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Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I part

Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I participate in (Python/Django/...). What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel (while still maintaining mailing lists, bug trackers and the like). And as much as I hate it, the success can't be denied. Especially when looking at some conferences I've been to over the years. If they even had an IRC channel, it was mostly dead, but the Slack channels were buzzing with activity during the conference. I'm not sure why that is. Ease-of-use? The fact that many attendees are familiar with Slack from work, but not with IRC?

pmarreck 10y ago
Slack chat provides a number of nice features that IRC (at least out of the box... I know there have been attempts) does not. IRCCloud at least lets you see chat history, which IRC doesn't have out of the box but Slack does.
- exelius 10y ago
  So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
    - jstanley 10y ago
      An IRC bouncer (e.g. znc) can do this, but it's far from seamless.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it generally works.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        > The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer and client which integrate tightly, with clients for Linux, Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iOS, which stores backlog in a database. This search system is a very simple one, and simply uses postgres’ fulltext word vector search.
        NateDad 10y ago
        "log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)" There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff. So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. How is that better again? That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Yes it is. This is exactly what Quassel and IRCCloud do.
    - philh 10y ago
      A few people have replied, saying how to get chat history with IRC, but as far as I can tell, none of them work like Slack. With Slack, you can see history from before the first time you connect. It looks like none of the IRC solutions enable that; the IRC protocol doesn't make it possible, without the server (or a channel member) keeping logs. (I haven't used either very much, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        IRCCloud can, they're a client too :) I highly recommend them if you are serious about IRC. But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec. https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/
        philh 10y ago
        How does it do this? When you use IRCCloud to go to a channel for the first time, where does IRCCloud get the history for that channel from? (You say "they're a client too" - I confess, I don't know what they are apart from a client.)
        scrollaway 10y ago
        Like I was saying, IRCv3 has support for replaying the channel's history, as long as it's stored serverside. But I don't know if anything actually implements it, even IRCCloud which is v3-compatible. At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. They could implement it though if they used logs from their users... kinda wish they would. But hey.
        philh 10y ago
        > At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. Then I'm not entirely sure what you were referring to, when you said "IRCCloud can". Backlog from before you joined the channel is the specific feature that I was saying couldn't be done. It's interesting to know that IRCv3 does have that support, so I was wrong about it not being possible. But if nothing implements it, it's not very helpful.
    - baldfat 10y ago
      We are talking Open Source Project Communication not small group communication. IRC and FreeNode channels have been the standard for communication and not for archival purposes. I use an IRC bouncer with my home server and I never look back through the thousands of communications except to see a reply to my question. Why does a Open Source Community channel need archived communication unless it is just a few developers only chat?
    - rsync 10y ago
      "A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history." That's not even wrong.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    IRC as a protocol is very outdated. If I log in at home and forgot out log out at work, I need another username. IRCv3 has a lot of enhancements that should move IRC out of the 1990s as far as a communication protocol, but there's not a whole lot of movement on it. I think FreeNode has some v3 support. We don't have a lot of developers dedicating time to this. I'd love to myself, because it's something the OSS community needs, but it's also very difficult to contribute to projects when you're already doing 40 hours a week at a day job. Today I feel like most of the OSS projects that are getting support are ones that are corporately supported: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > but there's not a whole lot of movement on it. I think FreeNode has some v3 support. That’s as wrong as you can get. Networks with support, ranked by amount of supported features, are: InspIRCd Testnet, EsperNet, IRCCloud Teams, Snoonet, Rizon, IRCHighWay, freenode: http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html Clients with support, ranked alphabetically, are: Desktop: AdilIRC, BitchX, ChatZilla, Colloquy, Conspire, Hexchat, IceChat, Instantbird, Irssi, Konversation, KVIrc, LimeChat, mIRC, Mozilla Thunderbird, Quassel, Textual, WeeChat. Web: IRCCLoud, Iris, Kiwi IRC, The Lounge, Mibbit, Quassel-Webserver Mobile: AndChat, IRC for Android, AndroIRC, Colloquy, IRC7, IRCCloud, LimeChat, Palaver, Quasseldroid, YAAIC Bouncers: Quassel, ZNC Bots: Limnoria, Sopel, Moon Moon http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html And libraries are: cinch, Communi, irc-framework, Kitteh IRC Client Library, Net::Async::IRC, pydle, Rust irc, Warren, zIRC That’s quite a whole lot of movement. That’s every project related to IRC
    - rsync 10y ago
      "If I log in at home and forgot out log out at work, I need another username." You don't log into irc from your work or your home or your anything. You run screen in your shell account and log into irc once and never log in again. Christ - do we need a refresher course here in how to use the Internet for the incoming freshman class of 1994 ?
  - s73ver 10y ago
    Not everyone is going to use the same client.
  - always_good 10y ago
    The problem is that you might be running a nicer IRC setup, but almost nobody else is. Doesn't do you much good if everyone else logs off the second they close their laptop lid, or can't scroll back up to see what you just said because they had to relaunch their client. Chatting is interesting because of other people. That's why I'm chatting. In Slack, I can ping people that are offline. And all they have to do is open Slack again or reconnect to the internet and they get notified. I don't need to count on them being an IRC veteran. All these people pointing out ways to enhance your personal IRC experience are missing the point. Oh yeah, and I can post code in Slack.
- codelitt 10y ago
  Slack only provides a bit of history unless it's a paid account. What open source community could support that many paid users on Slack?
  - aiiane 10y ago
    That "bit of history" goes a long way, though. In particular, it means you don't lose context when you disconnect temporarily, which makes a huge difference for both mobile and laptop use cases. (Obviously, this is also one of the reasons why bouncers were invented for IRC - and why they're popular. But Slack having it out-of-the-box is a huge yak saver.)
- MaxLeiter 10y ago
  There's also TheLounge and ircanywhere which try to be FOSS IRCCloud
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Eh, no, if you want to get a FLOSS product comparable to IRCCloud, Quassel + Quassel-Webserver are more appropriate comparisons. TheLounge and ircanywhere are missing a lot in comparison.
    - MaxLeiter 10y ago
      What is Lounge missing compared to IRCCloud?
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Mobile. And other projects, including the GPL project Quassel, do have mobile clients (although Quasseldroid, which I maintain, isn’t exactly the best client in the world).
        MaxLeiter 10y ago
        Lounge has a responsive view you can save to home screen on iOS and android. Looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/MmajSU1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MmajSU1.jpg
        kuschku 10y ago
        I've seen it, but it's nothing like even Quasseldroid. And quasseldroid is already a horrible codebase (mostly because I took over maintenance when I knew nothing about code quality). Yet even Quasseldroid manages to be better. That said, there is truly a need for a really good, FLOSS irc client ob mobile.
        MaxLeiter 10y ago
- anonymoushn 10y ago
  IRCCloud's chat history is quite bad. I still find myself leaving bots in all chats to be able to grep logs.
dade_ 10y ago
I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.
- throwaway9475 10y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.
  - cls59 10y ago
    I don't think it's a generational thing either. I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it. The problem is the difference in the amount of energy demanded by the set-up process. Connecting to Slack is extremely simple and I don't have to fiddle with the settings in order to get a decent experience. Compared to IRC, I have to: - Figure out how to configure my client. - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots on Freenode or $other_server. - Figure out how to set up something like ZNC in order to federate the client on my phone with the client on my laptop so I don't miss messages. - ... It's an epic yak shave that sucks massive amounts of time and energy a from the thing I joined the community to do: improve a piece of software that isn't IRC.
    - eridius 10y ago
      The benefit, though, is once you are set up with IRC, joining new channels is a breeze, especially since most open source software uses a single network (Freenode). All I have to do is type something like /join #rust-lang and I'm in the new channel. Compare this with Slack, where, no matter how many teams you've joined in the past, you have to go through the exact same rigamarole to join a new Slack team.
lloydde 10y ago
If not primary, at what percentage is it a core form of collaboration? WordPress.org seems to fully integrate Slack into its processes. And as a now outsider, intuitively, it seems they've been able to scale their community more and continue their rapid development. The OP does make a fantastic argument on the open/public point, but synchronize communication is also a necessity for collaboration.
- ValentineC 10y ago
  > WordPress.org seems to fully integrate Slack into its processes. And as a now outsider, intuitively, it seems they've been able to scale their community more and continue their rapid development. The WordPress community Slack forced Slack to implement some server-side changes when it hit ~5,000 people though (I don't remember the exact number, but I remember when things started to not work), and I suspect it's the largest resource-consuming instance in my Slack client.
mgbmtl 10y ago
On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser active users, to ~ 100 active and ~ 500 lesser active users. I agree that more folks should consider moving away from IRC. The sign-up process for Mattermost is easy. It's intuitive, cross-platform, mobile-friendly, etc. While we geeks are used to IRC, onboarding people to IRC is no different than any other product: the smallest glitch, weird UI, confusing elements will make people drop off pretty quickly. I have always had to sit down with someone to show them how to connect to IRC. We would waste time at code sprints showing people how to connect. With Mattermost, we have unlimited logs (so we can cross-ref/permalink conversations in the issue trackers), threaded conversations (great for when the channel is noizy), emoji reactions (friendlier atmosphere), etc. However, I agree with the article: Slack is inappropriate for open source communities. Mattermost and Rocket Chat are good alternatives. Between my IRC habits and what I can do with Mattermost, I find Slack very frustrating (and I don't use it anymore). Then again, as much as I like IRC, it's not an alternative either.
- it33 10y ago
  Thanks for the mention on Mattermost! For anyone who'd like to try an open source Slack-alternative, you can start in less than a minute with auto-deploy via Bitnami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s Goes to AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, all data under your control, Mattermost Team Edition runs under MIT license. Also, check out our new React Native mobile apps: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile
- frikk 10y ago
  We migrated from IRC to Mattermost and haven't looked back. It integrates so well with our Gitlab/Jenkins flow, too. It's been great. The biggest benefits for us: - Easy to use web push endpoints w/ API keys (great for scripting with curl) - Integration with Gitlab / Jenkins - Chat Logs (see what happened while you were away) - Public listing of channels (no more "oh you have to join #whatever to see that") - Mobile Web App (I can't get the Android app to work with our self signed cert, but that's OK).
cookiecaper 10y ago
Slack is successful because IRC web clients are so cumbersome and annoying. Most of the things Slack provides easily could've been provided in a web-based IRC client, but where's the upside for Slack in that? By adopting an incompatible web model, they lock people and their messages in, and can charge per user in the room. As a good IRC client, the most they could get away with is a subscription charge per client, which has the downside of creating a barrier to entry that limits adoption (requires everyone who wants to use it to pay, v. a central employer or organization that can compel people onto a chat platform). Users like web-based because it means that they just click a button and the thing they want magically appears with no install process. Companies like web-based because it allows them to box all the secret sauce behind a server that can't be introspected. There's no risk of someone cracking their program and distributing it for free, and they get to keep complete control over the crown jewels, which are now and always have been the data that the program purports to manage.
rsync 10y ago
"What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel" Just keep your hands off my mailman ...

pmarreck 10y ago

Slack chat provides a number of nice features that IRC (at least out of the box... I know there have been attempts) does not. IRCCloud at least lets you see chat history, which IRC doesn't have out of the box but Slack does.

exelius 10y ago
So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).
- cortesoft 10y ago
  A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
  - jstanley 10y ago
    An IRC bouncer (e.g. znc) can do this, but it's far from seamless.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it generally works.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer and client which integrate tightly, with clients for Linux, Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iOS, which stores backlog in a database. This search system is a very simple one, and simply uses postgres’ fulltext word vector search.
      - NateDad 10y ago
        "log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)" There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff. So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. How is that better again? That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Yes it is. This is exactly what Quassel and IRCCloud do.
  - philh 10y ago
    A few people have replied, saying how to get chat history with IRC, but as far as I can tell, none of them work like Slack. With Slack, you can see history from before the first time you connect. It looks like none of the IRC solutions enable that; the IRC protocol doesn't make it possible, without the server (or a channel member) keeping logs. (I haven't used either very much, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      IRCCloud can, they're a client too :) I highly recommend them if you are serious about IRC. But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec. https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/
      - philh 10y ago
        How does it do this? When you use IRCCloud to go to a channel for the first time, where does IRCCloud get the history for that channel from? (You say "they're a client too" - I confess, I don't know what they are apart from a client.)
        scrollaway 10y ago
        Like I was saying, IRCv3 has support for replaying the channel's history, as long as it's stored serverside. But I don't know if anything actually implements it, even IRCCloud which is v3-compatible. At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. They could implement it though if they used logs from their users... kinda wish they would. But hey.
        philh 10y ago
        > At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. Then I'm not entirely sure what you were referring to, when you said "IRCCloud can". Backlog from before you joined the channel is the specific feature that I was saying couldn't be done. It's interesting to know that IRCv3 does have that support, so I was wrong about it not being possible. But if nothing implements it, it's not very helpful.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    We are talking Open Source Project Communication not small group communication. IRC and FreeNode channels have been the standard for communication and not for archival purposes. I use an IRC bouncer with my home server and I never look back through the thousands of communications except to see a reply to my question. Why does a Open Source Community channel need archived communication unless it is just a few developers only chat?
  - rsync 10y ago
    "A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history." That's not even wrong.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- djsumdog 10y ago
  IRC as a protocol is very outdated. If I log in at home and forgot out log out at work, I need another username. IRCv3 has a lot of enhancements that should move IRC out of the 1990s as far as a communication protocol, but there's not a whole lot of movement on it. I think FreeNode has some v3 support. We don't have a lot of developers dedicating time to this. I'd love to myself, because it's something the OSS community needs, but it's also very difficult to contribute to projects when you're already doing 40 hours a week at a day job. Today I feel like most of the OSS projects that are getting support are ones that are corporately supported: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > but there's not a whole lot of movement on it. I think FreeNode has some v3 support. That’s as wrong as you can get. Networks with support, ranked by amount of supported features, are: InspIRCd Testnet, EsperNet, IRCCloud Teams, Snoonet, Rizon, IRCHighWay, freenode: http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html http://ircv3.net/support/networks.html Clients with support, ranked alphabetically, are: Desktop: AdilIRC, BitchX, ChatZilla, Colloquy, Conspire, Hexchat, IceChat, Instantbird, Irssi, Konversation, KVIrc, LimeChat, mIRC, Mozilla Thunderbird, Quassel, Textual, WeeChat. Web: IRCCLoud, Iris, Kiwi IRC, The Lounge, Mibbit, Quassel-Webserver Mobile: AndChat, IRC for Android, AndroIRC, Colloquy, IRC7, IRCCloud, LimeChat, Palaver, Quasseldroid, YAAIC Bouncers: Quassel, ZNC Bots: Limnoria, Sopel, Moon Moon http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html And libraries are: cinch, Communi, irc-framework, Kitteh IRC Client Library, Net::Async::IRC, pydle, Rust irc, Warren, zIRC That’s quite a whole lot of movement. That’s every project related to IRC
  - rsync 10y ago
    "If I log in at home and forgot out log out at work, I need another username." You don't log into irc from your work or your home or your anything. You run screen in your shell account and log into irc once and never log in again. Christ - do we need a refresher course here in how to use the Internet for the incoming freshman class of 1994 ?
- s73ver 10y ago
  Not everyone is going to use the same client.
- always_good 10y ago
  The problem is that you might be running a nicer IRC setup, but almost nobody else is. Doesn't do you much good if everyone else logs off the second they close their laptop lid, or can't scroll back up to see what you just said because they had to relaunch their client. Chatting is interesting because of other people. That's why I'm chatting. In Slack, I can ping people that are offline. And all they have to do is open Slack again or reconnect to the internet and they get notified. I don't need to count on them being an IRC veteran. All these people pointing out ways to enhance your personal IRC experience are missing the point. Oh yeah, and I can post code in Slack.
codelitt 10y ago
Slack only provides a bit of history unless it's a paid account. What open source community could support that many paid users on Slack?
- aiiane 10y ago
  That "bit of history" goes a long way, though. In particular, it means you don't lose context when you disconnect temporarily, which makes a huge difference for both mobile and laptop use cases. (Obviously, this is also one of the reasons why bouncers were invented for IRC - and why they're popular. But Slack having it out-of-the-box is a huge yak saver.)
MaxLeiter 10y ago
There's also TheLounge and ircanywhere which try to be FOSS IRCCloud
- kuschku 10y ago
  Eh, no, if you want to get a FLOSS product comparable to IRCCloud, Quassel + Quassel-Webserver are more appropriate comparisons. TheLounge and ircanywhere are missing a lot in comparison.
  - MaxLeiter 10y ago
    What is Lounge missing compared to IRCCloud?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Mobile. And other projects, including the GPL project Quassel, do have mobile clients (although Quasseldroid, which I maintain, isn’t exactly the best client in the world).
      - MaxLeiter 10y ago
        Lounge has a responsive view you can save to home screen on iOS and android. Looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/MmajSU1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MmajSU1.jpg
        kuschku 10y ago
        I've seen it, but it's nothing like even Quasseldroid. And quasseldroid is already a horrible codebase (mostly because I took over maintenance when I knew nothing about code quality). Yet even Quasseldroid manages to be better. That said, there is truly a need for a really good, FLOSS irc client ob mobile.
        MaxLeiter 10y ago
anonymoushn 10y ago
IRCCloud's chat history is quite bad. I still find myself leaving bots in all chats to be able to grep logs.

dade_ 10y ago

I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.

throwaway9475 10y ago
I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.
- cls59 10y ago
  I don't think it's a generational thing either. I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it. The problem is the difference in the amount of energy demanded by the set-up process. Connecting to Slack is extremely simple and I don't have to fiddle with the settings in order to get a decent experience. Compared to IRC, I have to: - Figure out how to configure my client. - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots on Freenode or $other_server. - Figure out how to set up something like ZNC in order to federate the client on my phone with the client on my laptop so I don't miss messages. - ... It's an epic yak shave that sucks massive amounts of time and energy a from the thing I joined the community to do: improve a piece of software that isn't IRC.
  - eridius 10y ago
    The benefit, though, is once you are set up with IRC, joining new channels is a breeze, especially since most open source software uses a single network (Freenode). All I have to do is type something like /join #rust-lang and I'm in the new channel. Compare this with Slack, where, no matter how many teams you've joined in the past, you have to go through the exact same rigamarole to join a new Slack team.

lloydde 10y ago

If not primary, at what percentage is it a core form of collaboration? WordPress.org seems to fully integrate Slack into its processes. And as a now outsider, intuitively, it seems they've been able to scale their community more and continue their rapid development. The OP does make a fantastic argument on the open/public point, but synchronize communication is also a necessity for collaboration.

ValentineC 10y ago
> WordPress.org seems to fully integrate Slack into its processes. And as a now outsider, intuitively, it seems they've been able to scale their community more and continue their rapid development. The WordPress community Slack forced Slack to implement some server-side changes when it hit ~5,000 people though (I don't remember the exact number, but I remember when things started to not work), and I suspect it's the largest resource-consuming instance in my Slack client.

mgbmtl 10y ago

On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser active users, to ~ 100 active and ~ 500 lesser active users. I agree that more folks should consider moving away from IRC. The sign-up process for Mattermost is easy. It's intuitive, cross-platform, mobile-friendly, etc. While we geeks are used to IRC, onboarding people to IRC is no different than any other product: the smallest glitch, weird UI, confusing elements will make people drop off pretty quickly. I have always had to sit down with someone to show them how to connect to IRC. We would waste time at code sprints showing people how to connect. With Mattermost, we have unlimited logs (so we can cross-ref/permalink conversations in the issue trackers), threaded conversations (great for when the channel is noizy), emoji reactions (friendlier atmosphere), etc. However, I agree with the article: Slack is inappropriate for open source communities. Mattermost and Rocket Chat are good alternatives. Between my IRC habits and what I can do with Mattermost, I find Slack very frustrating (and I don't use it anymore). Then again, as much as I like IRC, it's not an alternative either.

it33 10y ago
Thanks for the mention on Mattermost! For anyone who'd like to try an open source Slack-alternative, you can start in less than a minute with auto-deploy via Bitnami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s Goes to AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, all data under your control, Mattermost Team Edition runs under MIT license. Also, check out our new React Native mobile apps: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile
frikk 10y ago
We migrated from IRC to Mattermost and haven't looked back. It integrates so well with our Gitlab/Jenkins flow, too. It's been great. The biggest benefits for us: - Easy to use web push endpoints w/ API keys (great for scripting with curl) - Integration with Gitlab / Jenkins - Chat Logs (see what happened while you were away) - Public listing of channels (no more "oh you have to join #whatever to see that") - Mobile Web App (I can't get the Android app to work with our self signed cert, but that's OK).

cookiecaper 10y ago

Slack is successful because IRC web clients are so cumbersome and annoying. Most of the things Slack provides easily could've been provided in a web-based IRC client, but where's the upside for Slack in that? By adopting an incompatible web model, they lock people and their messages in, and can charge per user in the room. As a good IRC client, the most they could get away with is a subscription charge per client, which has the downside of creating a barrier to entry that limits adoption (requires everyone who wants to use it to pay, v. a central employer or organization that can compel people onto a chat platform). Users like web-based because it means that they just click a button and the thing they want magically appears with no install process. Companies like web-based because it allows them to box all the secret sauce behind a server that can't be introspected. There's no risk of someone cracking their program and distributing it for free, and they get to keep complete control over the crown jewels, which are now and always have been the data that the program purports to manage.

rsync 10y ago

"What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel" Just keep your hands off my mailman ...