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Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits sear

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and over. Couple this with the fact that channels are not indexed by Google and you get a black box where valuable Q&A content and discussion goes to die.

fletchowns 10y ago
I have experienced this as well with the Chef Community Slack channel. It is a wonderful resource and it's super convenient to have easy access from my phone, etc but there is so much useful information in there that won't be accessible by others in the future.
austenallred 10y ago
That's an easy problem to fix http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/
- ngokevin 10y ago
  Yup. We have a 2800-person community Slack for an open source project. Slack Archive set us up for free, and it works well. But we still direct people to Stack Overflow since the Q&A is more discoverable there.
accountface 10y ago
Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with
- 542458 10y ago
  Because codifying, organizing, and keeping up-to-date general knowledge on a wiki is hard work, whereas banging out a quick answer to a specific question on slack is comparatively easy. Which maybe should be a challenge to anybody looking to build the next generation of knowledge repositories.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.
  - accountface 10y ago
    Isn't that the norm for chat apps though? It's not like they're breaking anything... people are just expecting something that doesn't really exist?
    - Sacho 10y ago
      Dunno, I have 10 year old irc chat logs sitting on my computer.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      Every chat app I've ever used going back to ICQ keeps permanent logs, except for Slack. (Technically Slack does too, it just keeps them on its own server and won't let you look unless you pay.)
      - derefr 10y ago
        Actually no: you can look all you like without paying, it's just kind of clumsy. If you "export your data from Slack" (yourteam.slack.com/services/export), you get the whole history, even on the free plan. I've repeatedly considered writing a bot that would—on a regular schedule—poke this page with a headless browser to generate a dump, download said dump, and ingest it into ElasticSearch (which I'd then expose through a web search, or maybe just spit out batched archive pages into a static-site S3 bucket and let Google index them.) Such a bot would be a good companion to https://github.com/rauchg/slackin https://github.com/rauchg/slackin for FOSS teams. But I haven't done any of that yet, because I get the feeling that putting enough attention on this little "feature" would get it quickly locked down.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Honestly, I'd expect these "public" Slack groups of FOSS projects to have search-engine-accessible archives, just like Usenet and mailing lists do through Google Groups. Why do I need to know what Slack even is, to be able to find+read the answer someone gave someone else to a question over Slack?
- tikhonj 10y ago
  Because a bad Wiki people use is better than a good Wiki people don't.
jakebasile 10y ago
I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible to avoid Slack at any startup now, but I'd love to be able to avoid it in FOSS.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord. I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike Slack's. It's fast. The voice quality is superb. As far as productivity goes, I get far more done with it than I ever did with IRC. The addition of being able to hop on voice very quickly is insanely good. Screensharing and video chat coming this year as well, I'm pretty excited. It's to the point that I bought Discord Nitro (their premium offering) the day it was released, for no other reason than to give them money. I hope the question of protocol openness gets resolved; until then, IRC just doesn't cut it for me anymore. IRCCloud.com helps, but their interface is super slow with lots of channels and IRC itself simply has no support for the thousands of improvements that have been made in communications the past 30-something years.
  - subpixel 10y ago
    Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever. Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/
timClicks 10y ago
It's also problematic in that it chisels away at what it means for a project to be open source. The focus seems to be purely on the software licence, and increasingly less about the wider project tooling. GitHub and Slack provide a huge amount of utility. But they also feel hollow to me. It feels harder and harder to opt-out of using closed tools.
jonbaer 10y ago
The 2 links for UI/UX comparison ... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588 https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500046858... https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Searching-in-Slack https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Searching... ... I think on Discord it is based on the context of what the secondary thing is you are doing outside of chat (gaming - it will show you what game the others are playing - or any app based on file process - which is pretty slick) and on Slack it will be primarily thinking you are at work so it's all about quicker access to files/presentations/etc.
zanny 10y ago
What is Matrix / Riot missing today to get these open source communities to start using an open source federated chat room protocol?
wcummings 10y ago
IRC isn't that hard. Just register a channel on freenode (which exists for the purpose of facilitating open source!), there's already a web interface [1]. You can stick a nice link on your project's webpage. It's even less work for users than Slack, you don't have to register, just punch in a nickname. Someone in your project can manage to setup a logbot that dumps logs onto a webserver, which will be indexed by google. I suspect there are services that will do it for you, so you might not even have to setup the bot yourself. If there isn't one I'd have half a mind to build one, if it gets more projects using IRC. [1] https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/

fletchowns 10y ago

I have experienced this as well with the Chef Community Slack channel. It is a wonderful resource and it's super convenient to have easy access from my phone, etc but there is so much useful information in there that won't be accessible by others in the future.

austenallred 10y ago

That's an easy problem to fix http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/

ngokevin 10y ago
Yup. We have a 2800-person community Slack for an open source project. Slack Archive set us up for free, and it works well. But we still direct people to Stack Overflow since the Q&A is more discoverable there.

accountface 10y ago

Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with

542458 10y ago
Because codifying, organizing, and keeping up-to-date general knowledge on a wiki is hard work, whereas banging out a quick answer to a specific question on slack is comparatively easy. Which maybe should be a challenge to anybody looking to build the next generation of knowledge repositories.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.
- accountface 10y ago
  Isn't that the norm for chat apps though? It's not like they're breaking anything... people are just expecting something that doesn't really exist?
  - Sacho 10y ago
    Dunno, I have 10 year old irc chat logs sitting on my computer.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    Every chat app I've ever used going back to ICQ keeps permanent logs, except for Slack. (Technically Slack does too, it just keeps them on its own server and won't let you look unless you pay.)
    - derefr 10y ago
      Actually no: you can look all you like without paying, it's just kind of clumsy. If you "export your data from Slack" (yourteam.slack.com/services/export), you get the whole history, even on the free plan. I've repeatedly considered writing a bot that would—on a regular schedule—poke this page with a headless browser to generate a dump, download said dump, and ingest it into ElasticSearch (which I'd then expose through a web search, or maybe just spit out batched archive pages into a static-site S3 bucket and let Google index them.) Such a bot would be a good companion to https://github.com/rauchg/slackin https://github.com/rauchg/slackin for FOSS teams. But I haven't done any of that yet, because I get the feeling that putting enough attention on this little "feature" would get it quickly locked down.
- derefr 10y ago
  Honestly, I'd expect these "public" Slack groups of FOSS projects to have search-engine-accessible archives, just like Usenet and mailing lists do through Google Groups. Why do I need to know what Slack even is, to be able to find+read the answer someone gave someone else to a question over Slack?
tikhonj 10y ago
Because a bad Wiki people use is better than a good Wiki people don't.

jakebasile 10y ago

I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible to avoid Slack at any startup now, but I'd love to be able to avoid it in FOSS.

scrollaway 10y ago
I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord. I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike Slack's. It's fast. The voice quality is superb. As far as productivity goes, I get far more done with it than I ever did with IRC. The addition of being able to hop on voice very quickly is insanely good. Screensharing and video chat coming this year as well, I'm pretty excited. It's to the point that I bought Discord Nitro (their premium offering) the day it was released, for no other reason than to give them money. I hope the question of protocol openness gets resolved; until then, IRC just doesn't cut it for me anymore. IRCCloud.com helps, but their interface is super slow with lots of channels and IRC itself simply has no support for the thousands of improvements that have been made in communications the past 30-something years.
- subpixel 10y ago
  Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever. Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/

timClicks 10y ago

It's also problematic in that it chisels away at what it means for a project to be open source. The focus seems to be purely on the software licence, and increasingly less about the wider project tooling. GitHub and Slack provide a huge amount of utility. But they also feel hollow to me. It feels harder and harder to opt-out of using closed tools.

jonbaer 10y ago

The 2 links for UI/UX comparison ... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588 https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500046858... https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Searching-in-Slack https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Searching... ... I think on Discord it is based on the context of what the secondary thing is you are doing outside of chat (gaming - it will show you what game the others are playing - or any app based on file process - which is pretty slick) and on Slack it will be primarily thinking you are at work so it's all about quicker access to files/presentations/etc.

zanny 10y ago

What is Matrix / Riot missing today to get these open source communities to start using an open source federated chat room protocol?

wcummings 10y ago

IRC isn't that hard. Just register a channel on freenode (which exists for the purpose of facilitating open source!), there's already a web interface [1]. You can stick a nice link on your project's webpage. It's even less work for users than Slack, you don't have to register, just punch in a nickname. Someone in your project can manage to setup a logbot that dumps logs onto a webserver, which will be indexed by google. I suspect there are services that will do it for you, so you might not even have to setup the bot yourself. If there isn't one I'd have half a mind to build one, if it gets more projects using IRC. [1] https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/