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A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1]. It has lots of clients, and a great vision. You use an online client called riot[2] which use

by ktta 10y ago

A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1]. It has lots of clients, and a great vision. You use an online client called riot[2] which uses the matrix protocol. There are other clients available[3] including desktop clients. There's E2E encryption coming to more of the clients which is inspired from signal protocol (double ratchet part of it specifically), without Forward secrecy so as to maintain session history on new devices. I think it has a bright future and you should consider it too. [1]:https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [2]:https://riot.im https://riot.im [3]:https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

swiley 10y ago
"in the spirit of IRC" is a bit of a stretch. This is all a massive blob of web technologies which contrasts IRC's minimalism and it's lightweight clients written in C. It doesn't appear to require any specific service though so at least it has that.
- ktta 10y ago
  Well we are moving to a web first world, and passing the terminal days of IRC. Trying to avoid web technologies isn't going to do anyone good. Best we can do is try to make them better are secure. Light weight clients can be written in C if you want. There's nothing that needs a web browser Here's the spec if you're interested[1]. There's also a weechat script if you want a command line client[2] [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html
  - COMPUTERLOSER 10y ago
    This comment made me throw up in my mouth a little.
  - nullc 10y ago
    > Well we are moving to a web first world, Too bad much of the web stinks, with terrible responsiveness and usability and impose those results through bloated protocols and spaghetti architecture on anything that tries to interface with them. Multiple times on caltrain I've had people ask me how I'm on the internet as I have meetings on IRC without even noticing the connectivity has gone poor -- while their webchat stuff with multiple megabytes of ajaxy whatever won't even load.
    - russdpale 10y ago
      Yeh in this vain, I'll add that I have very experienced colleagues who are so fed up with the current internet that they don't even fight net neutrality, and would rather another protocol rise in its place.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - milesrout 10y ago
      There's nothing inherently 'web' or 'slow' or 'ajaxy' about Gzipped-JSON-over-HTTP2. I agree that the web is slow and crap a lot of the time, but chat using gzipped JSON over HTTP/2 would be just as fast as IRC as long as it's only sending the same level of info as IRC.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
        And yet it requires a hilariously complex protocol engine for HTTP for no purpose whatsoever.
        milesrout 10y ago
        I don't agree at all. HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 are not especially simple protocols, but they're not that complicated. They aren't unnecessarily complicated, that's for sure. They have a set of features that necessitates a level of complexity, but it's better to do it in HTTP/2 once and only once than to repeat the same failures and reworks and added features and upgrades etc. etc. etc. to get the same level of features in a million different application protocols. Because otherwise you'll get to the same place as we were with HTTP/1.1: your nice 'simple' protocol will need to be replaced with one that can support multiple streams, etc.
  - rsync 10y ago
    "Well we are moving to a web first world, and passing the terminal days of IRC." That's too bad - mostly for the people that won't experience it or see it as viable. In 2017 I use (al)pine as my sole mailtool. It's many, many times faster and more efficient than web based email - and much more private and secure.
- derefr 10y ago
  "Web technologies" makes it sound like it requires WebRTC or something. It's a set of HTTPS endpoints that you shove JSON-encoded messages at. Certainly a bit "fluffier" than IRC (no prefix-length binary protocols here, sadly), but much more interoperable in the modern world (i.e. you can write a browser extension that can speak directly to a Matrix server using the built-in JSON+AJAX APIs; Matrix servers won't need specific egress exceptions in enterprise firewalls; etc.) HTTP2 (if used) already makes the metadata parts of the protocol pretty concise and low-overhead; it's just the messages themselves that are large. So it'd be nice if—at least for the message bodies—there was an optional binary layer-6 encoding (e.g. CBOR, BERT-RPC) that clients and servers could try to negotiate with their Accept headers, with an expectation that many servers would implement it, and an allowance for constrained clients that implement that encoding but not JSON.
- Arathorn 10y ago
  I'm not sure it's fair to call it a massive blob of web technologies (although I'm biased, given I work on it). To compare sending a message on IRC versus sending one on Matrix: $ telnet irc.freenode.net 6667 ... NICK Ara4n USER Ara4n Ara4n irc.freenode.net :Matthew Hodgson ... JOIN #matrix PRIVMSG #matrix :test versus: curl "https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/rooms/!cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ%3Amatrix.org/send/m.room.message/uuid?access_token=$access_token" -X PUT --data '{"msgtype":"m.text","body":"test"}' (okay, this assume you've grabbed a valid access_token from an existing session, and already know that #matrix:matrix.org's internal ID is !cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ:matrix.org, but that's easy to find by curling https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/%23matrix%3amatrix.org https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/%23matri...). Meanwhile definitely are some lightweight C matrix clients out there - e.g. https://github.com/matt-williams/matrix-esp8266/blob/master/matrix-esp8266.ino https://github.com/matt-williams/matrix-esp8266/blob/master/... is a proof of concept client in C that runs on an ESP8266(!), or the libpurple plugin: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix. In the end, if you don't like HTTP or web technologies, there is NOTHING stopping people from contributing alternative transports - COAP, MQTT, capnproto, QUIC, XMPP, WebSockets or whatever floats their boat. But it seems that the simple HTTP+JSON API works well enough that nobody has bothered yet (other than https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/websockets.rst https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/...).
  - Arathorn 10y ago
    (that said, I think the point of Dave Cheney's article is more that sync realtime chat is bad for FOSS collaboration relative to mailing lists and forums. So until Matrix finally lands threading & forum semantics and smtp/nntp bridges, I suspect it's part of the problem he's complaining about :D)
    - ptman 10y ago
      Threading I know is being worked on, but is SMTP/NNTP anything other than a jape?
      - 10y ago
hota_mazi 10y ago
> A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1] Does it have Android and iOS clients? If not, it's not a great alternative to Slack. It's not even an alternative to Slack.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vinay427 10y ago
  You might consider doing a simple Google search instead of presenting a possible conclusion based on a guess. In any case, Riot is great and works on both Android and iOS.
- lytedev 10y ago
  It does! Check out Riot.im
- unknown2374 10y ago
  Yes, they have amazing (and multiple) clients for both Android and iOS. Especially Riot, which is not just a cheap web wrapper that a lot if the alternatives, it's native and in my experience, I have not had any problems, performance inckuded, using it for slack on my Android phone.
  - vopi 10y ago
    Err..Pretty sure it is a web wrapper? Just checked out their GitHub and didn't even see a desktop app.
    - Arathorn 10y ago
      I think the point is that the ios and android apps are pure native; no react native or HTML. riot-desktop is indeed just an electron wrapper of riot-web (although it works quite well); but then there are native desktop matrix clients like Quaternion and NaChat for those who want them :)
tomjen3 10y ago
Why is there not a web based IRC app?
- educar 10y ago
  Lounge is very good
- tribaal 10y ago
  There is! irccloud.com is pretty awesome. They have a pretty good mobile app as well (at least on android - I'm not an iOS user). (I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a happy user)
- bronson 10y ago
  There is. A bunch in fact. http://mibbit.com/ http://mibbit.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ or, site-specific: https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ http://chat.efnet.org/ http://chat.efnet.org/
- Veratyr 10y ago
  IRC is a TCP-based protocol and browsers don't support TCP connections. There are web-based applications that communicate with IRC but they require a proxy running on a server.
- collinmanderson 10y ago
  I use. https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge (npm install -g thelounge) I used to use: https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ (Paid, SaaS)
killin_dan 10y ago
Matrix is an extremely heavy protocol, not suitable for business use imo. Riot is really obnoxious to use and get set up, and is also extremely resource hungry. I don't think you're very familiar with chat protocols if you think it's even remotely suitable as a replacement for IRC.
- ktta 10y ago
  Well. I'm interested to see what you think is a suitable protocol for business. I said it's an alternative, not a replacement. The days of simplistic IRC protocols have gone. Now people want emojis, search, session persistence, web client, and more things. So for that, there's obviously going to be more complexity compared to IRC. And IRC feels so hacked on when fit it with the modern features one wants today. I'm not very familiar with all of the chat protocols, but I'm familiar with the possibilities of communication today. It's riddled with proprietary protocols and chromium based applications. And that's why I see Matrix as the next step.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    >I said it's an alternative, not a replacement. The days of simplistic IRC protocols have gone. Now people want emojis, search, session persistence, web client, and more things. Let's take those each at a time, shall we? >Emojis This has nothing to do with the protocol. If you can send arbitrary UTF-8 messages (which you should be able to do, obviously, and can with modern IRC clients) then you can send emojis to your heart's content. >Search I've never personally found search particularly useful, but there's nothing about IRC that makes it any harder or easier to search messages. The way all chat search works and will always work is that you log chat messages somewhere and provide a way to search them. That has nothing to do with the protocol and everything to do with the server logging messages. You can then extend your chat protocol with a command that you send to the server that asks it to search the current channel (or all channels, or all channels I'm in, or all channels I've been in, or all messages sent in all channels that I was in at the time, that's up to the server though - corporate probably want the former, public you'd want the last one) for a particular string/regexp/whatever. There's nothing particularly complex here from the perspective of the chat protocol and in fact it would be simple to extend the IRC protocol with a command for doing this at the protocol level. It's just much easier to write bots to log messages and web interfaces to search those logs with. >Session persistence No, nobody wants this. What people want are to see messages sent while they weren't there and to be able to receive messages while away. The former is solved by the same server-side logging mentioned above and the latter is really the same idea. The thing is, most IRC servers don't want to buffer messages indefinitely for everyone that makes an account then never logs in again. >Web client There are lots of IRC web clients, and all you need for this is a simple protocol. >So for that, there's obviously going to be more complexity compared to IRC. And IRC feels so hacked on when fit it with the modern features one wants today. IRC has lots of features that are much, much more complicated than what you mention above, like DCC file transfer.
ajross 10y ago
Another great alternative to Slack in the spirit of IRC is "Internet Relay Chat".
akerro 10y ago
You have completely misunderstood the post.
- ktta 10y ago
  I do realize that the post talked about how real time communication must be avoided. But there are still projects that prefer real time communication and use slack for that. Matrix is a good alternative, and I pointed that out. This is in no way a disagreement with the author.
erlehmann_ 10y ago
I see advertising for Matrix every single time the chat topic comes up. Having looked at the protocol, it seems massively more inefficient than just using XMPP, which has numerous clients and a lot of features. Can Matrix do anything that XMPP can not? Note that I have read the claims at http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-xmpp http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differenc... but critizising the minimal XMPP baseline feature set while claiming that XMPP is not being “well designed for mobile use cases” seems like someone wants to have their cake and eat it too – I have used XMPP over low-bandwith high-latency mobile data connections for years and noticed that XMPP's stream syncronization is a really nice feature for that use case.
- Arathorn 10y ago
  For the record, the only person on this thread (afaik) actually affiliated with Matrix is me, and we categorically don't advertise but jump on discussions like this one to try to answer queries and dispel confusion & FUD. The FAQ entry on XMPP needs to be updated, tbh - XMPP works fine on low bandwidth connections, and is typically lower bandwidth than Matrix (at least when using HTTP/1.1). The "not well designed for mobile use cases" was talking more about push notification support & history synchronisation, both of which XMPP has improved since.
compuguy 10y ago
Rocket Chat is a great (open source) slack alternative: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/

by ktta 10y ago

swiley 10y ago

"in the spirit of IRC" is a bit of a stretch. This is all a massive blob of web technologies which contrasts IRC's minimalism and it's lightweight clients written in C. It doesn't appear to require any specific service though so at least it has that.

ktta 10y ago
Well we are moving to a web first world, and passing the terminal days of IRC. Trying to avoid web technologies isn't going to do anyone good. Best we can do is try to make them better are secure. Light weight clients can be written in C if you want. There's nothing that needs a web browser Here's the spec if you're interested[1]. There's also a weechat script if you want a command line client[2] [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html
- COMPUTERLOSER 10y ago
  This comment made me throw up in my mouth a little.
- nullc 10y ago
  > Well we are moving to a web first world, Too bad much of the web stinks, with terrible responsiveness and usability and impose those results through bloated protocols and spaghetti architecture on anything that tries to interface with them. Multiple times on caltrain I've had people ask me how I'm on the internet as I have meetings on IRC without even noticing the connectivity has gone poor -- while their webchat stuff with multiple megabytes of ajaxy whatever won't even load.
  - russdpale 10y ago
    Yeh in this vain, I'll add that I have very experienced colleagues who are so fed up with the current internet that they don't even fight net neutrality, and would rather another protocol rise in its place.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - milesrout 10y ago
    There's nothing inherently 'web' or 'slow' or 'ajaxy' about Gzipped-JSON-over-HTTP2. I agree that the web is slow and crap a lot of the time, but chat using gzipped JSON over HTTP/2 would be just as fast as IRC as long as it's only sending the same level of info as IRC.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
      And yet it requires a hilariously complex protocol engine for HTTP for no purpose whatsoever.
      - milesrout 10y ago
        I don't agree at all. HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 are not especially simple protocols, but they're not that complicated. They aren't unnecessarily complicated, that's for sure. They have a set of features that necessitates a level of complexity, but it's better to do it in HTTP/2 once and only once than to repeat the same failures and reworks and added features and upgrades etc. etc. etc. to get the same level of features in a million different application protocols. Because otherwise you'll get to the same place as we were with HTTP/1.1: your nice 'simple' protocol will need to be replaced with one that can support multiple streams, etc.
- rsync 10y ago
  "Well we are moving to a web first world, and passing the terminal days of IRC." That's too bad - mostly for the people that won't experience it or see it as viable. In 2017 I use (al)pine as my sole mailtool. It's many, many times faster and more efficient than web based email - and much more private and secure.
derefr 10y ago
"Web technologies" makes it sound like it requires WebRTC or something. It's a set of HTTPS endpoints that you shove JSON-encoded messages at. Certainly a bit "fluffier" than IRC (no prefix-length binary protocols here, sadly), but much more interoperable in the modern world (i.e. you can write a browser extension that can speak directly to a Matrix server using the built-in JSON+AJAX APIs; Matrix servers won't need specific egress exceptions in enterprise firewalls; etc.) HTTP2 (if used) already makes the metadata parts of the protocol pretty concise and low-overhead; it's just the messages themselves that are large. So it'd be nice if—at least for the message bodies—there was an optional binary layer-6 encoding (e.g. CBOR, BERT-RPC) that clients and servers could try to negotiate with their Accept headers, with an expectation that many servers would implement it, and an allowance for constrained clients that implement that encoding but not JSON.
Arathorn 10y ago
I'm not sure it's fair to call it a massive blob of web technologies (although I'm biased, given I work on it). To compare sending a message on IRC versus sending one on Matrix: $ telnet irc.freenode.net 6667 ... NICK Ara4n USER Ara4n Ara4n irc.freenode.net :Matthew Hodgson ... JOIN #matrix PRIVMSG #matrix :test versus: curl "https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/rooms/!cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ%3Amatrix.org/send/m.room.message/uuid?access_token=$access_token" -X PUT --data '{"msgtype":"m.text","body":"test"}' (okay, this assume you've grabbed a valid access_token from an existing session, and already know that #matrix:matrix.org's internal ID is !cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ:matrix.org, but that's easy to find by curling https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/%23matrix%3amatrix.org https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/%23matri...). Meanwhile definitely are some lightweight C matrix clients out there - e.g. https://github.com/matt-williams/matrix-esp8266/blob/master/matrix-esp8266.ino https://github.com/matt-williams/matrix-esp8266/blob/master/... is a proof of concept client in C that runs on an ESP8266(!), or the libpurple plugin: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix. In the end, if you don't like HTTP or web technologies, there is NOTHING stopping people from contributing alternative transports - COAP, MQTT, capnproto, QUIC, XMPP, WebSockets or whatever floats their boat. But it seems that the simple HTTP+JSON API works well enough that nobody has bothered yet (other than https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/websockets.rst https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/...).
- Arathorn 10y ago
  (that said, I think the point of Dave Cheney's article is more that sync realtime chat is bad for FOSS collaboration relative to mailing lists and forums. So until Matrix finally lands threading & forum semantics and smtp/nntp bridges, I suspect it's part of the problem he's complaining about :D)
  - ptman 10y ago
    Threading I know is being worked on, but is SMTP/NNTP anything other than a jape?
    - 10y ago

hota_mazi 10y ago

> A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1] Does it have Android and iOS clients? If not, it's not a great alternative to Slack. It's not even an alternative to Slack.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vinay427 10y ago
You might consider doing a simple Google search instead of presenting a possible conclusion based on a guess. In any case, Riot is great and works on both Android and iOS.
lytedev 10y ago
It does! Check out Riot.im
unknown2374 10y ago
Yes, they have amazing (and multiple) clients for both Android and iOS. Especially Riot, which is not just a cheap web wrapper that a lot if the alternatives, it's native and in my experience, I have not had any problems, performance inckuded, using it for slack on my Android phone.
- vopi 10y ago
  Err..Pretty sure it is a web wrapper? Just checked out their GitHub and didn't even see a desktop app.
  - Arathorn 10y ago
    I think the point is that the ios and android apps are pure native; no react native or HTML. riot-desktop is indeed just an electron wrapper of riot-web (although it works quite well); but then there are native desktop matrix clients like Quaternion and NaChat for those who want them :)

tomjen3 10y ago

Why is there not a web based IRC app?

educar 10y ago
Lounge is very good
tribaal 10y ago
There is! irccloud.com is pretty awesome. They have a pretty good mobile app as well (at least on android - I'm not an iOS user). (I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a happy user)
bronson 10y ago
There is. A bunch in fact. http://mibbit.com/ http://mibbit.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/ or, site-specific: https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ http://chat.efnet.org/ http://chat.efnet.org/
Veratyr 10y ago
IRC is a TCP-based protocol and browsers don't support TCP connections. There are web-based applications that communicate with IRC but they require a proxy running on a server.
collinmanderson 10y ago
I use. https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge (npm install -g thelounge) I used to use: https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ (Paid, SaaS)

killin_dan 10y ago

Matrix is an extremely heavy protocol, not suitable for business use imo. Riot is really obnoxious to use and get set up, and is also extremely resource hungry. I don't think you're very familiar with chat protocols if you think it's even remotely suitable as a replacement for IRC.

ktta 10y ago
Well. I'm interested to see what you think is a suitable protocol for business. I said it's an alternative, not a replacement. The days of simplistic IRC protocols have gone. Now people want emojis, search, session persistence, web client, and more things. So for that, there's obviously going to be more complexity compared to IRC. And IRC feels so hacked on when fit it with the modern features one wants today. I'm not very familiar with all of the chat protocols, but I'm familiar with the possibilities of communication today. It's riddled with proprietary protocols and chromium based applications. And that's why I see Matrix as the next step.
- milesrout 10y ago
  >I said it's an alternative, not a replacement. The days of simplistic IRC protocols have gone. Now people want emojis, search, session persistence, web client, and more things. Let's take those each at a time, shall we? >Emojis This has nothing to do with the protocol. If you can send arbitrary UTF-8 messages (which you should be able to do, obviously, and can with modern IRC clients) then you can send emojis to your heart's content. >Search I've never personally found search particularly useful, but there's nothing about IRC that makes it any harder or easier to search messages. The way all chat search works and will always work is that you log chat messages somewhere and provide a way to search them. That has nothing to do with the protocol and everything to do with the server logging messages. You can then extend your chat protocol with a command that you send to the server that asks it to search the current channel (or all channels, or all channels I'm in, or all channels I've been in, or all messages sent in all channels that I was in at the time, that's up to the server though - corporate probably want the former, public you'd want the last one) for a particular string/regexp/whatever. There's nothing particularly complex here from the perspective of the chat protocol and in fact it would be simple to extend the IRC protocol with a command for doing this at the protocol level. It's just much easier to write bots to log messages and web interfaces to search those logs with. >Session persistence No, nobody wants this. What people want are to see messages sent while they weren't there and to be able to receive messages while away. The former is solved by the same server-side logging mentioned above and the latter is really the same idea. The thing is, most IRC servers don't want to buffer messages indefinitely for everyone that makes an account then never logs in again. >Web client There are lots of IRC web clients, and all you need for this is a simple protocol. >So for that, there's obviously going to be more complexity compared to IRC. And IRC feels so hacked on when fit it with the modern features one wants today. IRC has lots of features that are much, much more complicated than what you mention above, like DCC file transfer.

ajross 10y ago

Another great alternative to Slack in the spirit of IRC is "Internet Relay Chat".

akerro 10y ago

You have completely misunderstood the post.

ktta 10y ago
I do realize that the post talked about how real time communication must be avoided. But there are still projects that prefer real time communication and use slack for that. Matrix is a good alternative, and I pointed that out. This is in no way a disagreement with the author.

erlehmann_ 10y ago

I see advertising for Matrix every single time the chat topic comes up. Having looked at the protocol, it seems massively more inefficient than just using XMPP, which has numerous clients and a lot of features. Can Matrix do anything that XMPP can not? Note that I have read the claims at http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-xmpp http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differenc... but critizising the minimal XMPP baseline feature set while claiming that XMPP is not being “well designed for mobile use cases” seems like someone wants to have their cake and eat it too – I have used XMPP over low-bandwith high-latency mobile data connections for years and noticed that XMPP's stream syncronization is a really nice feature for that use case.

Arathorn 10y ago
For the record, the only person on this thread (afaik) actually affiliated with Matrix is me, and we categorically don't advertise but jump on discussions like this one to try to answer queries and dispel confusion & FUD. The FAQ entry on XMPP needs to be updated, tbh - XMPP works fine on low bandwidth connections, and is typically lower bandwidth than Matrix (at least when using HTTP/1.1). The "not well designed for mobile use cases" was talking more about push notification support & history synchronisation, both of which XMPP has improved since.

compuguy 10y ago

Rocket Chat is a great (open source) slack alternative: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/