7 ms·

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

• 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.