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I hope this spurns more OSS communities to move to gitter. As much as I enjoy slack, limits on features like search and invites creates a friction that I think

I hope this spurns more OSS communities to move to gitter. As much as I enjoy slack, limits on features like search and invites creates a friction that I think a service like gitter can help solve.

notacoward 10y ago
s/spurns/spurs/ Not trying to be snarky. Maybe it was a typo, but non-English speakers might not immediately get from that to the correct word.
lol768 10y ago
Personally the fragmentation of these random chat services does little to make me want to get involved in project chat discussions. I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.
- Perihelion 10y ago
  Totally agree with this. Having to join 10+ Slack-like groups to collaborate on open source projects is unrealistic for me. As a result, I don't frequent some projects' chats and stick to bug trackers/mailing lists -- as a result of that I miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes with contributing to open source. I've missed out on a few conversations where decisions were made too. Being in multiple groups on these services is a huge pain point for me, whereas being on multiple IRC servers in multiple channels is far less invasive to my time and computer resources ;D. I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone use IRC for everything, but it seems like a lot of us had standardized on IRC for OSS before most of these services came along. Also I'm salty that most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools which are both things I've leaned on heavily when working with communities. That's probably a rant for another day, but it's related to why I really dislike using some of these things. This might just be my perception, but it seems like most people I come across in this field were on IRC at some point.
  - mos_basik 10y ago
    >most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools This is what pushed me away from using Slack with a group of gamers I admin for. I can understand Slack's desire to stick to the workplace and how that leads to "if you need to /ignore a co-worker your company has problems implementing /ignore in Slack can't fix." And I can understand Mattermost wanting to become the opensource/on-prem analog of that. But it really falls apart when you try to use that kind of system with users that don't know you, aren't on your payroll or have issues with rules - like open source developers, or gamers. My group eventually switched to Discord for, among other things, its amazing ACL-style permissions system, frictionless inviting and unlimited history (iirc, getting history with the first tier of paid Slack would have cost us ~11k USD/year?). It's not perfect - I really hope their bot API gets some love, and of course the ability to host your own server would be nice (though I understand some of the catch-22's there) - but I like it a LOT and I keep encountering new groups of people with Discord servers where I can just idle using one client. This is MUCH more IRC-like experience than I ever got with Slack (for instance, switching between or getting/setting notification alert levels on several different servers is much more ergonomic on Discord than on Slack). I've not used Gitter a whole lot - just a couple of times when I had a question for some project that had one - but my impression is that it leans more towards "chat with strangers about $topic" (like Discord) and less towards "chat with colleagues about work" (like Slack). In that respect, I'd lay a small amount of money that Gitter does have an /ignore command, among other tools that you miss from IRC.

I hope this spurns more OSS communities to move to gitter. As much as I enjoy slack, limits on features like search and invites creates a friction that I think a service like gitter can help solve.

notacoward 10y ago

s/spurns/spurs/ Not trying to be snarky. Maybe it was a typo, but non-English speakers might not immediately get from that to the correct word.

lol768 10y ago

Personally the fragmentation of these random chat services does little to make me want to get involved in project chat discussions. I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.

Perihelion 10y ago
Totally agree with this. Having to join 10+ Slack-like groups to collaborate on open source projects is unrealistic for me. As a result, I don't frequent some projects' chats and stick to bug trackers/mailing lists -- as a result of that I miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes with contributing to open source. I've missed out on a few conversations where decisions were made too. Being in multiple groups on these services is a huge pain point for me, whereas being on multiple IRC servers in multiple channels is far less invasive to my time and computer resources ;D. I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone use IRC for everything, but it seems like a lot of us had standardized on IRC for OSS before most of these services came along. Also I'm salty that most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools which are both things I've leaned on heavily when working with communities. That's probably a rant for another day, but it's related to why I really dislike using some of these things. This might just be my perception, but it seems like most people I come across in this field were on IRC at some point.
- mos_basik 10y ago
  >most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools This is what pushed me away from using Slack with a group of gamers I admin for. I can understand Slack's desire to stick to the workplace and how that leads to "if you need to /ignore a co-worker your company has problems implementing /ignore in Slack can't fix." And I can understand Mattermost wanting to become the opensource/on-prem analog of that. But it really falls apart when you try to use that kind of system with users that don't know you, aren't on your payroll or have issues with rules - like open source developers, or gamers. My group eventually switched to Discord for, among other things, its amazing ACL-style permissions system, frictionless inviting and unlimited history (iirc, getting history with the first tier of paid Slack would have cost us ~11k USD/year?). It's not perfect - I really hope their bot API gets some love, and of course the ability to host your own server would be nice (though I understand some of the catch-22's there) - but I like it a LOT and I keep encountering new groups of people with Discord servers where I can just idle using one client. This is MUCH more IRC-like experience than I ever got with Slack (for instance, switching between or getting/setting notification alert levels on several different servers is much more ergonomic on Discord than on Slack). I've not used Gitter a whole lot - just a couple of times when I had a question for some project that had one - but my impression is that it leans more towards "chat with strangers about $topic" (like Discord) and less towards "chat with colleagues about work" (like Slack). In that respect, I'd lay a small amount of money that Gitter does have an /ignore command, among other tools that you miss from IRC.