27 ms·

Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

• FooBarWidget 9y ago
  Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client implements desired extensions), etc. Why not accept that there are legit technical reasons why existing open protocols are unacceptable? We should not be blaming Slack so much. If we want to make a difference we must come up with a better open protocol that satisfies all the requirements. And it does not end there: there must also be an open client that normal people actually want to use, and there must be tons of marketing to promote it. Stop complaining about companies not adopting open protocols and do something. Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will follow. It is not easy, it may even feel wrong, but it is the only way.
  • dijit 9y ago
    Open Protocols usually come about either because the world needs something like that, so multiple companies work together on a standard; or because volunteers take on the work. Volunteers don't have the marketing budget or, even the technical budget to compete with slack. It's basically a non-starter unfortunately; and when they do come around (XMPP with push and decent extension is not bad) people are so hung up on the first implementation that they won't look passed previous shortcomings. It's easy to tar something when it doesn't have a marketing team behind it.
  • cyphar 9y ago
    There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people are using them, but that doesn't change that Slack dropping support for bridges is just typically disappointing. Matrix also has full Slack/IRC/whatever-else-you-want bridges (which you can stack to talk between IRC and Slack). So there's that. However, this is simply untrue: > Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will follow. When you are Slack Inc and the only differentiator you have is that you are in control of how chat works, why on earth would you switch to a protocol that you don't have full control over?
    • dfabulich 9y ago
      Slack initially integrated with IRC and XMPP because they were more popular than Slack. Now that Slack is much bigger than all IRC and XMPP traffic combined, the integration is no longer worth its weight in code. If Matrix were overwhelmingly more popular than Slack, they would integrate with Matrix. But Matrix isn't more popular than Slack. (Matrix isn't even as popular as IRC, despite being a better product than IRC, as far as I can see.)
      • cyphar 9y ago
        Matrix has Slack bridges, so "integration with Slack" isn't a problem from the Matrix side. But more importantly, I wasn't suggesting that Slack should integrate with Matrix, it was that open protocols do exist and some are better than Slack in specific ways.
      • MereInterest 9y ago
        > Slack initially integrated with IRC and XMPP because they were more popular than Slack. Bait > Now that Slack is much bigger than all IRC and XMPP traffic combined, the integration is no longer worth its weight in code. Switch
  • zer00eyz 9y ago
    > Why not accept that there are legit technical reasons why existing open protocols are unacceptable? I can think of a few features, in a few open protocols that started out as "open" but proprietary - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest being the most well known. > Stop complaining about companies not adopting open protocols and do something. Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will follow. It is not easy, it may even feel wrong, but it is the only way. This, this is sage advice, this is what needs to happen, and we need to just take the time to do it. I am at the point where I think I'm ready to become a Stallman like zealot in my almost golden years.
  • akkat 9y ago
    email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security
    • ascorbic 9y ago
      Email does many things, but "works great" isn't one of them. PGP even less.
      • CaptSpify 9y ago
        What doesn't work great about email? easy to use, easy to set up, easy to modify, easy to switch which software handles your email both server-side and client-side....
        • s73v3r_ 9y ago
          Has a huge spam problem...
          • cyphar 9y ago
            But people posting tonnes of GIFs, emojis, and tagging @all on #general isn't spam? I don't disagree that email has a spam problem (though spam filters have gotten quite good in the past 20-30 years), just that spam isn't an email problem.
            • NikolaeVarius 9y ago
              You can easily choose to be not be a part of that. You do not have that luxury on email.
              • CaptSpify 9y ago
                You know you can filter email based on the content, right?
            • ascorbic 9y ago
  • adrianmonk 9y ago
    In addition to sucking in technical ways, the current set of open protocols probably could stand to leave more room for innovation. Chat is a really hot area in the industry right now, and people are trying all kinds of different things with it. Team-oriented stuff, smart threading, different forms of addressing (find people by mobile phone number instead of account name), and plenty more I'm not even aware of. An open solution would have a better shot if it has a way to not only solve problems well but also evolve and incorporate new features and ideas. Another issue is that social platforms serve as a unique kind of directory service. It turns out that how good a chat system is at allowing you to find contacts to chat with might be just as important as how good it is at actually chatting with them.
    • MayeulC 9y ago
      I don't think it matters that much. Open protocols are typically in for the long run, and will end up replicating the feature set of the most popular proprietary ones. And the best thing is that they are generally free to pick the best ideas from various places. One issue is adoption, but this is something that can be dealt with eventually.
  • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > XMPP [...] is fragmented (not every client implements desired extensions), etc. How much I hate this "X is fragmented" argument. When two pieces of software that speak a common set of core protocols and thus can achieve at least some level of interoperability, but there is no perfect feature parity, then OH HORROR, IT IS FRAGMENTED!!1111 The obvious solution? Use a product that does not interoperate with absolutely anything at all ... Next people are going to claim that you should learn some random endangered language instead of English to avoid the "fragmentation" due to the numerous dialects, I guess.
    • s73v3r_ 9y ago
      "The obvious solution? Use a product that does not interoperate with absolutely anything at all ..." You mean use a product with a baseline feature set where you can count on all the clients seeing things the same way and supporting the same thing.
      • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Sorry, but that is just obvious flat-out bullshit. Have you tried using Psi (an XMPP client) to communicate with a user using the Slack client (well, after this change, obviously ...)? Did you have any success with that? No, of course not. In other words: Slack is obviously not a product where you can "count on all the clients seeing things the same way and supporting the same thing.". Slack works with exactly one client at the other end, so it is bullshit to claim that it "works the same with all clients", when in fact it works with exactly one client, and that's it, with other clients you get exactly no interoperability at all. And it is bullshit squared to pretend that that is somehow an advantage over other technologies: No single client using any protocol provides an inconsistent featureset or interface. It doesn't matter which single client and which protocol you use, you will always get a consistent featureset and interface. That has absolutely nothing to do with Slack, but only with the fact that you standardize on one client.
        • s73v3r_ 9y ago
          Most people using Slack are using the Slack client. Therefore, yes, I can count on there being a baseline.
  • woodruffw 9y ago
    Netsplits apply to networks, not gateways. From Slack's perspective, supporting IRC is relatively simple: send messages in UTF-8 and "send" files by sending the URL that Slack's uploading service produces. IRC does have a lot of deficiencies, but they're well-understood and the client environment has adapted to them.
  • epberry 9y ago
    Agreed. I have never had as good of an experience with IRC or XMPP as I have with slack. Open protocols are still great for open communities, internet discussion boards, etc. but when you're a multi-billion dollar messaging platform and companies are using you for critical communication I don't see any reason to continue supporting them. They've actually gone a step further and put the accessibility features in slack and upgraded their api to support things people used to do on the irc channels.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      IRC is right now standardizing reactions and threads. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, IRCCloud now runs their own slack gateway for their users, with support for all of it: https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 It's absolutely possible to provide all this in open protocols, and even in a reasonable timeframe.
    • saagarjha 9y ago
      > I have never had as good of an experience with IRC or XMPP as I have with slack. Interestingly, I've felt the opposite way. Slack will often lose connection, fail to send messages, or fail to refresh and fetch new messages (ones I know exist, because I was sent a notification for them). IRC and XMPP don't seem to do this.
  • atomi 9y ago
    You want IRC to have a kitchen sink. But IRC is perfect for it's intended scope. You get to use whatever other service you want for sending files or sharing images. All you have to do is link to it.
    • bastawhiz 9y ago
      The attitude of "you have a link, that's good enough" is a silly one. What about file metadata? Who uploaded it? What's their identity in the chat? Because there's no threading in IRC, you can't have a discussion about files/links that persists separate from the channel. Even if you make a HEAD request for every file, what if I want to see the page title of the link or a thumbnail of a linked video or image rather than downloading it? If we keep the attitude of "IRC solves all the problems it intends to solve," then the number of users whose problems are addressed by IRC shrinks more and more over time.
  • lallysingh 9y ago
    Here's the fun part: eventually slack's going to have the same problems it complains about these protocols having. Some new platform can't run the same client as usual, so they write a new one that has a slightly different feature set. And/or some clients can't be upgraded. "All of this has happened before and will happen again." I'm completely unsurprised. The integrations were there to reduce customer risk in choosing slack. Now that slack is big enough, they don't need to do that anymore. Those integrations can only let 3rd parties into the party that slack wants all for themselves. Shit like this is why IRC is still so popular.
  • alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Why not make your protocol open source so the world can benefit, integrate and improve upon it? If the current open standards suck, there is no reason we can't create new, better open standards. But, I've never used Slack nor would use it as I'm biased towards it's prop nature, especially when it's used (and even promoted) within open source communities.
    • s73v3r_ 9y ago
      I'm fairly certain they're not Slack, so they couldn't do that.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • keyle 9y ago
    Why don't you evolve slack into open protocols? Oh that's right, that's your IP. That is the reason you walk away from protocols and implement 'safer', 'reliable', 'augmented' closed source options.. Your time could be spent on open source, so don't claim that open source walked away from you, when you're the one doing it.
    • rspeer 9y ago
      I don't think the person you're responding to is the one doing it.
  • progval 9y ago
    > netsplits are a common issue This is a server software issue, not a protocol issue.
  • whatyoucantsay 9y ago
    "Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck?" said FooBarWidget to the world, via TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS...
  • e12e 9y ago
    > come up with a better open protocol that satisfies all the requirements. [my emphasis] Yeah, no. The email/xmpp approach of small core + extensions is probably the only viable way. I've played with both rocket.chat and matrix - and while I don't really like the architecture of the former, it feel a lot more like a finished solution/product - with a sane api. I hope Matrix will become more relevant, but I think the documentation and implementation suffers under the design ambitions. In a certain sense smtp, imap and irc all use telnet for transport (and all can be augmented with ssl/tls). That's not a great choice today - but there seems to an odd resistance to combining "the good pieces we have". Maybe just demanding ssh as the (client/server) transport, for example. Use srv records for discovery. Use capnproto for serialization. I don't know, but there seems like there's and odd resistance to reusing great components that are easily tested and developed independently. In that sense the slack/rocket mission is easier: be compatible with yourself. (and using https+json for transport / rpc is perfectly valid re-use. But a promise for stable apis and a clear split between client and server (rather than client+server | bots (ie: non-Roman clients) would be nice. Allow people to bring their own server, or client or both.
  • jmiserez 9y ago
    All valid points, but this makes me sad: >and there must be tons of marketing to promote it. It used to be “build it and they will come”. Open source projects don’t have millions to spend on marketing.
    • FooBarWidget 9y ago
      That is false. It has never been "build it and they will come". Open source projects do need to spend millions on marketing. They just aren't necessarily paid for in money or by a single party. The Linux hype of the late 1990s came from the effort of thousands, tens of thousands of advocates who devoted their free time (which costs money). And just look at any popular devops tools today -- the most popular projects have very slick-looking websites and organize tons of community events, all of which cost time and money to implement. This is what I mean by "it may feel wrong". We developers like to buy into this fantasy of "build it and they will come" but it has never been true.
  • Doxin 9y ago
    IRC is not at a standstill mind you. IIRC these days it specifies UTF-8 as encoding[1] [1] as specified somewhere here https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/
• vletrmx 9y ago
  The IRC gateway was the only thing that made slack even barely usable for me.
• cbm-vic-20 9y ago
  Surprising absolutely nobody, private company closes access via open protocols with 3rd party clients.
• Grollicus 9y ago
  Is Slack the Platform where you can have multiple accounts with the same displayname? A bit surprising to hear them talk about security
  • geoah 9y ago
    Yeah they really dropped the ball on this one
  • smkelly 9y ago
    We encountered this the other week. I didn't realize this was even a thing up until I saw it happen. It is sort of mind-boggling that they allow this. It was confusing to troubleshoot.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    This thread need more visibility!
  • mmagin 9y ago
    WAT? How does that go, if I try to message @username, where does it go then?
    • sattoshi 9y ago
      Display name != Username
  • arbie 9y ago
    I didn't know this was possible. How does it work with SSO authentication? I suppose enterprises can force display names?
    • arbie 9y ago
      To answer myself, yes, SSO plans can enforce display name uniqueness.
• cortesoft 9y ago
  I wonder how hard it would be to write a custom bridge with the real time api, to make your own IRC gateway?
  • duncan_bayne 9y ago
    I was thinking about this too, then I realised I'd be spending some of my own precious life helping Slack mitigate the consequences of a user-hostile, and Open Web-hostile, decisions. Screw that.
    • cortesoft 9y ago
      Looks like it has already been done, thankfully :D https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
  • matthewmacleod 9y ago
    Pretty easy, I reckon. I started writing a native Mac client using the API, and it was pretty straightforward. I don’t see there being a huge barrier to implementing a gateway.
    • 52-6F-62 9y ago
      I've been starting to toy around with it and Qt for a quick and dirty native app. Nothing worth sharing yet. What route did you go?
      • matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Just a plain Cocoa app using Swift. Similarly nothing worth sharing, but the API is straightforward enough and I wanted to brush up on my Swift, so it was a worthwhile experiment. Maybe I'll even finish it one day :)
  • staz 9y ago
    One of my ex-colleague build one a while ago in less that a few days so I guess not that hard. But he is in the habit of making IRC gateway for everything he use
• AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
  For weechat users, there's always the wee-slack plugin [0] which runs on the Slack API, rather than the IRC gateway. [0] https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
  • tyrust 9y ago
    Does anyone know if there is an equivalent for irssi? Perhaps it's time I give weechat a try :/
    • AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
      I've yet to find one, which is unfortunate because I am a much bigger fan of irssi.
    • mvanbaak 9y ago
      wee-slack is the reason I switched from irssi to weechat. Sad, but true.
    • mcovey 9y ago
      It's certainly possible using BitlBee - https://www.bitlbee.org/ https://www.bitlbee.org/ But as far as I can see nobody has written a Slack-API plugin for it, yet.
• pc2g4d 9y ago
  Of course they do. This is exactly the path Google took. Once you achieve enough power in the market, you can throw open protocols overboard. It's a symptom of the centralized world the internet has become.
  • elektron 9y ago
    Companies are just using Micro$oft's playbook. Oh, and spoiler alert, Microsoft still is too: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/Windows/SubsystemForLinux https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/Windows... Embrace / Extend / Expunge
    • saagarjha 9y ago
      You post implies that you're officially affiliated with Slack. If so, are you really comparing yourself to "Micro[s]oft's playbook"? Why can't you work to fix the issue rather than follow the industry standard?
      • Vendan 9y ago
        looks to me like they just copy/pasted the MOTD from an irc client that connected to slack's gateway
        • saagarjha 9y ago
          Ahh, I didn't recognize that. I had just thought they formatted it that way to seem cute.
    • mynameisvlad 9y ago
      So how exactly do you expect running Debian/other Linuxes on Windows will extinguish them? I don't really see a way for that to happen. Sure, the Linux subsystem is "Embrace", but a lot of things can be embraced without extended or extinguished.
      • 9y ago
• saagarjha 9y ago
  I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of the accessibility features you need directly into Slack. Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.
  • zitterbewegung 9y ago
    I run Slack in a browser tab . Their native apps are basically electron tabs. I wonder how many people used xmpp and irc gateways in relation to all of their active users ?
    • castis 9y ago
      They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required to use Slack on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely wouldn't solely on principle.
      • ztoben 9y ago
        That's absurd. How is it so high? Mine uses around 700MB pretty consistently.
        • dijit 9y ago
          Animated custom emojis seem to be a common thread, animated images in general cause my CPU and memory to spike when using slack. Our network engineer loves this dancing parrot emoji but it basically pins a core on my machine and adds 20-30% of memory to slacks process. I've switched over to using mattermost, it can be (and is) self hosted so I'm not as worried about slack getting hacked (again) and leaking our info/taking control of our systems with chatops. The downside is; mattermost is not a strong replacement. I wrote a bot to basically do a large part of my job for me, and coding against mattermosts websocket protocol and dealing with authentication has been messy to say the least. Slack is a joy to code against and use from a UI perspective when compared. (sadly, as I don't like it for ideological reasons)
• dougluce 9y ago
  Bitlbee will compensate.
  • mvanbaak 9y ago
    As much I would love this, it looks like the only real option right now is wee-slack plugin for weechat. I have been using it for almost a year now and it does it's job very well. Bitlbee for hipchat, wee-slack for slack. I'm ok (for now, it's just a matter of time before slack cannot be used without one of their official clients like the shit that happened with whatsapp and others)
• saltcured 9y ago
  This change, if it goes through, means I will disengage from Slack other than passive browsing from their Android app. My teammates will have to remember how to read email if they want non-trivial input. It feels like a mixed blessing though, as it is a nice excuse to detox from this mess.
  • jest3r1 9y ago
    Well email is due for a comeback.
• sciurus 9y ago
  Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16536254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16536254
• kev009 9y ago
  Demerit. These idiots need a few more hundred million dollar financing rounds to figure out how to use the rest of the RAM on my computer.
• lol768 9y ago
  This is disappointing. Why isn't there a public blog post about this? Why is the "more information" page behind an auth wall?
  • saagarjha 9y ago
    If you were Slack, would you post a blog post about this? It's clearly a negative, so there's no point in drawing attention to it.
  • haroldp 9y ago
    You know why.
• drdaeman 9y ago
  Okay, I get that IRC isn't able to convey lots of modern fancy stuff, but XMPP? Really? I swear, it can do almost anything that fits into stanza exchange logic, as long as one's not afraid of adding an XML namespace (of course, it's being nice to search for already existing XEPs first). Afterwards it's client developers' problem to support shared threaded animated gif sticker emoji reactions or whatever.
  • u801e 9y ago
    The one problem I had with the XMPP gateway is that it would lock up my client for several minutes while trying to connect. I don't have that problem when using the IRC gateway. But at least I didn't have to deal with inline images and animated gifs over the gateway.
  • dmitriid 9y ago
    > Afterwards it's client developers' problem Riiiight. And how many clients do you know that have that? Or read receipts? Or file sending? Or... Or...? There’s basically just one client that supports modern XMPP features. So no, it’s not the client developers’ problem. It becomes the end-users’ problem. And they will abandon XMPP in favor of solutions that don’t have tgat problem.
    • drdaeman 9y ago
      XMPP is a protocol. Slack's own RTM API is a protocol. It was claimed that the former cannot be extended but the later can be - which I argued is wrong. Now you're arguing about something completely different. It's not like it's a death sentence if some RTM API-consuming app is not capable of something - why does it suddenly becomes an issue when we switch protocol to XMPP?
      • dmitriid 9y ago
        Because Slack both develops the protocol, and provides apps for all platforms that support all features in this protocol. There’s exactly one XMPP client (Conversations for Android IIRC) that supports all the XMPP features (many of them in still experimental XEPs) that make it barely suitable for a modern mobile-heavy world, much less for anything else. So yes. When you say it’s developers’ problem to develop clients, it’s not. It immediately becomes the end-users’ problem.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nopacience 9y ago
  Slack was fine, now it is time to move back to IRC. Some people like slack or telegram because they provide an API for BOTs. Something IRC has been open to since the begining. Non power users might have trouble using IRC with the usual clients (mIRC/irssi/bitchx). Today a family member, not technical and 60+yrs asked about "that tool" that is like whatsapp however it allows users that just joined a group to read old messages. He was referring to slack. He wanted to create a group and when new users from his company joined, they would be able to read whatever was written on that group. So with this in mind, i think what would really work (also) is to have something on the front of IRC (some bouncer) with a pretty UI that logs everything and allows new users to connect via mobile, standard irc clients, and also send pictures, and read backlog (stuff slack does). However the backend chat server should be the decentralized existing ones, efnet/freenode/etc. So maybe its time to re-invent slack and make a pretty UI to access usual standard IRC. ie. a new slack that uses old irc networks (decentralized networks) as its backend. But also allows users to talk from mobile apps, browsers, etc
  • MaxLeiter 9y ago
    A few projects exist that try to be "modern" UIs for IRC (bias: I contribute to Lounge) TheLounge - https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat (FOSS, self-hosted) IRCCloud - https://irccloud.com https://irccloud.com (mobile clients OS, hosted)
    • merb 9y ago
      they don't look "modern"..
      • amiga-workbench 9y ago
        Yeah, there isn't enough low contrast text and excessive white space.
        • MaxLeiter 9y ago
          TheLounge has full support for themes and custom CSS on the client
• synack 9y ago
  Is there a specific list of IRC's deficiencies somewhere? Could we start on an IETF draft to address some of those rather than throw our hands in the air and build yet another walled garden?
  • dwc 9y ago
    One potential problem with that is that for many IRC users, many of the "deficiencies" either don't matter or are bonuses. Also, see https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/
  • WimLeers 9y ago
    https://ircv3.net https://ircv3.net
  • shiado 9y ago
    Well for starters IRC doesn't let you keep your hands warm when somebody posts a giphy and your system resource usage goes up to crypto mining levels.
    • paganel 9y ago
      I don't rely on slack at work (we use mostly emails and some skype), I'm also part of a small-ish team, so I have to ask: do people in bigger-ish teams really send gif after animated gif in their work-related slack conversations? And if the answer is "yes", what does that help accomplish?
      • nikanj 9y ago
        The more your work chat resembles an attention-addiction-skinner-box social media, the higher engagement numbers it gets. It's relatively easy to see how these engagement numbers can be leveraged as a sales tool.
      • jldugger 9y ago
        1. Yes, they do. We even have a bot to post the top giphy result for a search query. 2. It's absoletely as assinine and distracting as you imagine.
• Dunedan 9y ago
  Well, another day of being disappointed by Slack. Aside from missing native clients mentioned in other comments my biggest pain point is their awful implementation of threads. Every time I think: They must be kidding, they can't be serious, that's just a bad dream. A few examples: - The only place where you get noticed about responses to threads is the "New Threads" view, which makes it easy to miss responses, when you have responses to multiple threads waiting to be read. - While having the "New Threads" view open, new messages aren't shown automatically and you have to click a link to show them. - "Threads" for snippets and files are displayed directly in the channel the snippet/file got posted in. - You can't post snippets and files in Threads. - You can't use "/me" in Threads.
  • AlexandrB 9y ago
    Slack threads are like a bad version of email built into an OK IRC client.
  • dilap 9y ago
    yeah threads are fucking terrible. it's a shame there's not a way to just turn them off.
  • bananaboy 9y ago
    Oh wow I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the threads implementation. It's an awful user experience!
• jhgg 9y ago
  This sucks, but it makes sense. I'm willing to be <1% of their users use these gateways, and it's becoming an engineer burden to maintain as they try and ship new features. I don't think this will translate to any significant loss of users anyways, as their main money-making users use it in a business setting where you kinda /have/ to use it.
• gsich 9y ago
  Which features? Seems like an excuse to not maintain those services.
• turdnagel 9y ago
  Relatedly, are there any 3rd party Slack apps out there? Their APIs are powerful and seem pretty complete.
  • dblohm7 9y ago
    Those APIs will probably be deprecated soon enough.
    • saagarjha 9y ago
      I doubt it. Many companies depend on Slack's APIs to do things like post build failures or provide custom commands.
      • beavis2 9y ago
        Same could be said about their IRC gateway.
• Froyoh 9y ago
  Time to use Discord
  • escapecharacter 9y ago
    I've used Slack as part of a few organizations. If I'm starting my own ad-hoc technical organization, is there any reason not to use Discord? Seems to have all the features I need.
    • jakebasile 9y ago
      I've used Discord extensively and it's high quality software. The only reasons I could see someone choosing not to use it are: - Doesn't have the same plethora of plugins that Slack does, although it does have a fairly complete API. - It is a gaming product and it shows, which might make some more straight-laced people balk at its perceived unprofessionalism.
    • SahAssar 9y ago
      It's also not open source and you can't self-host it if needed. I'd recommend a IRC server and https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
    • mikro2nd 9y ago
      Love Discord. Only one bone to pick: Every time I sign up to a new Discord instance, I get to jump through all the same hoops to prove to Discord that I'm a Good Person There To Engage As A Proper Human Being. It gets old fast. I wish that Discord instances would talk to one another and say "Oh, that gal, she's probably OK..." and give me at least a step or two up the ladder.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Discord has all the same problems Slack does. It's a proprietary VC-funded app without a sustainable business model.
    • azangru 9y ago
• bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Zulip. Open source with IRC gateway, but most importantly a model that lets you tame the firehose.
• racer-v 9y ago
  From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a "tube" from https://sameroom.io https://sameroom.io - not free though.
  • ryukafalz 9y ago
    If you're looking to bridge Slack and IRC, Matrix does a pretty good job of that. https://imgur.com/a/f2fuO https://imgur.com/a/f2fuO I don't believe anyone's written a fully-functional XMPP connector yet though.
  • rekoros 9y ago
    Free for some providers that have Sameroom-operated "BridgeBots". Any combination of Hangouts, Skype, GroupMe, Telegram, and Gitter is free to connect. We also had a Freenode BridgeBot, but couldn't get around the max connections per user issue.
    • racer-v 9y ago
      Does that mean if I want to use an open source client with Slack, I can use the Gitter BridgeBot and open source Gitter client? Does it work with private Slack channels?
      • rekoros 9y ago
        It does
    • MaxLeiter 9y ago
      Freenode permits I-lines for multiple users from the same IP. Have you looked into that?
      • rekoros 9y ago
        We’re all whitelisted in terms of IPs. The issue is with # connections from the same nick. We worked with Freenode to find a solution and it didn’t pan out. The overwhelming majority of customers connect to Slack though, so it wouldn’t matter price-wise. I think I’m the only one reading #stripe from Skype :-)
• m-p-3 9y ago
  Is Mattermost a viable alternative, and is it possible to bridge it with IRC and XMPP?
  • cyphar 9y ago
    Mattermost has bridges[1]. There's also Matrix[2] which is decentralised and has bridges for almost everything. [1]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge [2]: https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
    • PeterMikhailov 9y ago
      Have you tried running this stuff? Have you tried running your own home server and then bridging your irc network to it? It's not simple.
      • cyphar 9y ago
        I have run my own homeserver, you're right it's not simple. However, the main Matrix homeserver has those bridges set up (so if you don't mind using it, you can). But in the context of a corporate environemnt, you have people who are paid to maintain services like this.
        • PeterMikhailov 9y ago
          Can I bridge my Slack to the main Matrix homeserver ( matrix.org )
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
          • ATsch 9y ago
            Yes, it's even included in the Riot UI. Note that unlike IRC, where bots or users must be on the same server rooms are completely independent of any single homeserver. There's nothing that says a room belongs to a certain homeserver. So the bridges set up by matrix.org will work with any room, unless you explicitly turn off federation.
• dal 9y ago
  This is super shitty.. the only reason to use slack was that you could escape from the shitty web/electron crap. Good bye slack.
• strmpnk 9y ago
  It looks like IRCCloud has done an API based integration which is then exposed again via their own IRCv3 system: https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721 https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721
  • dewey 9y ago
    That looks super interesting. That might be the reason to finally push me from self hosted znc to irc cloud.
• gelstudios 9y ago
  Not to simply pile on to the complaints about this, but I rely on the IRC gateway on my paid account for: Memory constrained use Bandwidth constrained use _Attention_ constrained use I hope there will be a text only or “low latency” mode in the native client.
• munificent 9y ago
  > After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where the gateways can no longer handle all of our features or security needs. Oops. They misspelled "where we are dominant enough that we have more to lose than gain by being able to interoperate with our competitors."
• donatj 9y ago
  Huh, looks like I'm not using Slack anymore. There's a couple slacks I connect to casually only because I can in my already running IRC client.
• ggm 9y ago
  The UI looks easily clone-able. (if anyone wanted) -the LHs selects major groups, then a list of minor groups and identities, then a pane of content. The "value" is the persisting storage and maybe the integration with bots (which IRC had first anyway) and Markdown, which is a really low barrier to entry. So it feels to me like (and I speak as one who often says others can do it, but with no intent to do it myself so be warned) its a low bar implementation goal to do an IRC backed open slack.
• stuaxo 9y ago
  This is how I find out these existed, I could have been using something that didn't a shitload of memory in firefox the whole time :(
• stuaxo 9y ago
  Something that is quite "fun" is to accidentally leave a few slack tabs open in the browser, while running pycharm. (If you like watching the computer slow to a crawl and have to power it down).
• j45 9y ago
  I remember mIRC at this moment. It let an entirely new internet generation connect easier, compared to the chat clients of its' day. Slack still strikes me as a modernized IRC client at heart. Today's IRC client. Discovered by a new internet generation with today's integration trimmings. Let's look at IRC rooted technologies as waves of improvement for a moment. Platforms are guaranteed to come and go, no matter how big. Protocols seem to survive. The need to chat will remain. Protocols like XMPP are important for this reason. Developing XMPP quickly as private protocol builds should be a worthwhile undertaking. XMPP innovation is something I should go learn about more, though. No one platform can be the entire ecosystem. They all try. Maybe it's vanity, or a little insulting to create digital wells of content that the odds say will shut down one day. A step like disconnecting is a challenge for that reason. It will invite lots of people to look elsewhere, trying to find how it should be. It's not unreasonable to provide a limited subset of messaging features with via IRC/XMPP. It doesn't seem unreasonable to improve XMPP itself either. I'm perfectly comfortable with a business strategy argument and wonder if Slack isn't looking long enough. Taking a 50-year vision might actually be better if something like XMPP interoperability and evolution remained to outlast everyone. Leaving the garden nicer than you found it, when possible, isn't always a bad thing. Due to this walling of gardens, my phone has no less than 8 or 10 chat apps silo's I can't avoid. (Skype, Hangouts, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, Messenger, etc.). To all chat visionaries, none of you are that important. I would replace you all in a heartbeat with something that had a longer shelf life. The tech that keeps integration and interoperability are the ones that I care about most. Tools like Pidgin or Trillian connected the worlds of MSN Messenger, ICQ, aim and IRC. Connection and connectedness is blissful for a reason - including across platforms.
• Findeton 9y ago
  It's just another private messaging system. It's making money, that's what counts for them.
• omginternets 9y ago
  Has anybody here switched to mattermost? How has your experience been so far? Any "gotchas" or unanticipated pain-points to be aware of?
  • JeremyNT 9y ago
    My org uses mattermost - a logical addition since we were already heavily invested in gitlab. I don't run the services personally but I know the guys who do, and from what I can tell it mostly Just Works. We use our org's SSO for gitlab, and we use use gitlab auth for mattermost, and all the pieces work together well. I don't use IRC with mattermost, but there are bridges available.
• seangrogg 9y ago
  Mmm, while this wouldn't have impacted my decision in the slightest, I am mostly glad that I have moved over to Discord for everything I used to do in Slack.
  • rocky1138 9y ago
    Is Discord any better? It's still a centralized service run by one company, is it not?
    • seangrogg 9y ago
      My choices in communication technology are based on what myself, my friends, and my colleagues find easy, intuitive, and accessible. That it's a centralized service has no bearing on 99.999% of the reality I share with the people close to me.
    • aepiepaey 9y ago
      Can't speak for Slack, but Discord is a fully walled garden, and they make sure to control how content on the platform is consumed. You can't automate your own account in any way without risking a ban due to breach of ToS (see "self-bots"). This makes it impossible, for example, to get local chat logs (as the official client doesn't support it).
• smilesnd 9y ago
  I think this just proves slack can no longer do what it was originally made for sending/receiving messages to boost productivity. Their are a ton of articles posted on hackernews discussing how slack turns a productive person into a slave of answering questions on slack. Slack is a distraction now, a glorified way to show your boss and others you are doing stuff while achieving nothing. Them removing these protocols isn't about forcing people to use their closed source protocol or shitty gui web technology. It is about taking a techie and forcing him to interact with the reset of the team like a good little sheep. Now he can't ignore the pings from pm and channels. Now he can't ignore the voice/video calls that someone demands of him/her sucking up more of his day with useless trash. All I hear in my head while I read this was either be a sheep like the rest or else.
  • paulryanrogers 9y ago
    Slack's official clients allow the user to control notifications, and therefore when they respond.
• bwooster 9y ago
  It was working great and seriously used and appreciated by our users. This is a tragedy. Many feel the electron clients are extremely clumsy and massive resource hogs. Nobody likes threads. Nobody needs threads.
• znpy 9y ago
  I am unsure why Microsoft Teams isn't used more. Compared to slack, it has not much less, and it comes for free with each subscription to office 365. I've seen the whole office 365 in action at my current company and quite frankly, it's well worth its price.
• ksk 9y ago
  This currently seems to be the only successful business model. Give something for free to get traction. Then slowly erode the free part, and try to get as many people as possible to run on the subscription treadmill. In most situations open source, open protocols and open data formats are an anathema to the cash register going ka-ching. When you start spending other peoples money, they are sure to remind you of this simple fact.
• Improvotter 9y ago
  I'm honestly looking forward to a worthy competitor. Slack has literally been slacking, I haven't seen any noteworthy features in 2 years. And we still don't have a proper client imo, can we please get a native one with some more progress?
  • nxc18 9y ago
    Came here to say this. I was on slack in 2015, took a break and came back in 2017. Nothing changed - no new features, and yet it was less reliable than I remembered. They aren't even up to date on emoji. I just can't find symbols I expect to be there. Talk about low effort. And yet they had time to redesign the ones they did have (and the new ones are fugly).
• bwooster 9y ago
  Despite being a walled garden, the IRC gateway was Slack's saving grace. It was what made it palatable to many old-school chatters and people who didn't want to add another proprietary client to the giant list of other proprietary chat clients needed to keep in touch with people.
• endgame 9y ago
  I see Slack is now big enough that they can stop pretending to care about interoperability, and essentially pulled a Google Talk on us all. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
• tlrobinson 9y ago
  This seems like as good of a place to ask as any: Are there any decent terminal-based Slack clients? (at least until Slack decides to shut down their API...)
• Endy 9y ago
  Well, that's the end of me using Slack.
• tdewitt 9y ago
  That sucks. The IRC gateway was the only way I could ignore the rampant not spam and image dumps. I'll miss you, /ignore. RIP
• morsch 9y ago
  Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
• mrmondo 9y ago
  What a depressing, disappointing move. An already closed ecosystem is making itself further insulated from open culture and competition. This further solidifies my position of avoiding the product.
• beavis2 9y ago
  This is good news for me. My company was considering Slack - the only reason it was agreed was due to the IRC gateway. So it looks like slack is out of the question now.
  • pas 9y ago
    What are the other candidates? What's your criteria?
• dethos 9y ago
  It is a shame. People with older computers will have a harder time, also people with their own work-flow and clients. Deep down, we knew that the Gateways were just a temporary thing, to help people enter the walled garden and also to shut down who might complain about the move to slack. Even though your company might use it (you can't do much there), you should resist when communities choose this system to their chat, there are open alternatives that fit better the use case.
• syshum 9y ago
  Embrace - Extend - Extinguish... Never lock yourself in to Propriety systems. Open Code, Open Hardware, open Protocols
• s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I appreciate the creativity in the presentation, but isn't every post here a "Tell HN" post?
• bitL 9y ago
  Step 1: Build your initial product on open technologies, harvest goodwill of enthusiastic people Step 2: Become popular and highly profitable Step 3: Ditch openness of your platform, implying your initial supporters were just useful idiots
  • jake_the_third 9y ago
    As much as I hate to admit it, I was android's useful idiot. I seem to have learned from my mistake though. I never bought into systems controlled by commercial entities afterwards. Unfortunately, the pool of useful idiots doesn't dwindle with each cycle iteration since there are always a new batch of idiots willing to take the bait (and attack you if you voice your concerns). So this strategy won't loose its effectiveness. Expect to see many iterations in the future :(
• 220V_USKettle 9y ago
  Closed garden. :(
• anonpoi 9y ago
  Bye Slack, fuck you, hello Riot =)
• ferminblancoa14 9y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=387878515008216&l=d4d2618fb9 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=387878515008216&l=d4...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• o- 9y ago
  Great, I feel like an idiot. I advocated slack, because it granted the freedom to choose a client. Now I helped lock-in others. Suggestions for alternatives, that I could migrate to? The requirements are: mid sized teams, desktop and mobile, all major os. People used web based client, native clients, irc gw, and bots. We need search and archive. Self-hosting is an option.
  • rocky1138 9y ago
    Take a look at Matrix. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
  • progval 9y ago
    IRC, with web clients like IRCCloud, TheLounge, or IRCAnywhere.
  • tuxracer 9y ago
    https://wire.com/ https://wire.com/
  • brodock 9y ago
    rocket.chat is the best alternative
    • e12e 9y ago
      On paper I like matrix, or prosody (xmpp/jabber) with extensions (ditto irc + logging bots etc). But after looking a bit at rocket.chat along with the api - it's hard to recommend something else as a self-hosted, open slack alternative. I'm not enthusiastic about the stack/mongodb dep - but boy is the api nice and documented, and their docker-compose a joy to get started with: https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/docker-containers/docker-compose/ https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/docker-containers/dock... https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/rest-api/ https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/rest-api/ [ed: oh, and there's a hosted option and you can pay if you want. I think that's also a big plus]
      • apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
• oiluj 9y ago
  Seems like alot of us have an issue surrounding walled gardens. We too see the problem and have recently launched https://m.io https://m.io to tackle the lack of interoperability across teams and platforms. For now we're allowing for anyone to chat across teams and with users that are on other enterprise messaging platforms like Cisco Spark.
• Steeeve 9y ago
  Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
• tudorw 9y ago
  evolution sucks
• progval 9y ago
  > After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where the gateways can no longer handle all of our features or security needs. I don't think Slack ever cared much about the gateways. I have used the IRC gateway for years, and it was never compliant with IRC protocols. I even had to patch my IRC client to work with Slack. IRC is also being extended with new features [1], some of which are designed specifically for gateways to services like Slack. But Slack never used these. It does not even use features that are supported by all IRC clients literally for decades (eg. AWAY) [1]: https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ Could you be more specific about what features IRC/IRCv3 lacks?
  • jgkamat 9y ago
    I attempted to use the xmpp gateway for a while before realizing it had a bug which caused the gateway to spam messages on reconnection. I contacted support and they said it was an intended feature and they wouldn't support proper xmpp group standards. That was the day I ditched slack forever.
• w0m 9y ago
  :(
• Nicolesandy23_ 9y ago
  Creditors keep coming after me and putting all to my credit report, This really caught me up and keep drowning my credit score. As at Feb 20th, My credit score was 530 until I contact the God’s eyes. I explained how bad my credit report was and also how all my credit cards are maxed out. He said to me not to worry, He gave me instructions to follow and we get started. He help me clear all the negatives collections on my report and help me increase my credit score 810 excellent within 72 hours. He also proceed to help me wipe the debts on my 3 credit cards and I get to have cash advance once again. I can’t thank him enough. He’s worth the publicity. Text or email for quick response and have your issue solved. (GODEYEVIEWHACKER (at) HOTMAIL (dot) COM or 443-338-3730)
• mach5 9y ago
  this sucks. i use smuxi specifically so all my chat apps can be in the same window. why do this? your web app is just not nice to use for text chat. its busy and poisoned by emotes and confusing menus.
• newnewpdro 9y ago
  Slack never intended for these gateways to stick around. They only offered them as a way to get a foothold in organizations where vestiges of influential IRC/XMPP users required them.
• hedora 9y ago
  I was about to set up a native xmpp/irc client because “Safari reloaded this tab because it was using too much energy” sigh Richard Stallman was right. Again.
• Luke-Jr 9y ago
  I guess I'll bid farewell to the Slack communities I've been participating in. I'm not interested in using a browser or installing additional software for chat.
  • ptman 9y ago
    You could try to get them to bridge to matrix
• 1024core 9y ago
  Why is anyone surprised? Almost every software company embaces "open standards" when they're starting up, because it helps them get a foothold. But once they're established, they want to kick out that ladder, in case the newer competitor comes along. Establish yourself, then build a moat. This is also a sign that they may be planning to IPO. How else would they sell a walled garden?
• shortformblog 9y ago
  Slack is the company that can't be bothered to support Opera, let alone open protocols. Incredibly lame, but par for the course.
• rdflterr 9y ago
  Couldn't be more bummed about this.
• rdflterr 9y ago
  This is a huge bummer.
• stevefeinstein 9y ago
  TIL there was an IRC gateway that I would have definitely used if I knew about it. Darn.
• ensany 9y ago
  Hi ! Please visit our website https://www.ensany.com/ https://www.ensany.com/ and register with us to support our humanity programme :)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  Used you to grow, don't need you anymore. Thank you, but bye.
• alokitr 9y ago
  I just recently started using slack and that's because a) of the irc gateway, b) people expressed interest in me connecting to a few "rooms" (I don't even know the slack terminology for room). Yes it's always peer pressure from the ones that know "better". It's sad that I 'll have to disconnect from those rooms and it's even sadder that I did not stand my ground but rather gave in and connected to slack. At least I 'll have the consolation I was right I the first place. Bye slack. You will NOT be sorely missed.
• endymi0n 9y ago
  From a business perspective, this is incredibly stupid, as they‘re basically abandoning their early, nerdy adopters who brought them into companies in the first place. It‘s a big „fuck you, now that we‘re a REAL COMPANY“, we don‘t need you anymore. It’s also a bad sign on who has taken charge and what the culture is like by now. If they had REALLY wanted, nothing of this would have been impossible. If you can‘t secure a weak or weird protocol, just go down the route Google did with the Cloud SQL proxy and tunnel it. There‘s no big complication connecting to a localhost gateway instead that handles all the authentication and encryption - we‘re talking about a nerdcore audience anyway. FWIW, I don‘t give much about IRC and love Slack as is, but I still can‘t believe they‘re acting this nearsighted.
• beshrkayali 9y ago
  What must-have/killer features won't work with IRC/XMPP gateways? Also, even if there is something, shouldn't it be optional then? I don't mind them wanting to discontinue support for it, it's their business after all. I mind the BS reason. Feels like a Google Reader scenario...
• umen 9y ago
  I don't understand ... im using slack at work , and why should i use IRC or XMPP with slack ? and why it is so bad they cancel it ? realy.. its just tool .. why i need IRC on top of that?
  • hvidgaard 9y ago
    Using IRC "on top" is to avoid using the Slack client at all. I can understand that, and Slack would shut down a lot of critics if they made native clients, and a CLI client.
    • umen 9y ago
      just to be clear when taking about IRC we are talking about mIRC type right ? native client to what ? i'm using their electron client .. what is wrong about it ? ( memory hangy?)
      • hvidgaard 9y ago
        IRC can be any client you want. Not much IRC, but the ability to leverage the hundreds of good IRC clients to use one in your workflow that fits your needs exactly. The Electron client is a glorified browser and webpage with none of the benefits of a native app, but with all downsides that entails, including using gigabytes of memory for simple chat. It's a damn chat client that needs to listen to and submit events, and order them into channels. That is it, it shouldn't use much, or feel slow at all. And then there is the CLI issue. If you want developers to promote your product, then make it good for them. Many developers want to use live in the commandline.
• yason 9y ago
  Ah, the good old "just when I began to think Slack is pretty decent after all", still remembering fights with Windows office communicator and others. The reason I use the IRC gateway is primarily to cut down all the extra crap except textual messages, and to be able to message from the console without having to switch windows or launch web pages (I run irssi 24/7 under tmux). This has been a nice sweet spot, with the improvement of seeing message history as well. The trend for things built in the 10's seem to be constant change and fear for shutting down. Conversely, IRC from the early 90's still works fine. IRC is like water pipes. It doesn't come with flashing lights but it does what it needs to do, does it reliably, and nothing more. And you can buy bottled water in various flavours but if water pipes didn't exist life would be far worse.
• jasonvorhe 9y ago
  One colleague at my last employer demanded to use the XMPP gateway and everyone hated it, because he constantly missed information, didn't get personal messages and didn't receive emoji reactions. I'm glad the finally removed this.
• timkeller 9y ago
  This kind of announcement needed to include "and today we're announcing native apps across all platforms". Honestly, the Slack app has become worse (not better) over time.
• lolikoisuru 9y ago
  And with that goes any chance of me ever even trying slack.
• Shoothe 9y ago
  Good riddance. Their XMPP gateway was extremely basic, frequently dropped messages. Why pretend it's working when it's clearly not? Here's the compliance ranking: https://conversations.im/compliance/ https://conversations.im/compliance/
• aestetix 9y ago
  It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies (maybe tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base. To an extent this makes sense, like if there is a new company CEO who has a different vision, etc. But many of these decisions-- dropping Google Reader, the trend to ditch the headphone jack, and now Slack killing IRC-- seem to be made for no apparent logic reason, and giving some bullshit excuse like "security reasons." Is this driven by data? If so, why don't they release the data and show us? Alternatively, in a free market, the way to best compete is to offer more options to your customers, unless you've attained a semi-monopoly, or have some kind of trust agreement. Is it that difficult to maintain these things? Apple and Google are among the richest companies in the world, and Slack just raised $250 million. Given that not only are all three features I'm discussing established and probably only need occasional maintenance, the headphone jack has been around for over 100 years. It's not like they need new science breakthroughts for it. None of it makes any sense, unless the entire Bay Area has gone Dilbert.
  • vesak 9y ago
    > But many of these decisions-- dropping Google Reader, the trend to ditch the headphone jack, and now Slack killing IRC-- seem to be made for no apparent logic reason, and giving some bullshit excuse like "security reasons." Google Reader didn't bring Google more money, even indirectly. Removing the headphone jack leads to less cables and less open holes in the device. Slack's IRC gateway wasn't very good, and nobody used it, plus its existence allows easy circumvention of some paid tier features, like logging. Everything has a reason, even if you might not like the reasoning.
    • aestetix 9y ago
      > Google Reader didn't bring Google more money, even indirectly. Was there a way to pay for it? Further, even if a feature doesn't bring money, does it cost sufficient money to maintain to merit removing? Why not just open source it and let the community maintain it? > Removing the headphone jack leads to less cables and less open holes in the device. The stated excuse for this was to allow the system to be thinner. By "less cables," do you mean inside the device or outside it? For inside it, I don't know, for outside it, it has lead to all kinds of drama, such as for professional musicians who have expensive equipment that used the classic jack. Further, it's clear to me Apple was not confident it was a good idea by the fact they included the lightning jack->headphone adaptor for free. Regarding "less open holes", don't they have waterproofing technology already? One of the big arguments I've seen that makes more sense is that by forcing audio through bluetooth or through the lightning port, they are able to push DRM. Unsure what I think about that. This also doesn't explain why other places, like Google, are following suit, much to the dismay of their customers. > Slack's IRC gateway wasn't very good, and nobody used it, plus its existence allows easy circumvention of some paid tier features, like logging. I use it extensively, and a quick persual of twitter (and this comment section) shows I am not alone. Further, if "nobody used it", then why would "circumvention of some paid tier features" matter, if nobody is doing circumvention? Now I have to make the decision whether to have a tab open, which from past experience will suck up about a gig of ram and be generally sluggish, or to use their native app, which from what I understand is basically an app wrapper around Electron and is even more sluggish than the non-app.
• pulsarpietro 9y ago
  Set up an IRC server, you don't need all that litter-ish emoticon, culture of distraction. Slack isn't anything new, is something they claim to be new so they can make money out of it.
• hultner 9y ago
  WeeChat Slack API plugin (works without IRC-gateway) https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack Background I'm not associated but I thought I had to share this. Since about a year back I've migrated to wee-slack for slack usage in my WeeChat IRC-client, it's also possible to use WeeChat as a bouncer through WeeChat relay (if not mistaken there's irssi-proxy:esque proxy-plugin too). I've been a die hard irssi-fan and still use it for much of my IRC interaction and been using weechat as a irssi-like slack client. As a bonus we can use many of the features that didn't work through the irc-gateway. You can also see a preview of my setup on my twitter https://twitter.com/ahultner/status/923588418126348289 https://twitter.com/ahultner/status/923588418126348289 If you're interested of my personal setup you can find it in my dotfiles https://github.com/Hultner/dotfiles/tree/master/cetrezMBP/.weechat https://github.com/Hultner/dotfiles/tree/master/cetrezMBP/.w...
  • strkek 9y ago
    This is what I use. Unfortunately as soon as you load previous Slack messages, the log file gets all messed up with their message order, so you can't rely on it as-is.
• benbristow 9y ago
  Since Slack's APIs are open to use would it not be possible to make an IRC/XMPP 'proxy' server?
• davidgerard 9y ago
  We went to paid Slack because it was, functionally, a hosted IRC server. I even recommended it to others on that basis. Looks like we're going elsewhere. What else is there that does the job? IRC interface, archives messages you missed.
• harisamin 9y ago
  maybe its time to revive my macOS native slack client MacSlack :) https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 I've posted about it before here on HN but wasn't sure if there's enough interest
• bhaavan 9y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
• skykooler 9y ago
  ...Welp; so much for being able to access Slack from a phone running a third-party OS. The Slack mobile web page is useless; you can't chat or view conversation logs from it, I've never figured out why it exists in the first place.
• invalid_ 9y ago
  Bye bye slack
• gazarsgo 9y ago
  Does anyone actually prefer coding to the IRC and XMPP protocols instead of the Slack API ? https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term seems more than sufficient to me, and hackable if I find an itch to scratch... Better yet, would anyone here pay for development of a self-hosted IRC or XMPP gateway to Slack? :P
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dickbasedregex 9y ago
  This sort of app gets rewritten every two years. People act like it’s the second coming every time. IRC with persistence? Oh that’s acana, slack, hipchat, whatever this year’s VC-backed boondoggle is. I haven’t seen anything new after IRC beyond ICQ. Just like movies now. Same meh, new packaging.
• Adutude 9y ago
  I stopped using the slack client because it was causing my desktop to hang, so I started using the IRC interface, which works great for my purposes. Since they are getting rid of how I access slack, I guess I'm done w/ slack.
• 908087 9y ago
  Why is it that the worst tools and companies constantly seem to end up floating to the top in terms of popularity?
• samrocksc 9y ago
  I just want to point out that a use case is that some people like to conserve resources and the electron app is the biggest resource hog in my ecosystem....
• joeevans1000 9y ago
  Duh of course. I can't believe the wholesale abandonment of IRC by so many open source communities for Slack. It's been so... so... horrifying to watch. Can't you see we're giving up critical data and history to an outfit that no one has control over whatsoever. Slack charges you to search the history beyond a certain number of messages. SLACK CHARGES YOU TO SEARCH THE HISTORY BEYOND A CERTAIN NUMBER OF MESSAGES! Yeah, let's make everyone all across the world pay to access a software community's most vital resource regardless of their income or even means to pay. Let's actively make this information sit behind a paywall accessible only by those privileged enough to breach it, but only as long as they keep paying month after month.
• valeriansaliou 9y ago
  This opens up a market for someone building a Slack app and putting it on the Slack marketplace, that would relay in/out messages from/to XMPP o IRC. I'd pay for this, I definitely don't want to use Slack from their Electron app that sucks both my battery and my RAM. I'd stick with Adium as an XMPP client connected to Slack.
  • u801e 9y ago
    When connecting over the XMPP gateway, have you ever had issues where your client would lock up while connecting and take multiple attempts to establish a connection? I had that problem and ended up switching to the IRC gateway.