only thing that stops me from wanting to use these services at $DayJob is the fact I have enough stuff I have to maintain. I'd really rather just pay $99/month for a 10-20 person team.

__david__ 11y ago
I set up rocket chat on my home server as a test and it's been great. I use it to chat with my family. So far the maintenance has been very minimal.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  I deal with production stuff at my $DAYJOB and it needs to run for 6+ months without a single on-call event for me to consider it minimal.
  - __david__ 11y ago
    I've had zero problems with the server (like memory leaks or random crashing), but the iOS app started complaining when the server was roughly 3 months out of date. To stop the errors there I had to upgrade the server code (which was itself pretty simple). That doesn't meet your criteria, but I've find it pretty minimal by my standards.

cookiecaper 11y ago

This is one of those applications that is always being rewritten somewhere. JWZ's law may even be relevant here: "Every program expands until it reads mail". It seems there is always a large group people out there working on messengers. The question really is what made Slack special. Why is it the Slack revolution and not the HipChat revolution? What about the veneer has allowed it to become a pervasive trend, expanding into non-tech companies and being hailed as a permanent replacement for most emails? This is the only interesting question around Slack, since, as numerous other commenters have pointed out, it doesn't really bring anything to the table that the messaging space hasn't seen a good number of times before.

auntyJemima 11y ago
Revolution? Drinking the kool aid much? My team has it. We've had it for a month or two now. There has only been a handful of posts and most of them are "TGIF" posts.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  >Drinking the kool aid much? As you can tell from my post which states that Slack doesn't offer anything unique or special, uh, no, I'm not drinking the kool-aid.
  - auntyJemima 11y ago
    I realize you're skeptical too, but I'm saying I wouldn't even go as far as to call it a revolution. Call it a trend if you'd like, that's giving it too much credit.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
frio 11y ago
It could've been the HipChat revolution. It was so close to being just that. As a user of both HipChat and Slack, however, the difference is vast. Slack had a rich API an integrations well before HipChat did; presents rich content substantially more attractively; had first-class mobile support off the bat; tracks unread messages when you're offline (this one is extremely frustrating in HipChat); made being a member of multiple teams simple; had a much smoother signup process... etc. The organisation I work for got on board the HipChat train just as Slack was gaining momentum. While it's cheaper, I think if we'd had Slack we'd have much greater adoption.

ShaneBonich 11y ago

It's already here - Bitrix24. Light years ahead of Slack. Free for unlimited users without silly restrictions on search and other crap. And GASP it comes with actual work tools beyond IM.

JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
That landing page has way too much going on to the point that it's hard to focus on what it's trying to tell me.
benevol 11y ago
Note that it's not open source.
taurath 11y ago
It looks like it has 500 features on the screen and it tries to do everything for you. Its not even in the same ballpark as slack.

hammerandtongs 11y ago

matrix.org with the vector.im and android client have been pretty great so far. Matrix has solved the right engineering problem first which is the persistence of the chats across all of your clients.

DeepYogurt 11y ago

IRC comes to mind.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is encryption. A Slack alternative that's end-to-end encrypted (at least for private messaging between users) and has encryption for chatrooms would be worth my time.

llimllib 11y ago
Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?
- icebraining 11y ago
  "Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data" (2000) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013) http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169 http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169
  - TorKlingberg 11y ago
    Homomorphic encryption would be great, is it likely to become practically usable soon? That is, is it safe enough against attackers, while allowing useful search?
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Homomorphic encryption is about doing computation on encrypted data, but you don't need it just to search. All you need is some way to get the server to send you the encrypted blocks which contain the messages you want (and which you can decrypt); you don't need the server doing computation on the encrypted data itself. A simple solution: divide the data into N blocks. Create an index that maps words to blocks (e.g. word "hello" is on blocks 36, 43, 84). Then encrypt the blocks and the index and upload them to the server. When you want to search, you just download the index, decrypt it, then use it to identify the blocks you need to download from the server. The first paper I linked has some more advanced techniques of the same sort.

whitegrape 11y ago

It's been built: http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/

soupbowl 11y ago
I've been using matrix for a few months replaced our XMPP setup with it. XMPP feels like the stone ages compared to matrix.

navait 11y ago

For talking about a race, Wired seems to have neglected a crucial technology: ircv3[1]. I'm not very fond of IRCv2, and have moved away from it where I previously used IRC. But IRC is popular, has a lot of clients, and v3 has a lot of promise. Why didn't the author bother to mention it? [1]: http://ircv3.net/ http://ircv3.net/

Kalium 11y ago
IRCv3 lacks a logo, a startup, and VC funding. So people who write tech news seem to often be unaware that it even exists.
- mmastrac 11y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is true - there's little to write about for pure tech projects like that when there's no flashy video to show off. You'd have to figure out how to message it to reach a wider audience which honestly seems difficult to me.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  It's also lacking adoption (which is understandable since it's not "officially released" yet).
  - zilean 11y ago
    I believe twitch uses ircv3.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      Wow, you're correct. I did not know that. Fun!
      - coroutines 11y ago
        Twitch is fairly-conforming to IRCv3... they don't prefix their non-standard capabilities with their domain in CAP LS. :> I'm sad because I applied to Twitch directly stating what I'd want to work on with the IRC portal and never got a response. My entire work history is IRC. XD

andrey_utkin 11y ago

What about reusing and polishing XMPP and existing decent software for it? About donating money to people who develop it all these years? No, we'll spread FUD upon XMPP or just ignore it but will proceed to use and abuse its legacy behind the closed doors. http://risovach.ru/upload/2016/03/mem/novyy--shablon_108583764_orig_.jpg http://risovach.ru/upload/2016/03/mem/novyy--shablon_1085837...

imglorp 11y ago
For one thing, XMPP is complicated and difficult to implement.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  There appear to be a lot of XMPP apps out there that seem to show otherwise.
- andrey_utkin 11y ago
  I'd like to refer to my own reply to another reply in this thread, I believe it is very relevant for what you're saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300811
- Zash 11y ago
  It may look intimidating at first, but it's really very easy once you get the basics. HTTP and IRC on the other hand look easy at first, then you get past that and there's just more and more complications and edge cases and horror. Like all the various cache headers and behaviors in HTTP, or how all IRC networks have their own dialect that's subtly different. I once tried to work on an IRC server interface, I read all the RFCs, wrote code, then tested with a client. Nothing worked, so I had to resort to replay what the client sent to a different network and reproduce whatever they did. If you go read the XMPP RFCs, you should be able to write a client or a server that gets along pretty well with the rest of the XMPP world.
- kyberias 11y ago
  This may be the primary reason for the multitude of protocols. Everyone thinks every existing protocol is complicated and thinks that they can implement it better. Or: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

mikerichards 11y ago

Regarding IRC... I started using Gitter a few months ago and have used various IRC clients for over 20 years. I was blown away on how much better the UX was in Gitter compared to IRC. The history, the notifications, the markup, the UI...you name it. And Gitter is a pretty crappy client. If there was a nicely implemented client, it would be even more impressive.

shakeel_mohamed 11y ago
I've been using Gitter for a few months now, I think it's just polished enough to use consistently. If it were even slightly unstable I'd have to stop using it.
- mikerichards 11y ago
  Until recently, Gitter had some weird bug where it the process would be in the background after you closed it, and you thinking that it was gone, would try to fire up another one it would just go to a background process or something. But Gitter has other issues - mostly of the UX kind. One of them is that you can search for other rooms, but you can't really save that search. You have to start over everytime. Also, the default of sending you an email for every freaking message when you star a room is absolutely atrocious.

ex3ndr 11y ago

If someone want performance, simplicity and encryption, take a look at our project: https://actor.im https://actor.im

Qwertious 11y ago
The download page lists "Mac OSX, Linux x86", Linux x64, Windows x86, Windows x64". The average user does not know what x86 or x64 means, and if they assume that the larger number is the latest (because duh) then they'll be causing problems down the line by installing the 32bit version on their (probably 64bit) machines. Traditionally, this is solved by autodetecting their OS and giving them a big link in giant UX-ey button form as "recommended", and only mentioning the other platform links in smaller letters below that. So, I don't think it's quite ready for grandmas yet.

tambourine_man 11y ago

We need open protocols. Then let a thousand clients with different paradigms bloom

vannevar 11y ago
For reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, chat has been reinvented more times than perhaps any other common Internet utility, and every time it is, there are no shortage of investors lined up for it. I think the cycle is largely driven by fashion, as youth get online and demand chat apps that are distinct (if not different in any meaningful functional way) from the existing ones.
- abraae 11y ago
  Perhaps because "chat" is the oldest human activity there is, so the idea that chat will ever be "done" is a chimera.
  - vannevar 11y ago
    If the medium is the message, then yes. A chat on ICQ is different from a chat on WhatsApp, because the app itself is part of the tribal identity. Like slang for existing words. So even if the functionality stays identical (and I would argue that it has, there's only so much you can do with a chat app), the cultural context of the app is different.
- tambourine_man 11y ago
  Yes, I have thought about that as well many times. AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage… Perhaps because the hard part of creating an online chat is the network effect and scaling, everyone thinks they can have shot. With so many being thrown at the wall, eventually a lot of them stick.
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  I have the same thought. Heck, voice and video chat, file sharing, even primitive forms of 'integrations' (in the form of IRC bots and the like) have been around for many years at this point. I remember the Yahoo messengers and the MSN messengers of yore having a majority of the features that I see in the modern chat clients. It really perplexes me that these new chat services are apparently worth so much money. Yes, you took some trends and put everything into a convenient package. Is that alone worth billions of dollars? The actual technical innovation is minimal.

cybette 11y ago

What about Telegram? It's partially open source (clients only for now) and provides end-to-end encryption.

whitegrape 11y ago
http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-back-we-know-maths/ http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-bac...
- cybette 11y ago
  Thanks for the link. However it is quite old, and Telegram was responding to the discussions and comments, demonstrating at least some respect for the feedback and perhaps doing something about it. Is there a more recent audit? I came across this - https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard - a while back but it doesn't seem very thorough. Then there's also Ricochet: https://ricochet.im/ https://ricochet.im/
sschueller 11y ago
Why not all open source like actor.im which is very similar to Telegram?

abecedarius 11y ago

No mention of Zulip? It's the first to come to mind for me if you ask for an open source Slack competitor.

scrollaway 11y ago

A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. None of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your "integrations", your "plugins", your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts? Some sort of open protocol. Urgh, I've been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn't understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn't understand why IRC isn't the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it's just people talking past each other. Every new attempt at making "the slack killer" makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc. PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.

ex3ndr 11y ago
We are actually trying to make open protocol in https://actor.im https://actor.im with federation with https://matrix.org https://matrix.org. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Yeah, I heard about it. It looks very promising, good luck.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  I haven't looked into actor much yet, but the last time I looked at Matrix, my main concern was how much implicit trust users needed to place in homeserver providers (messages and user profiles are stored in plaintext). Unless this has changed, I don't find it viable for any app that values user privacy. Even federated networks eventually gravitate towards a large degree of centralization once the tech becomes mainstream (see email). If any servers are used at all in a privacy-minded app, they need to be zero-knowledge as far as I'm concerned, for actual user data at the very least, if not metadata as well (I realize the latter is an unsolved problem). How does Actor handle user data and message storage?

kin 11y ago

I dunno, I love being able to easily switch between different teams. Plus, they've just introduced audio, and video is next. Everyone is talking about open protocols but when you're client agnostic you have to store/manage data somehow so surely Slack with its integration friendly mentality could go in that direction?

parfe 11y ago

In my org we started using slack and the people who talk the most say the least. Important conversations already took place on our internal jabber server. People with nothing to say never connected, but now with animated gifs and embedded youtube they use slack for entertainment. Never thought I'd see Eternal September in a professional environment.

thearn4 11y ago
In our team, we created a "random" channel for animated gifs, unrelated links, etc. to keep from cluttering the work-related ones. So far, it seems to have worked well.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 11y ago

So, is any of those projects proposing something better than XMPP as IETF standard, or may be someone is proposing to improve XMPP further? Without interopearibilty it will be just +1 to the sea of incompatible solutions.

beyti 11y ago

adblock blocker on wired, so upset

SwellJoe 11y ago
I don't mind them, normally, but in the case of Wired their detection is broken for uBlock. It continues to detect the blocker as on, even once disabled. So, reading Wired is now impossible for me, even if I accept their ads (which, I tend to be fine with for companies I trust not to be too invasive, and not to have ads that make noise or start video without warning).
- ar0 11y ago
  Ghostery counts 27 trackers for me on this single Wired article, 19 of which are classified as "Advertising". I would not call this "not to be too invasive".
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    I didn't look too deeply, but yeah, that's ridiculous. I don't need any Wired article that much.
    - alexschleber 11y ago
      Exactly. The whole piece is < 900 words, mentions about 4 meaningful pieces of info (current Slack stats, names of 3 OSS competitors and a line or three about their rationales, history, 1-2 added features). Hardly "must-read" territory. For those ~15 lines of unwrapped text, the whole page is 1900 lines in total.
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  Wired is 80% garbage articles and intrusive ads / trackers these days. I don't recommend it.
Royalaid 11y ago
I just ship the articles to instapaper

it33 11y ago

Connect IRC with Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge You can also talk to Mattermost team on #matterbridge on Freenode.

benevol 11y ago

Has anyone compared Rocket.Chat VS Mattermost? What are the significant differences (advantages/disadvantages)?

caffed 11y ago

:-) https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

ausjke 11y ago

Could not read this from wired.com due to my router has adblock enabled. Wired says if you don't let us do ads you can't read on. How did they detect that?

supergeek133 11y ago

Oh man this entire field is madness... especially when you realize this when trying to get ahold of someone: I'll try Slack... let me check Skype... no maybe they're on HipChat... SMS... oh hell I'll just call them!

moonshinefe 11y ago
Yes it is fairly ridiculous. Which is why an open protocol / non-closed environment would help solve this. Yeah, IRC is from the 80s and is lacking some modern features, but at least it was a fairly unifying chat system in its day. No one company owned it, most people could use it trivially, and there were many different clients out there to suite one's taste. There's still a market for wrapping a protocol in a nice web app UI and hiding the complexities from the user, which is why this closed chat systems trend is getting frustrating. Can't different chat services communicate with each other easily, without the need for a bridge?
- supergeek133 11y ago
  People want to make money, pretty straightforward. If I build something closed and people adopt it, I might get acquired!
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "Can't different chat services communicate with each other easily, without the need for a bridge?" If more chat services supported Matrix.org we could get there. http://matrix.org http://matrix.org https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients Someone's suggested it in the Mattermost suggestions site: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/10208583-integration-with-matrix-org https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...

amelius 11y ago

What I conclude from this is that open-source developers are all hungry for good specs (for a killer application). Therefore, wouldn't it be nice if there was a website where product designers (not software developers) could post their product designs, so that the developers have something to work from?

pcocko 11y ago

We started to use Slack in our company but it wasn't adopted by most of the people. Desktop version requires too much resources and it was unacceptable. We backed to Skype again. Has anyone ever had same experience?

55acdda48ab5 11y ago

Between phone conferencing, email, and shared desktop video conferencing, I don't get what more is needed in professional contexts. I don't even get IRC or IM. "Chat" is noise and distraction. Write proper emails or arrange phone calls. What exactly are people using slack for? I don't get it.

adrianpike 11y ago
They're all different when it comes to communication bandwidth and effectiveness. We need to discuss something visual as a five-person team? A phone conference is the wrong medium. We need to collaborate on a significant technical document? Slack is the wrong medium. We need to have a searchable back-and-forth discussion, interleaved with other things that are vying for our attention? We should probably use a chat tool.
- 55acdda48ab5 11y ago
  > We need to have a searchable back-and-forth discussion, interleaved with other things that are vying for our attention? This is email. > We need to discuss something visual as a five-person team? A phone conference is the wrong medium. Shared desktop conference, such as gotomeeting.
  - adrianpike 11y ago
    If those work for you and your team, that's great! However, the growing number and popularity of alternatives should be a strong signal that they do not work for every team.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

wslh 11y ago

I think the Achilles heel of almost every open source projects is [end-]user experience. The first time I used Slack I was sure it was trivial to replicate the software (not the business) by a small team of developers but a short time after I realized a lot of UX details that a normal open source team will not prioritize ever (e.g. conversationally educating the user about new features). Probably the weakest point of Slack is their price. A similar open source SaaS offering will not be free so Slack has margin to compete.

luckydude 11y ago

This is why I sort of hate open source. Slack is doing a great job, their prices are right. So why is it OK to destroy that? With what is going to be not as good stuff? I'll get down voted to hell but come on. It's cheap, it's good, so why not let the guy make a living? And for the record I don't even know who the guy is (or woman is). I just hate the "it's cool, lets rip it off attitude". Because the ripoff is rarely better than the original.

BlahBoy3 11y ago
So you have a problem with open source putting out alternatives, but you're perfectly fine with the free market, in which companies put out competing products all the time? I'm not trying to start a flame war here, I'm just curious as to why you think that a community of programmers working together to develop a competing product is any worse than a company like HipChat doing the same thing. I, for one, welcome this kind of collaboration.
mmel 11y ago
Do you really hate open source? or is that just an exaggeration? I find it hard to believe anyone could actually hate open source.
- luckydude 11y ago
  Nah, I use open source every day, I've contributed to it. I just don't like that as soon as something becomes popular then it's a target. It's always bothered me that open source seems to copy more than innovate. I'm sure there are open source projects that invented something new but it's hard to think of them (for me at least). But I can think of zillions of copies of closed source things (linux, gcc, etc). In the case of slack, it seems sort of mean spirited to try and clone it. They give it away for free for most people and charge for some sort of extra functionality and it's cheap, $7 or $8/month/person. I can understand something like Postgres, Oracle is expensive and cumbersome. But slack? Really? For the record I have no connection to the slack people, don't know them other than what I've read in the press.
moonshinefe 11y ago

jessegreathouse 11y ago

I wish we could just hurry up and come to the ultimate conclusion that we always had everything we needed with IRC. I can't understand why we're still in the jungle of high level applications replicating a low level protocol. I get that IRC never had a particular client that galvanized the protocol as much as the many iterations of proprietary real time chat that has came and went over the past 10 years, but honestly the problem isn't the protocol, the problem is that no one was making clients meant for the mainstream.

altitudinous 11y ago

This reads like that old XKCD where someone tries to build a standard that unifies all the existing 14 incompatible standards but it just becomes the 15th incompatible standard itself - https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Getting a critical mass of people to use a chat system is the defining factor of success, not the technical genius or features of the system. Slack is successful because it IS one of those standards that a critical mass of people use and is modern. There are plenty of systems that are far superior. However they are failures because they didn't achieve the critical mass of users.

trengrj 11y ago

If we are going to go with the name Open Sourcers why not make it Open Sourcerers.

_pmf_ 11y ago

Too bad Google insisted on dead-birthing Wave by throttling access via beta invitations. It generated incredible hype, but a lot of people (including me) could not use it due to this bullshit; maybe they can acquire Slack and reengineer it using the much more mature Wave foundation.

alex_duf 11y ago

I know what we need: an open protocol so that people can chat easily, whichever company you work for, wherever you are... We should call it IRC or XMPP :) Seriously I know XMPP is pretty un-popular, but deep inside I kind of wish it was the default protocol everybody used to communicate...

ursus_bonum 11y ago

I don't know why people think Slack is any good to begin with. It's fine at first but the more people use it the more unwieldy it gets. Email's pretty crappy but at least with email I get small, contained threads of conversation that can be searched and organized easily. Slack is like having a few giant never-ending email threads. It's horrible. And there's still no voice.