23 ms·

Slack's bait and switch

757 points by jcbrand 9y ago

gsich 9y ago
From the XMPP Foundation: https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480 https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480
- mic47 9y ago
  With this attitude of the XMPP Foundation, I doubt XMPP have any future. Better question would be to ask what should be improved in XMPP so that they could implement that properly. Why? Facebook, google, slack are not using XMPP internally for chat products, because of technical reasons. They dropped XMPP gateway for mix of technical and strategic reasons. Instead of trying to be a warrior for technical correctness, XMPP foundation should rather seek feedback and try to make sure that developers integrating with XMPP will do everything correctly as easy as possible. Otherwise, more and more projects would be dropping XMPP support.
  - gsich 9y ago
    They could implement what properly? According to the tweet XMPP supports this. Slack just doesn't care. I like the attitude of telling the truth. Compare to Torvalds.
    - d33 9y ago
      > I like the attitude of telling the truth. Compare to Torvalds. Care to elaborate?
      - gsich 9y ago
        I just like it when people flame and insult when it's deserved. A nice contrast to the "happy world; I get triggered by everything" stuff.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        So rather than actually trying to find solutions, you prefer people to yell and shout at each other and not get anything done.
        gsich 9y ago
        Well, they can do both.
  - EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
    Facebook and Google? They use IRC internally for technical reasons. IRC doesn't fall over. Googlers internally revolted when they were told to use Hangouts internally. XMPP works great and I've used it at several employers. There's no technical reasons to avoid it; it really is all about lock-in and corporate planning. I've watched Ralph struggle for years against corporate asshats. It's a real tragedy that all these companies don't participate in open standards. We shouldn't have ever expected good things from Slack.
    - mic47 9y ago
      > Facebook and Google? They use IRC internally for technical reasons. IRC doesn't fall over. Googlers internally revolted when they were told to use Hangouts internally. I was talking about implementation of Facebook messenger, or Google hangout (which does not use XMPP), not what is used internally for communication. Also, at Facebook, messenger is most used product internally. IRC is still used, but not that much (depends on org, infra devs use IRC more than product devs). But IRC is still essential, in case of emergencies (where you don't want to use your own product, as it may be down).
  - petre 9y ago
    > Otherwise, more and more projects would be dropping XMPP support. Eve Online just abandoned their own in game chat server and replaced it with ejabberd.
  - ralphm 9y ago
    Let me first turn this around. I actually personally tried to interact with the Slack team on how they implemented their XMPP gateway, early on. I pointed out how a relatively small missing protocol feature (server-side group chat bookmarking) was severely impacting the usability of the gateway, as it caused caused you to have to explicitly join the group chat room representing a Slack channel on every client (re)connect. In fact they violated protocol in case a client requested the list of bookmarks, causing clients to hang while connecting. It took them a year to start responding, and the problem was not fixed. Additionally I had pointed that their statements on XMPP security were factually wrong. No useful response or changes were made. That all said, I really like a bunch of things about Slack and have repeatedly pointed out in discussions in the XMPP community that there is a lot to be learned from Slack in terms of features (and how they work technically), UI consistency, and usability. As JC points out, this is surprisingly hard to achieve in open source projects. Even harder to pull off for a very diverse community around a set of protocols, rather than a single software product. There are also things in Slack that I think would be a lot better if they were modelled after recent protocol proposals in XMPP. For example we are working on something called MIX, an evolution on group chat, based on Publish-Subscribe. This allows for orthogonal streams of information bound to a channel, besides just chat and presence, like merge request notifications, Twitter mentions, etc. that could be displayed in a side-bar or ticker, instead of (annoyingly) interleaved with chat messages. I would have welcomed Slack interacting with the community, but they didn't.
    - mic47 9y ago
      Thanks for adding more context! It's hard to get that from twitter, sorry.
Maro 9y ago
I don't know the numbers, but if there's not a lot of users/companies using these alternative protocols, it makes sense not to support them. I'd do the same thing. The Facebook/Twitter analogy is flawed, because those are ad-supported businesses, so the company has a strong financial interest in having users on its own/primary platform, where it can deliver ads. I think that's not the case with Slack (?). But even there, I think the incentive to not support N protocols is not to get the +0.1% revenue from IRC/XMPP users, it's velocity/simplicity in product development, which is worth more money in the long term. Disclaimer: I worked for FB previously, on Workplace, which is a direct competitor to Slack.
- rplnt 9y ago
  I think it's even worse than "supporting" it, it was breaking their UX if certain users didn't have certain features (namely threads). Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack
  - merlincorey 9y ago
    > Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack When you already have too many channels, and then they give you the ability to have too many threads. I feel like they do a worse job at the supposed value add of being able to archive and later refer to a topic of conversation than channels simply because they are so light weight and proliferate so many of them, potentially. Plus it's really jarring to be pulled into a bunch of threads.
    - jochung 9y ago
      I think the too-many-channels problem is a symptom of the excessive walled gardening. Slack segregates by interests and social group, and bundles that with strict gatekeeping. There is no way for people to remix that to suit their own preferences. You can only fragment existing communities more. I would love a slack multiclient where I can put channels I care about side by side, regardless of origin, and keep the rest out of sight. Instead now everyone has their own #random and #offtopic and so on. Cruising between Slacks and Discords is like navigating a hall of mirrors. If there is disagreement, the only solution is complete schism.
atopuzov 9y ago
Anybody using matrix protocol? And riot.im client? Thoughts?
- akerro 9y ago
  It's better than Slack in terms of usability, performance and UI (subjective), but lacks some integrations that Slack has. Search engine is quite poor (not that Slack is any better, it's shit too).
- nukeop 9y ago
  Riot has everything Slack does, but it's more competent and free. And obviously the main selling point is compatibility with all kinds of other chats.
  - akerro 9y ago
    >Riot has everything Slack does Gitlab integration?
    - kemonocode 9y ago
      At my workplace we use Rocket.chat and it does have GitLab integration, so there's another possible alternative.
    - nukeop 9y ago
      Yes, of course. But unlike Slack you are not limited to "official" "integrations", you can add arbitrary widgets and can write your own.
- Unklejoe 9y ago
  I'm running the reference Matrix server (Synapse) on my home computer, and I'm using the Riot.im client. I mainly use it to communicate with a group of three friends. They are using Android, and I'm using an iPhone. It seems to work about as well as any other messaging app, which is impressive if you ask me, considering it's completely open and self-hosted.
nateguchi 9y ago
> Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations. Whilst this is partially true, One of the key features enterprises need and that Slack supplies is the ability to fully export messages for transfer and compliance purposes. One of the main differentiators between paid and unpaid slack is message retention. To my knowledge, I don't think the XMPP and IRC were used by anyone to overcome this limit but I'm pretty sure it's been done using their API. They haven't shut of usage of their API for this purpose so I'm pretty sure that lost sales is the motivation behind this change. The OP talks about the relevant ways Slack can implement features into their XMPP and IRC endpoints to allow new features. But this probably generates a lot of technical debt for a feature that isn't used by many people. (Also, anecdotally, I've found very few XMPP clients that actually support any of the proposed extensions).
- james_pm 9y ago
  My biggest issue with Slack is that on the free plan they store everything forever, but only allow you to access the last 10,000 messages. I'm fine with limits, but the users should be free to delete messages beyond the limit. It's my data that I entered in and they are preenting me from deleting it which is a pretty nasty thing to do. I suspect this will all change in May when the GDPR comes into play. The policy is clearly not compliant. They will likely either need to allow for deletion, or give users access to the data (even on free accounts).
  - rmc 9y ago
    Existing EU data protection law since the mid 90s gives people the right to get a copy of their personal data, with big players, like Facebook, supporting it for years. I don't know if Slack has any offices or entity in the EU, but you could try making an access request today./
    - detuur 9y ago
      They take money from EU clients, in Euros, so they are bound by EU law. GDPR will tighten the net around this sort of business models.
merlincorey 9y ago
The author I think is confused about the meaning of Slack's "emoji reactions". They are "badges" that can be applied to messages by any one who is in the channel the message was sent. Discord also has this feature. At any rate, that doesn't change the fact that it probably could have been implemented in XMPP. As one of /those/ people still using IRC, I would personally have been totally fine continuing to use the IRC gateway without these features.
- linsomniac 9y ago
  My company switched to a free slack account a couple years ago, from our own IRC server. The primary reason for the change was to get something a bit richer in abilities, and emoji reactions is something we make extensive use of. Just saying there are people out there that find these sorts of "XMPP breaking" features not only useful, but mission critical. Would have been useful if their announcement included some of their data for reaching the conclusion, like "95% of channels use emoji reactions in more than 5% of their messages". The announcement, as it was, didn't read very well to me.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way?
    - root_crontab 9y ago
      Someone says 'about to push this potentially breaking change to a shared resource, is that ok?'. Then everyone else posts a :thumbsup: Obviously, this could be done differently. But it's easy to do it like this and come to depend on it.
      - cdubzzz 9y ago
        While that use case is certainly an example of a convenience, I don’t think it passes the “mission critical” bar. I can’t think of any way that emoji reactions would be mission critical unless they are part of an API that can be used for automated execution of tasks. But maybe that sort of thing does exist?
djhworld 9y ago
> One of the sad things that has come out of Slack's meteoric rise to success, has been how many free and open source projects have jumped over to using it (after previously using IRC or XMPP). In so doing, they have closed off their discussions from search engines and they prevent people from accessing their past archives. Additionally the traditional mailing lists are full of "please can I have an invite to the Slack workspace" spam
- BuildTheRobots 9y ago
  It's not even that discussions have been lost from search engines, actual slack users are loosing massive amounts of history. If you a free/OSS project then you likely have little budget so you're stuck using hte free tier of Slack, which means users can only see the last 10,000 messages. We're loosing vast swathes of our history/discussion/media.
  - RyJones 9y ago
    The history isn't searchable, but the owners of the Slack can export the complete public history at any time. Here is an export that I did when we moved Hyperledger to Rocket.Chat: https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive I see the hosted version is down, though.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Key word: public history. Most of my interesting history is in private chats.
  - richthegeek 9y ago
    So would there be a use-case for a combined bot+app that you can connect some storage to (S3, FTP) which archives all channel message history in a searchable form? It could make it visible to search engines, searchable by humans, linkable to people outside of slack, and shouldn't take up very much storage space. Should be quite trivial to build also, and cheap enough to run as a bit of charity if projects pay for their own storage.
sandGorgon 9y ago
if there was an XMPP based hosted chat application that lets me create private rooms for my company (using google auth), I would migrate in a heartbeat. however, XMPP mistakes open-ness in the protocol with openness in conversations. Every showcase XMPP product is public, open chat rooms.
- jcbrand 9y ago
  I've added OAuth support for converse.js, it's not released yet, but the code is written. I intend to release that soon to https://inverse.chat https://inverse.chat. Rooms can be made private, members-only and non-searchable. This is standard XMPP behavior.
  - sandGorgon 9y ago
    its not just at the room level, its at the org level. the standard practice is that people create rooms in a slack org - and they are guaranteed that they are private to the org. one more step is where i can create private rooms to a few people within the org. XMPP obviously can support this, but the products built on top of XMPP are too open. The protocol doesnt have an issue - but the people building products on top of XMPP have an inherent distaste for organizational workflows.
    - jjrh 9y ago
      I'm not following. You can run a 'private'/'silo' xmpp server by turning off S2S. There are various commercial solutions that offer this.
some_account 9y ago
Why do we fall for this behavior over and over again? As long as we trade freedom for convenience, this will continue.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  We are suppose to act like the theoretical rational customer, yet concerns about potential bait and switch get called "conspiracy theory". Long term thinking is so uncommon it's almost frowned upon.
- gkya 9y ago
  I'm always amazed how easy it is to lure people with castrated fancy UI and things like emoji.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    Each new iOS update comes with new emojis nowadays, which is a great way to nudge the mainstream user to keep their OS updated...
  - matwood 9y ago
    The Welcome to the Macintosh podcast has fascinating multi-part series on emoji, and why they are such a big deal.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    You're seriously downplaying the usability and simplicity improvements Slack brought to the table.
    - gkya 9y ago
      No, I'm not. For one, I've never used it. The parent comment was referring to how they provided endpoints for programs connecting through open protocols, and now that they have some sort of critical mass, just dismissing the users of the service that utilize it through those. And my comment supports the viewpoint that we fall in for UX and convenience and low/no cost, then get screwed like this.
emodendroket 9y ago
Emoji reactions are a different feature than sending emoji. Also, the idea that e-mail predates the surveillance aspect of the Web... Well, that was baked in from the beginning, as detailed in Surveillance Valley.
patrickaljord 9y ago
Bait and switch is a bit harsh, I guess most of their users don't use IRC and it's a huge waste of resource and time for them. Even Open Source projects drop support for old tech like debian dropped support for old SPARC architecture in 2015. Of course the difference is that with Open Source anyone can pick up where they left but that's an issue with any proprietary/close source software and it's a risk one takes when going with a solution such as Slack.
- jsilence 9y ago
  IRC is an acronym for "IRC is not dead"
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  Anyone can explain why I'm being so downvoted here? Is anything I stated wrong or offensive or something? Genuinely curious.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    - patrickaljord 9y ago
      They never embraced IRC, they just had a gateway for people still using it. This would be valid if Slack's protocol was based on IRC and they later extended it and made it incompatible with IRC. This is not the case here.
unicornporn 9y ago
> Slack, like so many others before them, pretend to care about interoperability, opening up just so slightly, so that they can lure in people with the promise of "openness", before eventually closing the gate once they've achieved sufficient size and lock-in. On spot. People are lured in by hype and forget the long-term consequences. Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.
- rovek 9y ago
  I'd be interested to know how widely used these gateways are, since the conventional wisdom on HN is so frequently "vote with your wallet/feet/personal data". As they say: Use it or lose it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ge0rg 9y ago
    As a user, I was very disappointed to see that the gateways must be enabled by the project owner, not by the users themselves. In the end none of the Slack groups I've participated in allowed me to connect via IRC/XMPP.
    - herbst 9y ago
      Pretty sure enabling these by default would lead to a moderation nightmare in many groups.
      - ge0rg 9y ago
        I don't see how. You would still need to authenticate with that group, so it wouldn't automatically allow anonymous participants from the Internets.
      - calcifer 9y ago
        Slack is an in-company chat product (their slogan is literally “where work happens” [1]) and it was never intended for public groups, which is why all invite automation tools for Slack are third-party. Slack doesn’t want you to use their product as a public chatroom and they try really hard to make that as unattractive as possible. Given that, “moderation nightmare” is not really a concern for the target audience since if your company needs moderation in its work chat, you have much bigger problems. [1] https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/
icc97 9y ago
My major preference for Slack was replacing Skype chats, so there was no loss in terms of open source. Lots of people complain that it's just a fancy IRC client, but they don't realise how painless it is to get non-tech people to start using it. But quite clearly there needs to be a fully open sourced alternative. I think WordPress is a great example of how it should be done. Provide a super simple way to create xxx.slackclone.com in exactly the same number of steps as it takes to create a slack group whilst also providing something that you can download and install yourself. I think any project would have to be in PHP. Perhaps that sounds stupid but I think again following the WordPress model is a good track. PHP is the most easy way for low-tech people to get their own up and running. It should be as easy as the 5-minute WordPress install to get your own server. edit: Plus PHP is what Slack is built on and I quite like the irony. The further irony though is that WordPress use Slack now. Perhaps in a similar way that WordPress fought against the React licensing they might replace Slack if there was a good enough clone. As far as I can tell the aim could be to create as close as possible a clone of slack, ripping off as many features as possible without stepping over a boundary where Slack could try and shut you down.
- simion314 9y ago
  I agree, no idea why you are downvoted. At my job the Slack was forced on us by boss, probably because of the hype, we were using Skype before and we still use it because the team was used to Skype, it worked good enough, slack just added for us extra distractions. I think that even a good alternative appears if the hype is not enough it won't catch, also before Slack we used Hipchat for a short time, same story, it was imposed to the team because of the hype, in the end Slack got a bigger hype I assume.
Quarrelsome 9y ago
what's wrong with freenode.irc? As far as I can tell it still works as it did before.
rburhum 9y ago
So how do you propose they make money instead?
- andybak 9y ago
  Their business model is fine for many groups of user. However - open source projects in particular should be thinking about archiving, accessibility, discoverability etc. Slack is a bizarre choice which I can only ascribe to "nice UI and good timing". I'm personally getting a bit sick of it for another pragmatic reason. It's bloody slow to open, slow to switch accounts and even slow to switch channels.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    There is very little "nice" about their UI. UX isn't good (subjective, I know); it's not accessible at all; their "apps" take gigs of RAM and waste CPU, very slow search, not intuitive, etc. I was able to search years of intensive mailing in both server and local cache in an almost instantaneous fashion in Outlook {2003, 2010 & 2016} for Windows, but Slack can't properly search a year and a half of history without choking. On almost every level, slack is a complete technological failure (where it matters).
    - andybak 9y ago
      Note that I said "nice UI" and not "nice UX" ;-)
      - LeoNatan25 9y ago
        I'm really not sure how the two can be separate. In user interface concepts, UI design and UX go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, they do not just for UI but almost everywhere else. Case in point, Apple's glass windows that caused people to hit their heads in them by mistake. Terrible design and terrible UX.
amedvednikov 9y ago
I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem by building a free native desktop client for Slack, Skype, XMPP, Twitter etc. It doesn't have the 10 000 messages limit, it's very light (~100 KB) and fast: https://eul.im https://eul.im I recently started working on it full-time, so I expect a stable release to be out this month.
- mcjiggerlog 9y ago
  Looks cool, but do you have any intention on supporting macOS Sierra (or earlier versions)? > You have macOS 10.12.6. The application requires macOS 10.13 or later.
  - amedvednikov 9y ago
    The macOS bundle is not set up correctly right now, that's why it doesn't work on older versions of macOS. Run it from Terminal for now: ~/Downloads/eul.app/Contents/MacOS/eul I'll fix this in v0.31.
- gkya 9y ago
  The premise is cool indeed, but are you really going to solve "this walled garden problem" with a closed-source application?
- la_oveja 9y ago
  Looks VERY promising! I wanted the Linux alpha but doesn't seem like it's there yet :( I'll be following this for sure <3
  - amedvednikov 9y ago
    Thanks! Linux beta will be out this month. Right now I'm working on fixing bugs and crashes and implementing missing crucial features. Wrapping up the Linux GUI bit will only take a couple of days.
- boramalper 9y ago
  > I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem By building a closed-source client? Cool project; it's really impressive and I'd love to use once it gets stable, but don't you think your claim is a bit incompatible with your method?
kemonocode 9y ago
Hard to believe this is the same people who once worked in Glitch[0] and I wager that long after Slack is dead and buried, people will probably remember "that one quirky online game" with more fond memories than their productivity and resource-sapping amnesiac-unless-you-pay-up abomination of a product. [0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/ https://www.glitchthegame.com/
sharemywin 9y ago
I even hate the sound of "surveillance capitalism". It sounds so evil and insidious.
maxehmookau 9y ago
I, like many others, are starting to fall out of love with Slack. This may well be the straw that breaks the camels back. - Resource hogging - Buggy iOS app (especially on iPhone X) - Missing accessibility features - Lack of native app They've taken $0.75bn in funding over 10 rounds and still suffer from some _basic_ issues.
- juststeve 9y ago
  750 million USD?
  - tedd4u 9y ago
    Looks like $790M https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-funding-rounds https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-fundin...
- strkek 9y ago
  Also: - Mentions: Many times I've tried to mention someone but Slack goes and picks the wrong person. If I'm typing `@johnd`, then it should be fairly evident that I'm trying to mention `@johndoe`; don't make me go through that UI when you should have enough info already. - Buggy snippets: Why do I have to go through a slow UI just to paste some code, when triple-backtick should be enough? - Triple-backtick: No code highlighting. And just try to copy its content; you'll be surprised when your clipboard looks as if passed through an `s/\n/\n\n/g` filter. - Scroll up: Scrolling up many pages above causes some weird jumps. --- Incidentally, the Discord people got all these things right.
- shrimpx 9y ago
  - Terrible, unacceptable mobile performance. Often unusable over semi-reliable networks. "Connecting..."
aurelien 9y ago
IRC is just so good because its flexible to the wish of the tools and type of desktop you use that people should get time to think before use that type of trap for geek.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
Off-topic. Every time I hear about XMPP I remember signal's moxie bashing it. What is currently the mainstream opinion regarding XMPP and good security: is it possible? Is moxie an outlier in saying that it's not possible, or is that the mainstream opinion too?
- jcbrand 9y ago
  IIRC, the main criticism was against federation, and not XMPP itself. Daniel Gultsch, the author Conversations (XMPP Android App), wrote a response: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html
- pedroaraujo 9y ago
  When Moxie wrote that blog post[1] he was only speaking on behalf of his business interests. Signal is a proof-of-concept application that Open Whisper Systems uses to show off and sell their technology to other chat companies like how they have been doing with WhatsApp[2], Google[3] and Microsoft[4]. He was not really speaking for what was best for the community, you can read the blog post as marketing material. [1] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [2] - https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ [3] - https://signal.org/blog/allo/ https://signal.org/blog/allo/ [4] - https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/ https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    So your take is "what he said is not true"?
    - pedroaraujo 9y ago
      My take is that he makes it sound more dramatic than it is. The entire blog post loses credibility when you look at the Matrix.org project.
      - 9y ago
SXX 9y ago
> So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can't extract their conversations out of the silo. I totally agree with article itself, but this is rather moot point. Slack still provide full history export for free and it's rather easy to self-host said history. IRC and XMPP didn't made it any easier to extract that data. I aware that export doesn't include private messages, but it's not what Slack used for mostly anyway.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- inteleng 9y ago
  > Slack still provide full history export for free Wrong. If you want to export messages earlier than the last 10k, Slack will extort you to the tune of $10 per user (even if they aren't active). And that's per fucking month. Does your startup/club/laboratory of 29 people have $290/mo of income to incinerate, when you could just host an AWS IRC server for 1% of that?
  - SXX 9y ago
    Before making comment that you claim is false I went to our team management panel and exported full history for our team since 2016. It's not super active team we have, but it's still 20MB of logs in JSON and 64939 messages according to simple grep: grep '"text"' "./VCMI Slack export Mar 12 2018" -rn | wc -l It's team with open registration so it's would obviously be impossible to ever pay for it. After all it's open source project.
    - inteleng 9y ago
      You must be grandfathered in. Teams that I've been part of see their history actually cut off at the 10k mark.
      - SXX 9y ago
        If that is the case I probably won't ever find polite words for this kind of shady lock-in behavior. Certainly one more reason to abandon Slack.
zaidf 9y ago
OP must have little idea or has given little thought to how hard it can be to maintain on-going support for a feature a very, very tiny percentage of customers use. As far as I know, Slack never pitched as the guys who would rescue IRC out of obscurity and into mainstream. If they did, then you could perhaps fault them for giving up too easily without serious effort.
yani 9y ago
Everytime someone mentions bait and switch it is always about someone who is not paying for the service/product. You found a way to not pay for the service, they decided to close it, you are angry that either you have to pay or find alternative.
- dingaling 9y ago
  The IRC gateway was also available on the paid plans. Slack have not offered paying customers a discount for removing this feature.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  Not in this case. The author is just working on tool for a competing protocol (XMPP).
iknowstuff 9y ago
Love the idea! XMPP was well on its way to dominate until Apple released the iPhone and killed XMPP with the APNS requirement. Here's hoping we can go back to the federated model.
- ge0rg 9y ago
  There is some serious work on making federated XMPP work together with APNS. The iOS client developer needs to run a proxy server that will accept notifications from XMPP servers and wake up the client via APNS (this is required by how APNS authentication works). The client can connect to any server that supports XEP-0357: Push Notifications [0], and can register the respective push proxy with the XMPP server. ChatSecure for iOS [1] has implemented this approach, but the client still needs some more polish. [0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html [1] https://chatsecure.org/ https://chatsecure.org/
zachlatta 9y ago
I think this is pretty silly. Anyone that has actually used Slack on their team - especially if they've built integrations - will know otherwise. It is unbelievably painful to build integrations that cater to the regular client (users want forms, buttons, dropdowns, etc) that have clean fallbacks for text-only clients (at best 1% of your users). The real reason they're dropping support is because it will make it easier for developers to build in their ecosystem. That's it. That said, we shouldn't let Slack off easy - there are many basic issues that seem to plague Slack and Slack alone (ex. I can't believe this is an issue, but it seems nearly every message I try to send through iOS rich notifications fails to send). We should demand better, but an IRC or XMPP gateway is not the fight to pick. P.S. If you're in high school, you should join our relatively active Slack community at https://slack.hackclub.com https://slack.hackclub.com - started as an IRC community and switched when our members started demanding a decent mobile client.
- erezsh 9y ago
  What's so difficult about providing a link to the slack client when the feature is incompatible with IRC? 99% of the messages are text and images anyway.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
linsomniac 9y ago
If you want "takeout", getting the last 10,000 messages from slack is a pretty easy programming exercise. "channels.history" works really well in their API. Considering that one of the up-sells they provide is better searching and access to more messages, I was surprised it was so easy to grab your history. My team at work is using Slack and likes it. But, honestly, I don't think we'd pay a grand a year for it. We'd probably switch to Mattermost, which we already have set up as part of our underused gitlab server, or maybe to one of Slack's less expensive competitors. Though, there is some incentive for us staying with Slack, we have a couple custom bots. Over the last 2 years of use, the free account has rarely been too confining. Though the message history search isn't very usable, that's probably our biggest pain-point.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> Still, there's nothing fundamental about XMPP that prevents emoji reactions, and work is currently underway to add support for them. > The protocol is designed to be eXtensible (hence the X in XMPP) and new features are continuously being added. I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every feature they have now. My theory is that people would complain about how many extensions are required for third party clients to implement before you get a passable experience.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  > I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every feature they have now. Writing and maintaining a protocol and a client and a server is certainly harder than just having a private proprietary protocol. For what it is worth it seems XMPP is cherry picking features proven in proprietary protocols and standardizing them. It seems like there is a small set of such critical features as can be seen by supported XEPs in modern clients (https://dino.im/ https://dino.im/ https://conversations.im/ https://conversations.im/).
giancarlostoro 9y ago
What are some highly recommended XMPP servers? I've only ever used one that would always crash on me. I'm looking for something that I can run on DO for $5 a month without issues. Edit: Also for anyone who wants a simple to setup IRCd I highly recommend ngIRCd. Setup is as simple as: sudo apt install ngircd See: https://ngircd.barton.de/ https://ngircd.barton.de/
- detaro 9y ago
  A bunch of people I know run Prosody for that.
- petre 9y ago
  Ejabberd and Prosody. Ejabberd has the most features and massive scalability (millions of concurrent connections), but it's not trivial to set up. Prosody is usually a five minute set up to get up and running and scales pretty well with luaevent installed.
  - ge0rg 9y ago
    For prosody you'll need the community modules repository from https://modules.prosody.im/ https://modules.prosody.im/ to have modern features. Also please don't enable public registration on your server, or it will become a spam relay in a matter of weeks: https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-im/ https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-... It's perfectly fine to host XMPP for family&friends, and you can give them access directly if needed.
black_puppydog 9y ago
With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue, I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly. I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email. "But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn't even matter that I personally prefer the slack-like UX. Many other people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters. For anyone who's only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many. IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.
- Wintamute 9y ago
  Did you read the article to the end? The author isn't sticking his head in the sand, he puts his money where his mouth is and it currently developing a Slack-like client built on XMPP. The protocol can support many of the Slack-style features you cite, but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. Also, if you let hatred of other people's imagined smugness drive your technical and tooling decisions then ... well, I'm not sure it's the most effective metric to use.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    Interesting if it ends up supporting Emoji Reactions (note, this is not just Emoji, but Emoji Reactions to messages) and Threads That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    > The author isn't sticking his head in the sand I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.
Dowwie 9y ago
Taking services away hurts everyone more than never giving them in the first place. The author of this article feels betrayed. However, I doubt anyone intended to bait customers with extra value added services just to take them away later. More likely, managers eventually addressed costs or developed new business models.
iambateman 9y ago
This article fusses about how big mean slack took advantage of people by providing a free service and then dropping support for a protocol. I think Twitter’s treatment of developers perpetuated a David-v-Goliath storyline in which developers inevitably get short shrift while corporations take the profits. But this is different. Slack is a business and they’re making a business decision. I’ve never heard them imply that IRC would be a core part of their business. The vast majority of their user base has never even heard of IRC. It doesn’t make sense for them to spend money to support a feature used by 0.5% of their users. If IRC support is so important, build a business that supports IRC and get people to pay for it. Until then, can we stop acting like the mean boy on the playground stole our lunch?
nickjj 9y ago
What do you guys think about using Discourse as an alternative? It's not quite real time chat, but it almost is. You get the same attachments / decent UI benefits of Slack, it's open source, you can self host it without too much pain and it has a pretty nice API. No limitations on chat history too. I think in some ways it's much better than Slack because you have proper categories and threads so I think Discourse is a million times better if you're looking to use it as a mailing list alternative. In some ways it's worse than Slack because there's something very nice about just having to enter in 1 line of chat to get a message across, but with Discourse you would have to start a thread in some category. I'm going to be using either Slack or Discourse to build a private community but I haven't decided on which one yet. In case you've never heard of Discourse before, here's a live demo hosted on their official site https://try.discourse.org/ https://try.discourse.org/.
- larrysalibra 9y ago
  If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store of community information new members or potential new members can browse to learn about the community. Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.
  - nickjj 9y ago
    Yeah, basically I have a bunch of people who signed up to my programming courses and I want to give them a place to hang out, ask questions and interact with each other. I've used Slack with other organizations and it really is a black hole. Not just for the 10,000 history limitation, but it's really hard to find and read previous conversations.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Discourse has the advantage of having some sort of moderation tools included - people can have discrete permissions and rights, unlike Slack where everyone's equal - but the lack of a join/part for channels is annoying, and the inability for admins to create private channels is very frustrating.
jdc0589 9y ago
explain it like I'm 5 please: why can't.we just build an actually user friendly IRC client (including non technical people) that doesn't look like a dos app, and add client specific extensions for expanding image urls inline, etc... ?
- ge0rg 9y ago
  In theory, we can. However, building a well-working multi-platform chat client is a significant task, imagine a 5-10 person team working over a year, plus the long-term maintenance support. IRC might not be the right protocol for that, because you'll be adding quirks on top of quirks, but you could easily do that with XMPP. However, you won't find anyone willing to sponsor that development. Old protocols like IRC and XMPP just don't cut it in Silicon Valley. Examples for creating a new IM solution out of nothing, provided funding, include Signal and Matrix/Riot.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  The centralized nature of Slack actually makes it a lot _easier_/cheaper to develop, than developing for true federation. See for instance: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/ https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/ Okay, could you implement some IRC extensions to provide some of the features Slack has, deploy them on your own central server cluster, and provide a client that has access to those slack-like features with a UI as good or better than Slacks, so long as you're using channels on that server? Sure, you totally could. You could even take the extra time and energy to make those extensions open standards instead of just something you did (and it definitely is lots of extra time and energy to do that). A lot of work, but not a lot of unsolved problems, it's pretty straightforward. You could do it with IRC or XMPP. Now who's gonna pay for all that?
dandare 9y ago
Everybody keeps talking about selling your data, but as a small startup prospect I have no understanding of this business model. Why is the personal data so valuable? Is it valuable outside advertising? Who is the buyer of the data? What is the price?
tmaly 9y ago
maybe this could be an opportunity for something like mattermost to pick up the torch
crispyporkbites 9y ago
When I try to sign up for https://inverse.chat https://inverse.chat, I'm given the following information: > Create your account > Please enter the XMPP provider to register with: > Tip: A list of public XMPP providers is available here. When I click on the XMPP providers, I'm taken here: https://xmpp.net/directory.php https://xmpp.net/directory.php There's like a hundred options, so now I just close the tab and give up because I have no idea what to pick. Can you instead provide a sign up form that let's me sign up directly to a default provider? The process should mirror how webmail works, e.g. when you visit outlook.com, gmail, fastmail etc. you also end up with an email account with them.
- jcbrand 9y ago
  The server input suggests conversejs.org, you can use that as a default.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    Nope - conversejs is just the front end. Even if I go to conversejs.org I still have to pick a public XMPP provider when trying to use this for the first time (what is that, what are the implications of picking one, why is one better than then other, which Geo should I pick, why do some have weird names, ...)
    - jcbrand 9y ago
      It's not just the frontend, there's also an XMPP server hosted under conversejs.org, so you can have an account like crispyporkbites@conversejs.org
asterius 9y ago
Oblique to the predictable Slack XMPP decision, but relevant to federation: Mastondon is a facinating federated social network. It addresses the identity/reputation issues without embracing fb-fascism or one-site-to-rule-them-all nonsense. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ How it works Anyone can run a server of Mastodon. Each server hosts individual user accounts, the content they produce, and the content they subscribe to. Each user account has a globally unique name (e.g. @user@example.com), consisting of the local username (@user), and the domain name of the server it is on (example.com). Users can follow each other, regardless of where they’re hosted — when a local user follows a user from a different server, the server subscribes to that user’s updates for the first time.
- Promarged 9y ago
  Unfortunately ActivityPub (that powers Mastodon) has a lot of incidental complexity (including RSA signatures, JSON-LD, RDF normalizations to quads etc.) But this is a very simple alternative, distributed "Twitter" for hackers: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt#twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt#twtxt
- bhhaskin 9y ago
  There is also GNU social; which is what Mastodon is based off of. I have been thinking about hosting a server for awhile. Pretty cool stuff.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I do host my own mastodon server with a small community, the initial setup is a bit complicated but once you get it going upgrades are nice and easy (each update contains all shell commands necessary outside `git fetch` and `git checkout v{VERSION}`) Only downside of course is that if you selfhost alone, your federated timeline will be a bit empty, I do recommend either finding a community or starting one to get a bit more activity (Mastodon is essentially geared towards a sort of "community neighborhood" decentralization, where only one in a few hundred or thousand users needs to run a server, on average)
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
erikb 9y ago
I'm a huge fan of increasing our freedoms. But truth is there are things a lot bigger than even a few humans together. e.g. a vulcano breaks out means you can't go on top of the Vulcano without dying. A big corp or government wants your data, they will get it one way or another. So the goal of freedom cannot be reached. You always depend on something. However, that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to keep power over ones own life by accepting to work hard for it, by accepting to not use some maybe-nice-but-exploitative things, etc, by spending money and votes on people and projects and politicians who fight for freedom of everybody. I feel at work Slack is really the right thing, because what you produce there is not free anyways. My company owns the data I produce at work. So why shouldn't they own the chat logs (and pay for it)? For opensource and spare time projects certainly IRC and XMPP are the way to go. Therefore I'm not really pissed with Slack, but with the people who choose to use Slack for things where it's clearly not the right solution. It's a Sisyphean decision, though. Because you can't really make people not let themselves be exploited, especially if you try to give them freedom. The pain is that most people decide, totally freely, to sacrifice their freedom for a quick feeling of comfort.
dyeje 9y ago
How is it a bait and switch if Slack never advertised itself as an open platform?
moosingin3space 9y ago
Sorry, I really don't see the "bait and switch" here. IRC/XMPP gateways were never a selling point of Slack. Bots were always supposed to use the proprietary WebSocket/HTTP APIs, and in all the companies I've worked in that use Slack, not a single person used the IRC or XMPP gateway. Open-source project communities should not be using Slack, if for no reason other than the 10k message limit and the fact that it's annoying to be present in multiple Slacks. I prefer IRC or Gitter for those communities, as they're better designed around the flow of "drop in, drop out" than Slack.
- michaelt 9y ago
  So I'm a mid-level manager at a company with a few hundred developers. The more developers you hire, the higher the chance you'll start collecting people with obscure (but usually reasonably easy to satisfy) tool preferences. You know, the guy who changes his IDE to emacs key bindings, the guy who does all his e-mail using mutt when everyone else uses gmail, the girl who uses a Dvorak keyboard layout, the guy who insists he works best on a 1024x768 screen, and so on. Having tried a variety of industry tools and thought about about how you work best is usually a good sign[1]. Their favourite tools aren't my favourite tools, but they work for me so if they're not happy, I'm not happy. The bait and switch is we adopted a tool that would keep IRC users happy, and it dropped IRC support. [1] Although I keep my settings conservative, as it's hard for others to pair program or assist you with problems if they can't operate your computer
  - warrenm 9y ago
    The beauty of choice is that you and I can have different favorites - so long as we can get our work done, who cares? ____________________ (thanks to http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-march-16th-2018.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-internet... for finding this comment)
- tjoff 9y ago
  The only good thing I've ever heard of Slack is that you can avoid the bloated client and use IRC instead. Probably a great way to reduce friction when introduced.
detuur 9y ago
Embrace Extend Extinguish <-- YOU ARE HERE
kolbe 9y ago
I can't understand HN's algo. This story is 5 hours old with 202 comments and 552 points, and currently ranked at 15 on my list. Whereas there's another story 8 hours old with 89 points that's at 4. It always strikes me as more than a coincidence when startups that YC is affiliated with (Slack has purchased a few YC alum companies) get their bad news briefly commented on, then buried.
- eertami 9y ago
  Yeah this dropped off the front page very quickly. Came back to find the comments probably half an hour after viewing it at the 5th spot, but it was no longer there. It's obvious why it's done but always serves as a reminder of HNs lack of impartiality on submissions.
JeanMarcS 9y ago
> You can set up your own email server, and then send emails to people with their own email servers, or to people with Gmail or Yahoo! accounts. Well, there’s a good chance they’ll go straight to the SPAM folder if you just bring your server up, but yes, you can try.
tombert 9y ago
I don't particularly care if the thing that companies use for private chat isn't open-source and doesn't have an open gateway, but it does worry me a bit that Slack has slowly started to replace IRC for open-source software support. Typically if I need help with something FLOSS, I open up my Weechat and log onto Freenode, however increasingly I'm seeing FLOSS projects go to Slack (like Elementary OS). I understand that Slack is simpler, but it's also kind of antithetical to use a proprietary protocol for something open.
- jjrh 9y ago
  Seems like there is a opening for someone to start something similar to freenode but for XMPP. Or Freenode could run a XMPP<->IRC gateway.
my_ghola 9y ago
Is there an open source IRC/XMPP (or Matrix) client with features similar to Slack (side-threads, pinned messages) and preferably not using electron?
- Aaronn 9y ago
  Well Riot (Matrix and indirectly IRC client) has pinned messages and will soon have message threading but it is a web app (although it does have native mobile apps).
ris 9y ago
Well there you go. Not going to run a webapp that occupies a gig of ram or two for text chat, so goodbye to slack it is.
harlanji 9y ago
XMPP is a good machine for bait and switching. I discovered it after building my own AOL-like chat systems from scratch in high school, in VB, C, PHP, etc (many iterations) and engaged heavily. To this day all I hear when people talk about why not XMPP are lazy excuses. No doubt they come out as blaming XMPP rather than the hard problems it's solving at scrum meetings. I built a chat app backend recently and was met by FUD from senior engs on the team when I proposed it, and hostility by the CEO who trusted them... forced to build an MVC-based node backend PoC which wouldn't have scaled if I didn't already know how to build chat systems (force="this discussion is over" and "if you don't like it you can quit" type comments... which I did).
vinceguidry 9y ago
Slack grew compared to IRC. That showed the world what people want out of real-time messaging. Email grew relative to walled-garden solutions. That only shows what people want out of asynchronous messaging. My conclusion to all this is that people tend to use synchronous messaging in teams, and asynchronous messaging for everything else. Interconnectivity is more important for asynchronous messaging. Ease of use is more important for synchronous messaging. Email could never have been unseated by any of it's would-be competitors, whereas IRC was always bound to get usurped. It could never have kept up with the needs of the market. Now synchronous messaging is moving in the direction that web browsers started moving 15 years ago. The killer app has been found, now entrants are going to compete on ideology, while the standards people try to balance the profit motive with the need for interoperability. edit: missing is SMS, which occupies a weird middle ground between synchronous and asynchronous messaging. But its openness is more akin to email than Slack.
gist 9y ago
> For example, email is federated. You can set up your own email server, and then send emails to people with their own email servers, or to people with Gmail or Yahoo! accounts. Gmail actually does control somewhat inbound email by restricting certain mail and flagging it as spam according to their own arbitrary definition of spam. Oddly that even ends up flagging mail from one gmail account you own to another gmail account (both @gmail and @domain with google apps). And even in cases where it is clear there is an existing relationship between the parties. Other providers do that as well. And there is not an easy way to prevent it from happening either as a sys admin or a user (there are jump through hoop ways of course). And ultimately yes they do treat email (despite my own example) on their own network differently than email coming from a domain outside their network.
oldpond 9y ago
This is the same old model; give them something free, then monetize it. Thankfully, the internet allows us to just go somewhere else or write your own. https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-with-elixir-phoenix-and-react-part-1-project-setup-3252ae780a1 https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-with-...

757 points by jcbrand 9y ago

From the XMPP Foundation: https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480 https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480

mic47 9y ago
With this attitude of the XMPP Foundation, I doubt XMPP have any future. Better question would be to ask what should be improved in XMPP so that they could implement that properly. Why? Facebook, google, slack are not using XMPP internally for chat products, because of technical reasons. They dropped XMPP gateway for mix of technical and strategic reasons. Instead of trying to be a warrior for technical correctness, XMPP foundation should rather seek feedback and try to make sure that developers integrating with XMPP will do everything correctly as easy as possible. Otherwise, more and more projects would be dropping XMPP support.
- gsich 9y ago
  They could implement what properly? According to the tweet XMPP supports this. Slack just doesn't care. I like the attitude of telling the truth. Compare to Torvalds.
  - d33 9y ago
    > I like the attitude of telling the truth. Compare to Torvalds. Care to elaborate?
    - gsich 9y ago
      I just like it when people flame and insult when it's deserved. A nice contrast to the "happy world; I get triggered by everything" stuff.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        So rather than actually trying to find solutions, you prefer people to yell and shout at each other and not get anything done.
        gsich 9y ago
        Well, they can do both.
- EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
  Facebook and Google? They use IRC internally for technical reasons. IRC doesn't fall over. Googlers internally revolted when they were told to use Hangouts internally. XMPP works great and I've used it at several employers. There's no technical reasons to avoid it; it really is all about lock-in and corporate planning. I've watched Ralph struggle for years against corporate asshats. It's a real tragedy that all these companies don't participate in open standards. We shouldn't have ever expected good things from Slack.
  - mic47 9y ago
    > Facebook and Google? They use IRC internally for technical reasons. IRC doesn't fall over. Googlers internally revolted when they were told to use Hangouts internally. I was talking about implementation of Facebook messenger, or Google hangout (which does not use XMPP), not what is used internally for communication. Also, at Facebook, messenger is most used product internally. IRC is still used, but not that much (depends on org, infra devs use IRC more than product devs). But IRC is still essential, in case of emergencies (where you don't want to use your own product, as it may be down).
- petre 9y ago
  > Otherwise, more and more projects would be dropping XMPP support. Eve Online just abandoned their own in game chat server and replaced it with ejabberd.
- ralphm 9y ago
  Let me first turn this around. I actually personally tried to interact with the Slack team on how they implemented their XMPP gateway, early on. I pointed out how a relatively small missing protocol feature (server-side group chat bookmarking) was severely impacting the usability of the gateway, as it caused caused you to have to explicitly join the group chat room representing a Slack channel on every client (re)connect. In fact they violated protocol in case a client requested the list of bookmarks, causing clients to hang while connecting. It took them a year to start responding, and the problem was not fixed. Additionally I had pointed that their statements on XMPP security were factually wrong. No useful response or changes were made. That all said, I really like a bunch of things about Slack and have repeatedly pointed out in discussions in the XMPP community that there is a lot to be learned from Slack in terms of features (and how they work technically), UI consistency, and usability. As JC points out, this is surprisingly hard to achieve in open source projects. Even harder to pull off for a very diverse community around a set of protocols, rather than a single software product. There are also things in Slack that I think would be a lot better if they were modelled after recent protocol proposals in XMPP. For example we are working on something called MIX, an evolution on group chat, based on Publish-Subscribe. This allows for orthogonal streams of information bound to a channel, besides just chat and presence, like merge request notifications, Twitter mentions, etc. that could be displayed in a side-bar or ticker, instead of (annoyingly) interleaved with chat messages. I would have welcomed Slack interacting with the community, but they didn't.
  - mic47 9y ago
    Thanks for adding more context! It's hard to get that from twitter, sorry.

Maro 9y ago

I don't know the numbers, but if there's not a lot of users/companies using these alternative protocols, it makes sense not to support them. I'd do the same thing. The Facebook/Twitter analogy is flawed, because those are ad-supported businesses, so the company has a strong financial interest in having users on its own/primary platform, where it can deliver ads. I think that's not the case with Slack (?). But even there, I think the incentive to not support N protocols is not to get the +0.1% revenue from IRC/XMPP users, it's velocity/simplicity in product development, which is worth more money in the long term. Disclaimer: I worked for FB previously, on Workplace, which is a direct competitor to Slack.

rplnt 9y ago
I think it's even worse than "supporting" it, it was breaking their UX if certain users didn't have certain features (namely threads). Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack
- merlincorey 9y ago
  > Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack When you already have too many channels, and then they give you the ability to have too many threads. I feel like they do a worse job at the supposed value add of being able to archive and later refer to a topic of conversation than channels simply because they are so light weight and proliferate so many of them, potentially. Plus it's really jarring to be pulled into a bunch of threads.
  - jochung 9y ago
    I think the too-many-channels problem is a symptom of the excessive walled gardening. Slack segregates by interests and social group, and bundles that with strict gatekeeping. There is no way for people to remix that to suit their own preferences. You can only fragment existing communities more. I would love a slack multiclient where I can put channels I care about side by side, regardless of origin, and keep the rest out of sight. Instead now everyone has their own #random and #offtopic and so on. Cruising between Slacks and Discords is like navigating a hall of mirrors. If there is disagreement, the only solution is complete schism.

atopuzov 9y ago

Anybody using matrix protocol? And riot.im client? Thoughts?

akerro 9y ago
It's better than Slack in terms of usability, performance and UI (subjective), but lacks some integrations that Slack has. Search engine is quite poor (not that Slack is any better, it's shit too).
nukeop 9y ago
Riot has everything Slack does, but it's more competent and free. And obviously the main selling point is compatibility with all kinds of other chats.
- akerro 9y ago
  >Riot has everything Slack does Gitlab integration?
  - kemonocode 9y ago
    At my workplace we use Rocket.chat and it does have GitLab integration, so there's another possible alternative.
  - nukeop 9y ago
    Yes, of course. But unlike Slack you are not limited to "official" "integrations", you can add arbitrary widgets and can write your own.
Unklejoe 9y ago
I'm running the reference Matrix server (Synapse) on my home computer, and I'm using the Riot.im client. I mainly use it to communicate with a group of three friends. They are using Android, and I'm using an iPhone. It seems to work about as well as any other messaging app, which is impressive if you ask me, considering it's completely open and self-hosted.

nateguchi 9y ago

> Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations. Whilst this is partially true, One of the key features enterprises need and that Slack supplies is the ability to fully export messages for transfer and compliance purposes. One of the main differentiators between paid and unpaid slack is message retention. To my knowledge, I don't think the XMPP and IRC were used by anyone to overcome this limit but I'm pretty sure it's been done using their API. They haven't shut of usage of their API for this purpose so I'm pretty sure that lost sales is the motivation behind this change. The OP talks about the relevant ways Slack can implement features into their XMPP and IRC endpoints to allow new features. But this probably generates a lot of technical debt for a feature that isn't used by many people. (Also, anecdotally, I've found very few XMPP clients that actually support any of the proposed extensions).

james_pm 9y ago
My biggest issue with Slack is that on the free plan they store everything forever, but only allow you to access the last 10,000 messages. I'm fine with limits, but the users should be free to delete messages beyond the limit. It's my data that I entered in and they are preenting me from deleting it which is a pretty nasty thing to do. I suspect this will all change in May when the GDPR comes into play. The policy is clearly not compliant. They will likely either need to allow for deletion, or give users access to the data (even on free accounts).
- rmc 9y ago
  Existing EU data protection law since the mid 90s gives people the right to get a copy of their personal data, with big players, like Facebook, supporting it for years. I don't know if Slack has any offices or entity in the EU, but you could try making an access request today./
  - detuur 9y ago
    They take money from EU clients, in Euros, so they are bound by EU law. GDPR will tighten the net around this sort of business models.

merlincorey 9y ago

The author I think is confused about the meaning of Slack's "emoji reactions". They are "badges" that can be applied to messages by any one who is in the channel the message was sent. Discord also has this feature. At any rate, that doesn't change the fact that it probably could have been implemented in XMPP. As one of /those/ people still using IRC, I would personally have been totally fine continuing to use the IRC gateway without these features.

linsomniac 9y ago
My company switched to a free slack account a couple years ago, from our own IRC server. The primary reason for the change was to get something a bit richer in abilities, and emoji reactions is something we make extensive use of. Just saying there are people out there that find these sorts of "XMPP breaking" features not only useful, but mission critical. Would have been useful if their announcement included some of their data for reaching the conclusion, like "95% of channels use emoji reactions in more than 5% of their messages". The announcement, as it was, didn't read very well to me.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way?
  - root_crontab 9y ago
    Someone says 'about to push this potentially breaking change to a shared resource, is that ok?'. Then everyone else posts a :thumbsup: Obviously, this could be done differently. But it's easy to do it like this and come to depend on it.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      While that use case is certainly an example of a convenience, I don’t think it passes the “mission critical” bar. I can’t think of any way that emoji reactions would be mission critical unless they are part of an API that can be used for automated execution of tasks. But maybe that sort of thing does exist?

djhworld 9y ago

> One of the sad things that has come out of Slack's meteoric rise to success, has been how many free and open source projects have jumped over to using it (after previously using IRC or XMPP). In so doing, they have closed off their discussions from search engines and they prevent people from accessing their past archives. Additionally the traditional mailing lists are full of "please can I have an invite to the Slack workspace" spam

BuildTheRobots 9y ago
It's not even that discussions have been lost from search engines, actual slack users are loosing massive amounts of history. If you a free/OSS project then you likely have little budget so you're stuck using hte free tier of Slack, which means users can only see the last 10,000 messages. We're loosing vast swathes of our history/discussion/media.
- RyJones 9y ago
  The history isn't searchable, but the owners of the Slack can export the complete public history at any time. Here is an export that I did when we moved Hyperledger to Rocket.Chat: https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive I see the hosted version is down, though.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Key word: public history. Most of my interesting history is in private chats.
- richthegeek 9y ago
  So would there be a use-case for a combined bot+app that you can connect some storage to (S3, FTP) which archives all channel message history in a searchable form? It could make it visible to search engines, searchable by humans, linkable to people outside of slack, and shouldn't take up very much storage space. Should be quite trivial to build also, and cheap enough to run as a bit of charity if projects pay for their own storage.

sandGorgon 9y ago

if there was an XMPP based hosted chat application that lets me create private rooms for my company (using google auth), I would migrate in a heartbeat. however, XMPP mistakes open-ness in the protocol with openness in conversations. Every showcase XMPP product is public, open chat rooms.

jcbrand 9y ago
I've added OAuth support for converse.js, it's not released yet, but the code is written. I intend to release that soon to https://inverse.chat https://inverse.chat. Rooms can be made private, members-only and non-searchable. This is standard XMPP behavior.
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  its not just at the room level, its at the org level. the standard practice is that people create rooms in a slack org - and they are guaranteed that they are private to the org. one more step is where i can create private rooms to a few people within the org. XMPP obviously can support this, but the products built on top of XMPP are too open. The protocol doesnt have an issue - but the people building products on top of XMPP have an inherent distaste for organizational workflows.
  - jjrh 9y ago
    I'm not following. You can run a 'private'/'silo' xmpp server by turning off S2S. There are various commercial solutions that offer this.

some_account 9y ago

Why do we fall for this behavior over and over again? As long as we trade freedom for convenience, this will continue.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago
We are suppose to act like the theoretical rational customer, yet concerns about potential bait and switch get called "conspiracy theory". Long term thinking is so uncommon it's almost frowned upon.
gkya 9y ago
I'm always amazed how easy it is to lure people with castrated fancy UI and things like emoji.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Each new iOS update comes with new emojis nowadays, which is a great way to nudge the mainstream user to keep their OS updated...
- matwood 9y ago
  The Welcome to the Macintosh podcast has fascinating multi-part series on emoji, and why they are such a big deal.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  You're seriously downplaying the usability and simplicity improvements Slack brought to the table.
  - gkya 9y ago
    No, I'm not. For one, I've never used it. The parent comment was referring to how they provided endpoints for programs connecting through open protocols, and now that they have some sort of critical mass, just dismissing the users of the service that utilize it through those. And my comment supports the viewpoint that we fall in for UX and convenience and low/no cost, then get screwed like this.

emodendroket 9y ago

Emoji reactions are a different feature than sending emoji. Also, the idea that e-mail predates the surveillance aspect of the Web... Well, that was baked in from the beginning, as detailed in Surveillance Valley.

patrickaljord 9y ago

Bait and switch is a bit harsh, I guess most of their users don't use IRC and it's a huge waste of resource and time for them. Even Open Source projects drop support for old tech like debian dropped support for old SPARC architecture in 2015. Of course the difference is that with Open Source anyone can pick up where they left but that's an issue with any proprietary/close source software and it's a risk one takes when going with a solution such as Slack.

jsilence 9y ago
IRC is an acronym for "IRC is not dead"
patrickaljord 9y ago
Anyone can explain why I'm being so downvoted here? Is anything I stated wrong or offensive or something? Genuinely curious.
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    They never embraced IRC, they just had a gateway for people still using it. This would be valid if Slack's protocol was based on IRC and they later extended it and made it incompatible with IRC. This is not the case here.

unicornporn 9y ago

> Slack, like so many others before them, pretend to care about interoperability, opening up just so slightly, so that they can lure in people with the promise of "openness", before eventually closing the gate once they've achieved sufficient size and lock-in. On spot. People are lured in by hype and forget the long-term consequences. Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.

rovek 9y ago
I'd be interested to know how widely used these gateways are, since the conventional wisdom on HN is so frequently "vote with your wallet/feet/personal data". As they say: Use it or lose it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ge0rg 9y ago
  As a user, I was very disappointed to see that the gateways must be enabled by the project owner, not by the users themselves. In the end none of the Slack groups I've participated in allowed me to connect via IRC/XMPP.
  - herbst 9y ago
    Pretty sure enabling these by default would lead to a moderation nightmare in many groups.
    - ge0rg 9y ago
      I don't see how. You would still need to authenticate with that group, so it wouldn't automatically allow anonymous participants from the Internets.
    - calcifer 9y ago
      Slack is an in-company chat product (their slogan is literally “where work happens” [1]) and it was never intended for public groups, which is why all invite automation tools for Slack are third-party. Slack doesn’t want you to use their product as a public chatroom and they try really hard to make that as unattractive as possible. Given that, “moderation nightmare” is not really a concern for the target audience since if your company needs moderation in its work chat, you have much bigger problems. [1] https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/

icc97 9y ago

My major preference for Slack was replacing Skype chats, so there was no loss in terms of open source. Lots of people complain that it's just a fancy IRC client, but they don't realise how painless it is to get non-tech people to start using it. But quite clearly there needs to be a fully open sourced alternative. I think WordPress is a great example of how it should be done. Provide a super simple way to create xxx.slackclone.com in exactly the same number of steps as it takes to create a slack group whilst also providing something that you can download and install yourself. I think any project would have to be in PHP. Perhaps that sounds stupid but I think again following the WordPress model is a good track. PHP is the most easy way for low-tech people to get their own up and running. It should be as easy as the 5-minute WordPress install to get your own server. edit: Plus PHP is what Slack is built on and I quite like the irony. The further irony though is that WordPress use Slack now. Perhaps in a similar way that WordPress fought against the React licensing they might replace Slack if there was a good enough clone. As far as I can tell the aim could be to create as close as possible a clone of slack, ripping off as many features as possible without stepping over a boundary where Slack could try and shut you down.

simion314 9y ago
I agree, no idea why you are downvoted. At my job the Slack was forced on us by boss, probably because of the hype, we were using Skype before and we still use it because the team was used to Skype, it worked good enough, slack just added for us extra distractions. I think that even a good alternative appears if the hype is not enough it won't catch, also before Slack we used Hipchat for a short time, same story, it was imposed to the team because of the hype, in the end Slack got a bigger hype I assume.

Quarrelsome 9y ago

what's wrong with freenode.irc? As far as I can tell it still works as it did before.

rburhum 9y ago

So how do you propose they make money instead?

andybak 9y ago
Their business model is fine for many groups of user. However - open source projects in particular should be thinking about archiving, accessibility, discoverability etc. Slack is a bizarre choice which I can only ascribe to "nice UI and good timing". I'm personally getting a bit sick of it for another pragmatic reason. It's bloody slow to open, slow to switch accounts and even slow to switch channels.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  There is very little "nice" about their UI. UX isn't good (subjective, I know); it's not accessible at all; their "apps" take gigs of RAM and waste CPU, very slow search, not intuitive, etc. I was able to search years of intensive mailing in both server and local cache in an almost instantaneous fashion in Outlook {2003, 2010 & 2016} for Windows, but Slack can't properly search a year and a half of history without choking. On almost every level, slack is a complete technological failure (where it matters).
  - andybak 9y ago
    Note that I said "nice UI" and not "nice UX" ;-)
    - LeoNatan25 9y ago
      I'm really not sure how the two can be separate. In user interface concepts, UI design and UX go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, they do not just for UI but almost everywhere else. Case in point, Apple's glass windows that caused people to hit their heads in them by mistake. Terrible design and terrible UX.

amedvednikov 9y ago

I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem by building a free native desktop client for Slack, Skype, XMPP, Twitter etc. It doesn't have the 10 000 messages limit, it's very light (~100 KB) and fast: https://eul.im https://eul.im I recently started working on it full-time, so I expect a stable release to be out this month.

mcjiggerlog 9y ago
Looks cool, but do you have any intention on supporting macOS Sierra (or earlier versions)? > You have macOS 10.12.6. The application requires macOS 10.13 or later.
- amedvednikov 9y ago
  The macOS bundle is not set up correctly right now, that's why it doesn't work on older versions of macOS. Run it from Terminal for now: ~/Downloads/eul.app/Contents/MacOS/eul I'll fix this in v0.31.
gkya 9y ago
The premise is cool indeed, but are you really going to solve "this walled garden problem" with a closed-source application?
la_oveja 9y ago
Looks VERY promising! I wanted the Linux alpha but doesn't seem like it's there yet :( I'll be following this for sure <3
- amedvednikov 9y ago
  Thanks! Linux beta will be out this month. Right now I'm working on fixing bugs and crashes and implementing missing crucial features. Wrapping up the Linux GUI bit will only take a couple of days.
boramalper 9y ago
> I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem By building a closed-source client? Cool project; it's really impressive and I'd love to use once it gets stable, but don't you think your claim is a bit incompatible with your method?

kemonocode 9y ago

Hard to believe this is the same people who once worked in Glitch[0] and I wager that long after Slack is dead and buried, people will probably remember "that one quirky online game" with more fond memories than their productivity and resource-sapping amnesiac-unless-you-pay-up abomination of a product. [0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/ https://www.glitchthegame.com/

sharemywin 9y ago

I even hate the sound of "surveillance capitalism". It sounds so evil and insidious.

maxehmookau 9y ago

I, like many others, are starting to fall out of love with Slack. This may well be the straw that breaks the camels back. - Resource hogging - Buggy iOS app (especially on iPhone X) - Missing accessibility features - Lack of native app They've taken $0.75bn in funding over 10 rounds and still suffer from some _basic_ issues.

juststeve 9y ago
750 million USD?
- tedd4u 9y ago
  Looks like $790M https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-funding-rounds https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-fundin...
strkek 9y ago
Also: - Mentions: Many times I've tried to mention someone but Slack goes and picks the wrong person. If I'm typing `@johnd`, then it should be fairly evident that I'm trying to mention `@johndoe`; don't make me go through that UI when you should have enough info already. - Buggy snippets: Why do I have to go through a slow UI just to paste some code, when triple-backtick should be enough? - Triple-backtick: No code highlighting. And just try to copy its content; you'll be surprised when your clipboard looks as if passed through an `s/\n/\n\n/g` filter. - Scroll up: Scrolling up many pages above causes some weird jumps. --- Incidentally, the Discord people got all these things right.
shrimpx 9y ago
- Terrible, unacceptable mobile performance. Often unusable over semi-reliable networks. "Connecting..."

aurelien 9y ago

IRC is just so good because its flexible to the wish of the tools and type of desktop you use that people should get time to think before use that type of trap for geek.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

Off-topic. Every time I hear about XMPP I remember signal's moxie bashing it. What is currently the mainstream opinion regarding XMPP and good security: is it possible? Is moxie an outlier in saying that it's not possible, or is that the mainstream opinion too?

jcbrand 9y ago
IIRC, the main criticism was against federation, and not XMPP itself. Daniel Gultsch, the author Conversations (XMPP Android App), wrote a response: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html
pedroaraujo 9y ago
When Moxie wrote that blog post[1] he was only speaking on behalf of his business interests. Signal is a proof-of-concept application that Open Whisper Systems uses to show off and sell their technology to other chat companies like how they have been doing with WhatsApp[2], Google[3] and Microsoft[4]. He was not really speaking for what was best for the community, you can read the blog post as marketing material. [1] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [2] - https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ [3] - https://signal.org/blog/allo/ https://signal.org/blog/allo/ [4] - https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/ https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  So your take is "what he said is not true"?
  - pedroaraujo 9y ago
    My take is that he makes it sound more dramatic than it is. The entire blog post loses credibility when you look at the Matrix.org project.
    - 9y ago

SXX 9y ago

> So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can't extract their conversations out of the silo. I totally agree with article itself, but this is rather moot point. Slack still provide full history export for free and it's rather easy to self-host said history. IRC and XMPP didn't made it any easier to extract that data. I aware that export doesn't include private messages, but it's not what Slack used for mostly anyway.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
inteleng 9y ago
> Slack still provide full history export for free Wrong. If you want to export messages earlier than the last 10k, Slack will extort you to the tune of $10 per user (even if they aren't active). And that's per fucking month. Does your startup/club/laboratory of 29 people have $290/mo of income to incinerate, when you could just host an AWS IRC server for 1% of that?
- SXX 9y ago
  Before making comment that you claim is false I went to our team management panel and exported full history for our team since 2016. It's not super active team we have, but it's still 20MB of logs in JSON and 64939 messages according to simple grep: grep '"text"' "./VCMI Slack export Mar 12 2018" -rn | wc -l It's team with open registration so it's would obviously be impossible to ever pay for it. After all it's open source project.
  - inteleng 9y ago
    You must be grandfathered in. Teams that I've been part of see their history actually cut off at the 10k mark.
    - SXX 9y ago
      If that is the case I probably won't ever find polite words for this kind of shady lock-in behavior. Certainly one more reason to abandon Slack.

zaidf 9y ago

OP must have little idea or has given little thought to how hard it can be to maintain on-going support for a feature a very, very tiny percentage of customers use. As far as I know, Slack never pitched as the guys who would rescue IRC out of obscurity and into mainstream. If they did, then you could perhaps fault them for giving up too easily without serious effort.

yani 9y ago

Everytime someone mentions bait and switch it is always about someone who is not paying for the service/product. You found a way to not pay for the service, they decided to close it, you are angry that either you have to pay or find alternative.

dingaling 9y ago
The IRC gateway was also available on the paid plans. Slack have not offered paying customers a discount for removing this feature.
Shoothe 9y ago
Not in this case. The author is just working on tool for a competing protocol (XMPP).

iknowstuff 9y ago

Love the idea! XMPP was well on its way to dominate until Apple released the iPhone and killed XMPP with the APNS requirement. Here's hoping we can go back to the federated model.

ge0rg 9y ago
There is some serious work on making federated XMPP work together with APNS. The iOS client developer needs to run a proxy server that will accept notifications from XMPP servers and wake up the client via APNS (this is required by how APNS authentication works). The client can connect to any server that supports XEP-0357: Push Notifications [0], and can register the respective push proxy with the XMPP server. ChatSecure for iOS [1] has implemented this approach, but the client still needs some more polish. [0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html [1] https://chatsecure.org/ https://chatsecure.org/

zachlatta 9y ago

I think this is pretty silly. Anyone that has actually used Slack on their team - especially if they've built integrations - will know otherwise. It is unbelievably painful to build integrations that cater to the regular client (users want forms, buttons, dropdowns, etc) that have clean fallbacks for text-only clients (at best 1% of your users). The real reason they're dropping support is because it will make it easier for developers to build in their ecosystem. That's it. That said, we shouldn't let Slack off easy - there are many basic issues that seem to plague Slack and Slack alone (ex. I can't believe this is an issue, but it seems nearly every message I try to send through iOS rich notifications fails to send). We should demand better, but an IRC or XMPP gateway is not the fight to pick. P.S. If you're in high school, you should join our relatively active Slack community at https://slack.hackclub.com https://slack.hackclub.com - started as an IRC community and switched when our members started demanding a decent mobile client.

erezsh 9y ago
What's so difficult about providing a link to the slack client when the feature is incompatible with IRC? 99% of the messages are text and images anyway.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

linsomniac 9y ago

If you want "takeout", getting the last 10,000 messages from slack is a pretty easy programming exercise. "channels.history" works really well in their API. Considering that one of the up-sells they provide is better searching and access to more messages, I was surprised it was so easy to grab your history. My team at work is using Slack and likes it. But, honestly, I don't think we'd pay a grand a year for it. We'd probably switch to Mattermost, which we already have set up as part of our underused gitlab server, or maybe to one of Slack's less expensive competitors. Though, there is some incentive for us staying with Slack, we have a couple custom bots. Over the last 2 years of use, the free account has rarely been too confining. Though the message history search isn't very usable, that's probably our biggest pain-point.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> Still, there's nothing fundamental about XMPP that prevents emoji reactions, and work is currently underway to add support for them. > The protocol is designed to be eXtensible (hence the X in XMPP) and new features are continuously being added. I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every feature they have now. My theory is that people would complain about how many extensions are required for third party clients to implement before you get a passable experience.

Shoothe 9y ago
> I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every feature they have now. Writing and maintaining a protocol and a client and a server is certainly harder than just having a private proprietary protocol. For what it is worth it seems XMPP is cherry picking features proven in proprietary protocols and standardizing them. It seems like there is a small set of such critical features as can be seen by supported XEPs in modern clients (https://dino.im/ https://dino.im/ https://conversations.im/ https://conversations.im/).

giancarlostoro 9y ago

What are some highly recommended XMPP servers? I've only ever used one that would always crash on me. I'm looking for something that I can run on DO for $5 a month without issues. Edit: Also for anyone who wants a simple to setup IRCd I highly recommend ngIRCd. Setup is as simple as: sudo apt install ngircd See: https://ngircd.barton.de/ https://ngircd.barton.de/

detaro 9y ago
A bunch of people I know run Prosody for that.
petre 9y ago
Ejabberd and Prosody. Ejabberd has the most features and massive scalability (millions of concurrent connections), but it's not trivial to set up. Prosody is usually a five minute set up to get up and running and scales pretty well with luaevent installed.
- ge0rg 9y ago
  For prosody you'll need the community modules repository from https://modules.prosody.im/ https://modules.prosody.im/ to have modern features. Also please don't enable public registration on your server, or it will become a spam relay in a matter of weeks: https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-im/ https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-... It's perfectly fine to host XMPP for family&friends, and you can give them access directly if needed.

black_puppydog 9y ago

With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue, I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly. I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email. "But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn't even matter that I personally prefer the slack-like UX. Many other people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters. For anyone who's only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many. IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.

Wintamute 9y ago
Did you read the article to the end? The author isn't sticking his head in the sand, he puts his money where his mouth is and it currently developing a Slack-like client built on XMPP. The protocol can support many of the Slack-style features you cite, but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. Also, if you let hatred of other people's imagined smugness drive your technical and tooling decisions then ... well, I'm not sure it's the most effective metric to use.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Interesting if it ends up supporting Emoji Reactions (note, this is not just Emoji, but Emoji Reactions to messages) and Threads That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
- Can_Not 9y ago
  > The author isn't sticking his head in the sand I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.

Dowwie 9y ago

Taking services away hurts everyone more than never giving them in the first place. The author of this article feels betrayed. However, I doubt anyone intended to bait customers with extra value added services just to take them away later. More likely, managers eventually addressed costs or developed new business models.

iambateman 9y ago

This article fusses about how big mean slack took advantage of people by providing a free service and then dropping support for a protocol. I think Twitter’s treatment of developers perpetuated a David-v-Goliath storyline in which developers inevitably get short shrift while corporations take the profits. But this is different. Slack is a business and they’re making a business decision. I’ve never heard them imply that IRC would be a core part of their business. The vast majority of their user base has never even heard of IRC. It doesn’t make sense for them to spend money to support a feature used by 0.5% of their users. If IRC support is so important, build a business that supports IRC and get people to pay for it. Until then, can we stop acting like the mean boy on the playground stole our lunch?

nickjj 9y ago

What do you guys think about using Discourse as an alternative? It's not quite real time chat, but it almost is. You get the same attachments / decent UI benefits of Slack, it's open source, you can self host it without too much pain and it has a pretty nice API. No limitations on chat history too. I think in some ways it's much better than Slack because you have proper categories and threads so I think Discourse is a million times better if you're looking to use it as a mailing list alternative. In some ways it's worse than Slack because there's something very nice about just having to enter in 1 line of chat to get a message across, but with Discourse you would have to start a thread in some category. I'm going to be using either Slack or Discourse to build a private community but I haven't decided on which one yet. In case you've never heard of Discourse before, here's a live demo hosted on their official site https://try.discourse.org/ https://try.discourse.org/.

larrysalibra 9y ago
If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store of community information new members or potential new members can browse to learn about the community. Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.
- nickjj 9y ago
  Yeah, basically I have a bunch of people who signed up to my programming courses and I want to give them a place to hang out, ask questions and interact with each other. I've used Slack with other organizations and it really is a black hole. Not just for the 10,000 history limitation, but it's really hard to find and read previous conversations.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Discourse has the advantage of having some sort of moderation tools included - people can have discrete permissions and rights, unlike Slack where everyone's equal - but the lack of a join/part for channels is annoying, and the inability for admins to create private channels is very frustrating.

jdc0589 9y ago

explain it like I'm 5 please: why can't.we just build an actually user friendly IRC client (including non technical people) that doesn't look like a dos app, and add client specific extensions for expanding image urls inline, etc... ?

ge0rg 9y ago
In theory, we can. However, building a well-working multi-platform chat client is a significant task, imagine a 5-10 person team working over a year, plus the long-term maintenance support. IRC might not be the right protocol for that, because you'll be adding quirks on top of quirks, but you could easily do that with XMPP. However, you won't find anyone willing to sponsor that development. Old protocols like IRC and XMPP just don't cut it in Silicon Valley. Examples for creating a new IM solution out of nothing, provided funding, include Signal and Matrix/Riot.
jrochkind1 9y ago
The centralized nature of Slack actually makes it a lot _easier_/cheaper to develop, than developing for true federation. See for instance: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/ https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/ Okay, could you implement some IRC extensions to provide some of the features Slack has, deploy them on your own central server cluster, and provide a client that has access to those slack-like features with a UI as good or better than Slacks, so long as you're using channels on that server? Sure, you totally could. You could even take the extra time and energy to make those extensions open standards instead of just something you did (and it definitely is lots of extra time and energy to do that). A lot of work, but not a lot of unsolved problems, it's pretty straightforward. You could do it with IRC or XMPP. Now who's gonna pay for all that?

dandare 9y ago

Everybody keeps talking about selling your data, but as a small startup prospect I have no understanding of this business model. Why is the personal data so valuable? Is it valuable outside advertising? Who is the buyer of the data? What is the price?

tmaly 9y ago

maybe this could be an opportunity for something like mattermost to pick up the torch

crispyporkbites 9y ago

When I try to sign up for https://inverse.chat https://inverse.chat, I'm given the following information: > Create your account > Please enter the XMPP provider to register with: > Tip: A list of public XMPP providers is available here. When I click on the XMPP providers, I'm taken here: https://xmpp.net/directory.php https://xmpp.net/directory.php There's like a hundred options, so now I just close the tab and give up because I have no idea what to pick. Can you instead provide a sign up form that let's me sign up directly to a default provider? The process should mirror how webmail works, e.g. when you visit outlook.com, gmail, fastmail etc. you also end up with an email account with them.

jcbrand 9y ago
The server input suggests conversejs.org, you can use that as a default.
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  Nope - conversejs is just the front end. Even if I go to conversejs.org I still have to pick a public XMPP provider when trying to use this for the first time (what is that, what are the implications of picking one, why is one better than then other, which Geo should I pick, why do some have weird names, ...)
  - jcbrand 9y ago
    It's not just the frontend, there's also an XMPP server hosted under conversejs.org, so you can have an account like crispyporkbites@conversejs.org

asterius 9y ago

Oblique to the predictable Slack XMPP decision, but relevant to federation: Mastondon is a facinating federated social network. It addresses the identity/reputation issues without embracing fb-fascism or one-site-to-rule-them-all nonsense. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ How it works Anyone can run a server of Mastodon. Each server hosts individual user accounts, the content they produce, and the content they subscribe to. Each user account has a globally unique name (e.g. @user@example.com), consisting of the local username (@user), and the domain name of the server it is on (example.com). Users can follow each other, regardless of where they’re hosted — when a local user follows a user from a different server, the server subscribes to that user’s updates for the first time.

Promarged 9y ago
Unfortunately ActivityPub (that powers Mastodon) has a lot of incidental complexity (including RSA signatures, JSON-LD, RDF normalizations to quads etc.) But this is a very simple alternative, distributed "Twitter" for hackers: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt#twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt#twtxt
bhhaskin 9y ago
There is also GNU social; which is what Mastodon is based off of. I have been thinking about hosting a server for awhile. Pretty cool stuff.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I do host my own mastodon server with a small community, the initial setup is a bit complicated but once you get it going upgrades are nice and easy (each update contains all shell commands necessary outside `git fetch` and `git checkout v{VERSION}`) Only downside of course is that if you selfhost alone, your federated timeline will be a bit empty, I do recommend either finding a community or starting one to get a bit more activity (Mastodon is essentially geared towards a sort of "community neighborhood" decentralization, where only one in a few hundred or thousand users needs to run a server, on average)
s73v3r_ 9y ago

erikb 9y ago

I'm a huge fan of increasing our freedoms. But truth is there are things a lot bigger than even a few humans together. e.g. a vulcano breaks out means you can't go on top of the Vulcano without dying. A big corp or government wants your data, they will get it one way or another. So the goal of freedom cannot be reached. You always depend on something. However, that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to keep power over ones own life by accepting to work hard for it, by accepting to not use some maybe-nice-but-exploitative things, etc, by spending money and votes on people and projects and politicians who fight for freedom of everybody. I feel at work Slack is really the right thing, because what you produce there is not free anyways. My company owns the data I produce at work. So why shouldn't they own the chat logs (and pay for it)? For opensource and spare time projects certainly IRC and XMPP are the way to go. Therefore I'm not really pissed with Slack, but with the people who choose to use Slack for things where it's clearly not the right solution. It's a Sisyphean decision, though. Because you can't really make people not let themselves be exploited, especially if you try to give them freedom. The pain is that most people decide, totally freely, to sacrifice their freedom for a quick feeling of comfort.

dyeje 9y ago

How is it a bait and switch if Slack never advertised itself as an open platform?

moosingin3space 9y ago

Sorry, I really don't see the "bait and switch" here. IRC/XMPP gateways were never a selling point of Slack. Bots were always supposed to use the proprietary WebSocket/HTTP APIs, and in all the companies I've worked in that use Slack, not a single person used the IRC or XMPP gateway. Open-source project communities should not be using Slack, if for no reason other than the 10k message limit and the fact that it's annoying to be present in multiple Slacks. I prefer IRC or Gitter for those communities, as they're better designed around the flow of "drop in, drop out" than Slack.

michaelt 9y ago
So I'm a mid-level manager at a company with a few hundred developers. The more developers you hire, the higher the chance you'll start collecting people with obscure (but usually reasonably easy to satisfy) tool preferences. You know, the guy who changes his IDE to emacs key bindings, the guy who does all his e-mail using mutt when everyone else uses gmail, the girl who uses a Dvorak keyboard layout, the guy who insists he works best on a 1024x768 screen, and so on. Having tried a variety of industry tools and thought about about how you work best is usually a good sign[1]. Their favourite tools aren't my favourite tools, but they work for me so if they're not happy, I'm not happy. The bait and switch is we adopted a tool that would keep IRC users happy, and it dropped IRC support. [1] Although I keep my settings conservative, as it's hard for others to pair program or assist you with problems if they can't operate your computer
- warrenm 9y ago
  The beauty of choice is that you and I can have different favorites - so long as we can get our work done, who cares? ____________________ (thanks to http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-march-16th-2018.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-internet... for finding this comment)
tjoff 9y ago
The only good thing I've ever heard of Slack is that you can avoid the bloated client and use IRC instead. Probably a great way to reduce friction when introduced.

detuur 9y ago

Embrace Extend Extinguish <-- YOU ARE HERE

kolbe 9y ago

I can't understand HN's algo. This story is 5 hours old with 202 comments and 552 points, and currently ranked at 15 on my list. Whereas there's another story 8 hours old with 89 points that's at 4. It always strikes me as more than a coincidence when startups that YC is affiliated with (Slack has purchased a few YC alum companies) get their bad news briefly commented on, then buried.

eertami 9y ago
Yeah this dropped off the front page very quickly. Came back to find the comments probably half an hour after viewing it at the 5th spot, but it was no longer there. It's obvious why it's done but always serves as a reminder of HNs lack of impartiality on submissions.

JeanMarcS 9y ago

> You can set up your own email server, and then send emails to people with their own email servers, or to people with Gmail or Yahoo! accounts. Well, there’s a good chance they’ll go straight to the SPAM folder if you just bring your server up, but yes, you can try.

tombert 9y ago

I don't particularly care if the thing that companies use for private chat isn't open-source and doesn't have an open gateway, but it does worry me a bit that Slack has slowly started to replace IRC for open-source software support. Typically if I need help with something FLOSS, I open up my Weechat and log onto Freenode, however increasingly I'm seeing FLOSS projects go to Slack (like Elementary OS). I understand that Slack is simpler, but it's also kind of antithetical to use a proprietary protocol for something open.

jjrh 9y ago
Seems like there is a opening for someone to start something similar to freenode but for XMPP. Or Freenode could run a XMPP<->IRC gateway.

my_ghola 9y ago

Is there an open source IRC/XMPP (or Matrix) client with features similar to Slack (side-threads, pinned messages) and preferably not using electron?

Aaronn 9y ago
Well Riot (Matrix and indirectly IRC client) has pinned messages and will soon have message threading but it is a web app (although it does have native mobile apps).

ris 9y ago

Well there you go. Not going to run a webapp that occupies a gig of ram or two for text chat, so goodbye to slack it is.

harlanji 9y ago

XMPP is a good machine for bait and switching. I discovered it after building my own AOL-like chat systems from scratch in high school, in VB, C, PHP, etc (many iterations) and engaged heavily. To this day all I hear when people talk about why not XMPP are lazy excuses. No doubt they come out as blaming XMPP rather than the hard problems it's solving at scrum meetings. I built a chat app backend recently and was met by FUD from senior engs on the team when I proposed it, and hostility by the CEO who trusted them... forced to build an MVC-based node backend PoC which wouldn't have scaled if I didn't already know how to build chat systems (force="this discussion is over" and "if you don't like it you can quit" type comments... which I did).

vinceguidry 9y ago

Slack grew compared to IRC. That showed the world what people want out of real-time messaging. Email grew relative to walled-garden solutions. That only shows what people want out of asynchronous messaging. My conclusion to all this is that people tend to use synchronous messaging in teams, and asynchronous messaging for everything else. Interconnectivity is more important for asynchronous messaging. Ease of use is more important for synchronous messaging. Email could never have been unseated by any of it's would-be competitors, whereas IRC was always bound to get usurped. It could never have kept up with the needs of the market. Now synchronous messaging is moving in the direction that web browsers started moving 15 years ago. The killer app has been found, now entrants are going to compete on ideology, while the standards people try to balance the profit motive with the need for interoperability. edit: missing is SMS, which occupies a weird middle ground between synchronous and asynchronous messaging. But its openness is more akin to email than Slack.

gist 9y ago

> For example, email is federated. You can set up your own email server, and then send emails to people with their own email servers, or to people with Gmail or Yahoo! accounts. Gmail actually does control somewhat inbound email by restricting certain mail and flagging it as spam according to their own arbitrary definition of spam. Oddly that even ends up flagging mail from one gmail account you own to another gmail account (both @gmail and @domain with google apps). And even in cases where it is clear there is an existing relationship between the parties. Other providers do that as well. And there is not an easy way to prevent it from happening either as a sys admin or a user (there are jump through hoop ways of course). And ultimately yes they do treat email (despite my own example) on their own network differently than email coming from a domain outside their network.

oldpond 9y ago

This is the same old model; give them something free, then monetize it. Thankfully, the internet allows us to just go somewhere else or write your own. https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-with-elixir-phoenix-and-react-part-1-project-setup-3252ae780a1 https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-with-...