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You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot abou

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that will ultimately lead to no action.* *Because we've had this discussion so many times before...

ivm 8y ago
Luckily most of my active communities are on Discord nowadays. It works much faster and even has a dark theme by default.
- asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
  It's lovely how in Slack.app if you want dark theme, you have to modify the internet javascript files...
- rkeene2 8y ago
  But it's not any less centralized, which I think was the complaint, not that it was popular even though this was mentioned.
  - sarreph 8y ago
    > which I think was the complaint Spot on, not that I know anything about Discord's architecture...
- palencharizard 8y ago
  > even has a dark theme by default. I love how having a dark theme is second only to "it works" in terms of how we pick services these days XD
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- dictum 8y ago
  I say this as someone who almost always prefers the dark theme wherever it is available: I wonder how much this desire for dark interfaces comes from almost every app interface having bright colors on white. Somewhere along the shift to flat design, grays and non-bright colors have been ignored in the visual design of applications.
  - joobus 8y ago
    In civil engineering circles, it's known that a room which is too bright will cause eye strain and fatigue. There is an optimal level of light for the eyes to be most effective. But the computer makers and UI designers don't take this into account. Dark themes transmit less light to the eyes, causing less fatigue over time.
    - hokus 8y ago
      The trick is this" if you look into a bright light you cant see the rest of the room anymore. Its a kind of forced feeding. Not that the designers of our world are guilty of some sinister CONSPIRACY. They simply see awful-white as the only choice based on tests or they are just imitating what they know.
    - coryfklein 8y ago
      I just installed Dark Mode for Firefox [1], it makes all websites have a dark theme. My eyes are already thanking me. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-webextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-web...
cremp 8y ago
It's not so much decentralization as chaos engineering. Building the program with withstand failure after failure, of things in and out, of your control. Seems like Slack needs some chaos engineers...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
FooBarWidget 8y ago
Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether I fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster than I can fix my problem for myself. And it's not like I'm crippled when Slack is down. If it's urgent I can use the phone, and my todo list is stored outside Slack.
- ljm 8y ago
  In a way there's a second single point of failure though, right? So many people use Slack to integrate all kinds of things, and rely on their interaction with those platforms through Slack, that if Slack goes down then productivity halts and it's totally out of your hands while Slack themselves try to resolve the issue. - You don't get GitHub notifications on pull requests and comments, so things don't get reviewed and merged if developers aren't in the habit of checking the PR tab on GitHub itself. - You don't get CI notifications so you won't know how your latest test run or deploy is going without going straight into the CI service itself. Even worse when there's a failure and you're too used to having Slack warn you about that. - Your team might depend on Slack so much that they don't know how else to efficiently communicate, and the most efficient channel to communicate a fallback is not available or rarely checked (e.g. email, face to face). So you get a lot of chaos as people come up with dozens of alternatives. This is just poor discipline more than anything, putting too many structural eggs into one basket, but it doesn't change the fact that Slack has created that dependency.
  - nettdata 8y ago
    If your team can't check on that stuff manually for a few hours while Slack is down, then I think you may have bigger problems. If anyone on my team came to me and cited Slack being down as a reason for their inability to do their job, then they wouldn't be on my team. Is it less than ideal? Yes. Is it a little bit less efficient to pull info instead of having it pushed to you? Yes. Is the sky falling? No.
- 8y ago
Bartweiss 8y ago
I'm not sure about production dependent, but I'd love to see how many other companies have longer/worse outages thanks to this. There are definitely a lot of people counting on Slack as a sole channel to push low-level error notifications, and I doubt most of them have an easy fallback option.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  reading all this thread made me realize at my company (~50 people) we have a couple slack-bots that control a number of things, deploys being one of them. shrug
djsumdog 8y ago
I worked at an open source company where they hosted their own IRC server. There are OSS alternatives to Slack and I wonder if that company has tried to adopt any of them. This all goes back to one basic fact: The Cloud is Someone Else's Computer(tm). If your hosted Confluence or Jira is down, you can go walk over to your IT team and they'll be like, "Yea we know. We broke something. We're working on it." If you're using a hosted (a.k.a "Cloud" solution), you're just kinda fucked. You can't even extract your data and try to run it locally if it's down (if that's even an option).
- cwyers 8y ago
  That's uptime-as-anecdote. Yes, you can throw your entire IT department at your outage instead of waiting on the vendor to fix it. How many of us work somewhere where the entire IT team is as large as the team that works on Slack's uptime?
  - detaro 8y ago
    How many self-hosted setups need the complexity and matching team size of a centralized service serving millions of users?
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  Let's say the self hosted chat app does go down. Now someone has to fix it. Someone who probably has something better to do. In a cloud hosted solution, the person in charge of fixing your computer doesn't work for you. My experience with self hosted solutions is that they go down way more often and take longer to fix than cloud solutions.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  I remember the netsplits of IRC days...
ythn 8y ago
In my company we use Cisco Jabber for official comms but Slack unofficially. So when Slack goes down, we fall back on Jabber.
Kiro 8y ago
Sure, it's worrying but worth it for me personally. I might go to jail due to this (seriously) but at least people won't die. For me that's the threshold.
- MockObject 8y ago
  You can't leave us hanging like that. How could a Slack failure possibly send you to jail?
thomastjeffery 8y ago
My company has a customer support system that relies on Slack chatops. It's an interesting morning, to say the least.
- dijit 8y ago
  To me it raises a concern, chatops and slack integrations are /very/ common, it's a form of vendor lock-in on their side and it makes absolute sense. However, if you become dependent on chat-ops to do your job. (say: fallbacks for common things have eroded due to lack of use) then suddenly your company is crippled. And why? for a chat service? The value add from slack is grotesquely small in isolation.
yani 8y ago
What channel of communication did you pick talk to your teammates on Slack? I've received messages by Facebook Messenger, Line, and the rusty email :)
danmg 8y ago
Here's a chat decentralisation platform: https://www.ratbox.org/ https://www.ratbox.org/ .
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I have used Mattermost and been pleased with it. It is an open-source Slack clone you can run on a low-end VM or your own hardware.

ivm 8y ago

Luckily most of my active communities are on Discord nowadays. It works much faster and even has a dark theme by default.

asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
It's lovely how in Slack.app if you want dark theme, you have to modify the internet javascript files...
rkeene2 8y ago
But it's not any less centralized, which I think was the complaint, not that it was popular even though this was mentioned.
- sarreph 8y ago
  > which I think was the complaint Spot on, not that I know anything about Discord's architecture...
palencharizard 8y ago
> even has a dark theme by default. I love how having a dark theme is second only to "it works" in terms of how we pick services these days XD
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dictum 8y ago
I say this as someone who almost always prefers the dark theme wherever it is available: I wonder how much this desire for dark interfaces comes from almost every app interface having bright colors on white. Somewhere along the shift to flat design, grays and non-bright colors have been ignored in the visual design of applications.
- joobus 8y ago
  In civil engineering circles, it's known that a room which is too bright will cause eye strain and fatigue. There is an optimal level of light for the eyes to be most effective. But the computer makers and UI designers don't take this into account. Dark themes transmit less light to the eyes, causing less fatigue over time.
  - hokus 8y ago
    The trick is this" if you look into a bright light you cant see the rest of the room anymore. Its a kind of forced feeding. Not that the designers of our world are guilty of some sinister CONSPIRACY. They simply see awful-white as the only choice based on tests or they are just imitating what they know.
  - coryfklein 8y ago
    I just installed Dark Mode for Firefox [1], it makes all websites have a dark theme. My eyes are already thanking me. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-webextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-web...

cremp 8y ago

It's not so much decentralization as chaos engineering. Building the program with withstand failure after failure, of things in and out, of your control. Seems like Slack needs some chaos engineers...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

FooBarWidget 8y ago

Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether I fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster than I can fix my problem for myself. And it's not like I'm crippled when Slack is down. If it's urgent I can use the phone, and my todo list is stored outside Slack.

ljm 8y ago
In a way there's a second single point of failure though, right? So many people use Slack to integrate all kinds of things, and rely on their interaction with those platforms through Slack, that if Slack goes down then productivity halts and it's totally out of your hands while Slack themselves try to resolve the issue. - You don't get GitHub notifications on pull requests and comments, so things don't get reviewed and merged if developers aren't in the habit of checking the PR tab on GitHub itself. - You don't get CI notifications so you won't know how your latest test run or deploy is going without going straight into the CI service itself. Even worse when there's a failure and you're too used to having Slack warn you about that. - Your team might depend on Slack so much that they don't know how else to efficiently communicate, and the most efficient channel to communicate a fallback is not available or rarely checked (e.g. email, face to face). So you get a lot of chaos as people come up with dozens of alternatives. This is just poor discipline more than anything, putting too many structural eggs into one basket, but it doesn't change the fact that Slack has created that dependency.
- nettdata 8y ago
  If your team can't check on that stuff manually for a few hours while Slack is down, then I think you may have bigger problems. If anyone on my team came to me and cited Slack being down as a reason for their inability to do their job, then they wouldn't be on my team. Is it less than ideal? Yes. Is it a little bit less efficient to pull info instead of having it pushed to you? Yes. Is the sky falling? No.
8y ago

Bartweiss 8y ago

I'm not sure about production dependent, but I'd love to see how many other companies have longer/worse outages thanks to this. There are definitely a lot of people counting on Slack as a sole channel to push low-level error notifications, and I doubt most of them have an easy fallback option.

brootstrap 8y ago
reading all this thread made me realize at my company (~50 people) we have a couple slack-bots that control a number of things, deploys being one of them. shrug

djsumdog 8y ago

I worked at an open source company where they hosted their own IRC server. There are OSS alternatives to Slack and I wonder if that company has tried to adopt any of them. This all goes back to one basic fact: The Cloud is Someone Else's Computer(tm). If your hosted Confluence or Jira is down, you can go walk over to your IT team and they'll be like, "Yea we know. We broke something. We're working on it." If you're using a hosted (a.k.a "Cloud" solution), you're just kinda fucked. You can't even extract your data and try to run it locally if it's down (if that's even an option).

cwyers 8y ago
That's uptime-as-anecdote. Yes, you can throw your entire IT department at your outage instead of waiting on the vendor to fix it. How many of us work somewhere where the entire IT team is as large as the team that works on Slack's uptime?
- detaro 8y ago
  How many self-hosted setups need the complexity and matching team size of a centralized service serving millions of users?
RandallBrown 8y ago
Let's say the self hosted chat app does go down. Now someone has to fix it. Someone who probably has something better to do. In a cloud hosted solution, the person in charge of fixing your computer doesn't work for you. My experience with self hosted solutions is that they go down way more often and take longer to fix than cloud solutions.
forgot-my-pw 8y ago
I remember the netsplits of IRC days...

ythn 8y ago

In my company we use Cisco Jabber for official comms but Slack unofficially. So when Slack goes down, we fall back on Jabber.

Kiro 8y ago

Sure, it's worrying but worth it for me personally. I might go to jail due to this (seriously) but at least people won't die. For me that's the threshold.

MockObject 8y ago
You can't leave us hanging like that. How could a Slack failure possibly send you to jail?

thomastjeffery 8y ago

My company has a customer support system that relies on Slack chatops. It's an interesting morning, to say the least.

dijit 8y ago
To me it raises a concern, chatops and slack integrations are /very/ common, it's a form of vendor lock-in on their side and it makes absolute sense. However, if you become dependent on chat-ops to do your job. (say: fallbacks for common things have eroded due to lack of use) then suddenly your company is crippled. And why? for a chat service? The value add from slack is grotesquely small in isolation.

yani 8y ago

What channel of communication did you pick talk to your teammates on Slack? I've received messages by Facebook Messenger, Line, and the rusty email :)

danmg 8y ago

Here's a chat decentralisation platform: https://www.ratbox.org/ https://www.ratbox.org/ .

patrickg_zill 8y ago

I have used Mattermost and been pleased with it. It is an open-source Slack clone you can run on a low-end VM or your own hardware.