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I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain

I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the point at which I started considering leaving. Using a proprietary protocol that doesn't allow any form of federation is an unacceptable way to build a global community. Please consider using an IRC based service for group chat or an XMPP based service where 1:1, history, rapid reconnects, and other more complex chat features are required (yes, if you're a dev you have to use XML which is annoying, but overall it's a well designed protocol, so get over it). This lets you host your own, and (in the case of XMPP at least) if one person wants to use a U.S. based service and another is in Iran they can just sign up for a Belgian account (or wherever). We can't afford to let he internet splinter off into siloed tiers based on nationality.

AndyMcConachie 8y ago
This is a software space that could really use more devs. IRC is fine but many people can't use it because it's too technical. We need more user friendly XMPP clients with features that non-technical people want. I hate Skype but damn if the non-techies I work with don't love it. I tried to download and run Jitsi a couple months ago for a project and it's voice quality was terrible. Skype just works. I sometimes have weird quirky bugs with Adium, and it's getting harder to justify telling my team to use it. Get hacking folks. This space needs better tools.
- ChrisClark 8y ago
  I've heard Matrix might be a good IRC replacement. But it also still looks rough to me. I only tried it once, but didn't continue as I didn't need it for anything.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    Matrix the protocol is pretty awful, and I'm not a huge fan of the "official" clients, but YMMV. The real problem with it though is that unlike IRC and XMPP the protocol itself isn't developed in a sustainable way by a standards foundation with a reasonable funding model. The protocol itself doesn't really matter that much though as long as we pick one that will be maintained and won't just go bankrupt (so IRC or XMPP depending on what you want to build) and then build nice services that support it. Remember, Slack is a service and a protocol, XMPP/IRC are just protocols. You still need good services like conversations.im or Freenode built on top of them for it to be usable. Unfortunately, we don't have many good services like Slack that have commercial backing but use an open protocol.
  - Argorak 8y ago
    Matrix is terrible in as it is purely focused on building a protocol. Everything else is underserved. People are into Chats because of the clients.
    - SamWhited 8y ago
      In all fairness to Matrix, this tends to be XMPP and IRCs biggest fault too. Although I tend to think the protocol needs to be developed by an independent standards body that really only focuses on that (which is the problem with Matrix, it can't go anywhere because it's fettered by a commercial entity that doesn't actually know much about protocol development). IRC and XMPP on the other hand have a standards body, but need to stop advertising them as if only the public network is usable: they need companies on board building their own services that use them (and possibly federate, or possibly allow third party clients).
- SamWhited 8y ago
  WRT XMPP clients: Dino.im is getting there (although it's still too early and buggy to say it's there yet, I think). I'm still not aware of any decent web clients though, unfortunately. The ones that do exist tend to be developed by individuals and full of security issues, even if they are nice looking and easy to use. I tend to think that we don't need more small community projects, we need one or two entire services like Slack to build themselves on the base protocols and federate. Even if they only allowed their own clients so that they controlled the entire experience, if they just federated with other servers it would give users a choice and largely solve the Slack problem.
wpietri 8y ago
I would love to see more things built on open protocols. But for that to be the case, we have to find ways to make better apps built on top of open protocols. We should start by admitting that Slack beat IRC. Beat it like a cheap hallway rug. IRC was always a terrible experience for novices, and it wasn't a great experience for experts. That it had any users at all is a testament not to IRC, but to what it enabled. Slack found a way to provide the same value but with a much better user experience. And then they rapidly iterated on that experience, making it better and better. They started out with IRC and XMPP bridges. But they eventually shut those down because they were a drag on improving the product. When faced with the same choice, IRC kept the original protocol and shut down improving the product. This was an understandable choice, but one that set up the situation where commercial developers could come in and do something radically better. Open source needs to figure out how to compete with that, or things like this will keep happening.
- aetherson 8y ago
  Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      > persistence and access to history Yep. > there are surely ways to solve that Most common solution is to use something else.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      I’ve honestly never found an IRC client with a sane UI. If it’s tedious for technical folks, why do you expect it to be preferable to slack?
IshKebab 8y ago
I wonder if part of the reason we don't have any great open source Slack competitors (yes I know about Mattermost, Zulip, etc.) is that so many open source developers (or at least commenters here) seem to be under the illusion that IRC is a reasonable alternative to Slack.
- mgbmtl 8y ago
  What's wrong with Mattermost? We use it for our FOSS community (and I use another instance for our company), works well.
  - simonsaidit 8y ago
    Our company still have a lot of guys on irc so a bridge was put in place to mattermost :)
  - clarry 8y ago
    Just terrible UX in general, and a very bloated & power hungry client. Search is borderline useless, and it's difficult for me to find anything that was talked about a couple weeks ago (meanwhile I can easily grep IRC logs for things that were said years ago). People at work turned off mobile notifications because they sometimes work, but usually not when you want them to work. I wish we'd just switch to IRC.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    What protocol does Mattermost use? I was under the impression that it was XMPP, but I can't find anything that says that now that I'm glancing at it. Did they invent their own as well?
- SamWhited 8y ago
  IRC isn't an alternative to Slack at all, which is why this argument is frustrating. IRC is a protocol, not a service. Slack could have been entirely based on IRC but they are greedy assholes who want to lock you into their clients. It could also have been entirely based on XMPP and federate with the broader ecosystem. Or based entirely on Matrix or whatever other protocols are out there. Unfortunately we as a community tend to mischaracterize things and position the public Jabber network or "IRC" as a competitor even though it's not even the same sort of thing. Another way of phrasing it is that we don't need to encourage people to use the Jabber network necessarily, we need to encourage companies like Slack to adopt the protocol and interop with the network. Then people can choose whatever they want.
walterbell 8y ago
An effort is underway to standardize E2E encrypted group messaging in the IETF with the MLS [1] protocol. Open-source participants include Wire and Matrix. Commercial participants include Facebook, Cisco, Google and Apple. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ Wire is open-source today and usable by regular people, with E2E encryption and email-only accounts.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  All the usual suspects. It'll die like the google chat thing(s).
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Always possible. As a counter-precedent of success, https://www.opus-codec.org https://www.opus-codec.org for WebRTC came from the IETF, Skype and others.
- mtgx 8y ago
  I'm curious, have you followed those discussions, and have you noticed say Google or Facebook do anything to "nudge" the protocol towards being "more convenient to use" (read: less secure) and less privacy friendly than it was originally intended to be?
  - wbl 8y ago
    We're all individuals at the IETF. I have seen people agree to changes that make their job harder because it was the right thing to do.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  How is Wire developed and funded? This was my biggest problem with Matrix (unsustainable funding model for the protocol and no proper standards body). Why not just use XMPP? Yes, everyone hates XML, but the protocol is well designed, has sustainable funding (via the IETF and XSF), and there's lots of experience out there, and it's flexible enough to develop services like Slack on top of.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
There's a move to work on ircv3 as well. Not sure how far we are from these sort of changes, but I would love to see rich IRC clients. I've seen IRC clients that preview images and such, so Slack isn't any more special in comparison (in my opinion anyway). Since it's all things a client can just support. https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/
SUr3na 8y ago
It's ironic that Golang.org is not accessible from Iran because of app engine.also several non proprietary repos like sourceforge. The only way to get go lang's source code is through github. It is only a matter of time untill Microsoft decides to block github for Iranians as well.I don't know why github is not currently blocked but I would not be surprised if it gets blocked.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  None of the Google developer-oriented resources are accessible from Iran. For example, you have to use a VPN to download Android Studio or access Google educational materials. Golang is just yet another Google project that has blocked Iran.
  - SUr3na 8y ago
    My intention was to show that in reality it doesn't matter whether a software is open source or proprietary like sourceforge .golang has nit blocked Iran .I highly doubt anyone among go community and creators would think or know about this issue . it is only blocked because of app engine just like many other non-google websites which use app engine.
cmurf 8y ago
What about mtproto (which is what Telegram is using)?
- TimWolla 8y ago
  Google for "Telegram Security" or "Telegram Moxie" to see why Telegram / mtproto might not be the best choice. This is repeatedly the topic on Hacker News as well.
winrid 8y ago
Try to propose running your own chat server at any medium to large company. No VP of engineering or CTO wants to worry about that and the possible security risks. If Slack messes up they can blame Slack but if you mess up and expose some Healthcare data to the outside world because of your chat server they are screwed.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  I’ve seen exactly those reasons by those people in those size companies to explain why slack could not be allowed.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    I've seen that too, but it's usually the same people who just reject anything hosted somewhere else with statements like "we're not doing airquotes The Cloud" and think all tech companies are conspiring against us.
    - krageon 8y ago
      No, it's because all of the big chat applications are hosted in the US and this is a completely unacceptable country to have any data in.
      - winrid 8y ago
        This is true. If you are in the EU you might not even legally be able to use a US hosted solution depending on what data you are sending over the chat...
- SamWhited 8y ago
  I've had the opposite experience; at my last job (a medium sized tech company that you've heard of and probably use tangentially on a daily basis) they wouldn't hear of using anything cloud based because then someone else could potentially leak their data.
soheil 8y ago
That’s pretty much the point of sanctions, what did you think was going to happen, people of sanctioned countries getting a medal? The point is to put as much pressure on those countries as possible and there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change. The question should be whether or not Iran should be sanctioned. But if you agree that it should then this is an example of a perfectly reasonable outcome.
- eloff 8y ago
  He's a Canadian student. How is this acceptable in any way?
  - soheil 8y ago
    The status of being a student does not expunge your status of being a citizen of your country of origin nor does it cut all your ties with said country. Part of sanctions is to pressure citizens of sanctioned countries in order for them to seek change in their governments.
    - eloff 8y ago
      Ah, I read that wrong. It's different if he's on a student via I suppose vs having permanent residency
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Wait, so sanctions against a country should affect all people who share the common ethnicity in that country regardless of citizenship status or location in the world? So essentially it's a sanction against an ethnic group, not a state. Are you sure that's a reasonable idea? How did Slack figure out this guy's ethnicity / citizenship / status? Why are they allowed to access that information and unilaterally act on it? Sounds like there's a valid question being asked here to me.
  - soheil 8y ago
    That's a question for Slack how they found out and that is a great question, but there seems to be much conflation of that question with justification of sanctions in the first place, which I wanted to address. It's a question of nationality and citizenship if Slack determined one of those to be the case then they simply followed the regulations set forth by the sanctions.

AndyMcConachie 8y ago

This is a software space that could really use more devs. IRC is fine but many people can't use it because it's too technical. We need more user friendly XMPP clients with features that non-technical people want. I hate Skype but damn if the non-techies I work with don't love it. I tried to download and run Jitsi a couple months ago for a project and it's voice quality was terrible. Skype just works. I sometimes have weird quirky bugs with Adium, and it's getting harder to justify telling my team to use it. Get hacking folks. This space needs better tools.

ChrisClark 8y ago
I've heard Matrix might be a good IRC replacement. But it also still looks rough to me. I only tried it once, but didn't continue as I didn't need it for anything.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Matrix the protocol is pretty awful, and I'm not a huge fan of the "official" clients, but YMMV. The real problem with it though is that unlike IRC and XMPP the protocol itself isn't developed in a sustainable way by a standards foundation with a reasonable funding model. The protocol itself doesn't really matter that much though as long as we pick one that will be maintained and won't just go bankrupt (so IRC or XMPP depending on what you want to build) and then build nice services that support it. Remember, Slack is a service and a protocol, XMPP/IRC are just protocols. You still need good services like conversations.im or Freenode built on top of them for it to be usable. Unfortunately, we don't have many good services like Slack that have commercial backing but use an open protocol.
- Argorak 8y ago
  Matrix is terrible in as it is purely focused on building a protocol. Everything else is underserved. People are into Chats because of the clients.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    In all fairness to Matrix, this tends to be XMPP and IRCs biggest fault too. Although I tend to think the protocol needs to be developed by an independent standards body that really only focuses on that (which is the problem with Matrix, it can't go anywhere because it's fettered by a commercial entity that doesn't actually know much about protocol development). IRC and XMPP on the other hand have a standards body, but need to stop advertising them as if only the public network is usable: they need companies on board building their own services that use them (and possibly federate, or possibly allow third party clients).
SamWhited 8y ago
WRT XMPP clients: Dino.im is getting there (although it's still too early and buggy to say it's there yet, I think). I'm still not aware of any decent web clients though, unfortunately. The ones that do exist tend to be developed by individuals and full of security issues, even if they are nice looking and easy to use. I tend to think that we don't need more small community projects, we need one or two entire services like Slack to build themselves on the base protocols and federate. Even if they only allowed their own clients so that they controlled the entire experience, if they just federated with other servers it would give users a choice and largely solve the Slack problem.

wpietri 8y ago

I would love to see more things built on open protocols. But for that to be the case, we have to find ways to make better apps built on top of open protocols. We should start by admitting that Slack beat IRC. Beat it like a cheap hallway rug. IRC was always a terrible experience for novices, and it wasn't a great experience for experts. That it had any users at all is a testament not to IRC, but to what it enabled. Slack found a way to provide the same value but with a much better user experience. And then they rapidly iterated on that experience, making it better and better. They started out with IRC and XMPP bridges. But they eventually shut those down because they were a drag on improving the product. When faced with the same choice, IRC kept the original protocol and shut down improving the product. This was an understandable choice, but one that set up the situation where commercial developers could come in and do something radically better. Open source needs to figure out how to compete with that, or things like this will keep happening.

aetherson 8y ago
Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    > persistence and access to history Yep. > there are surely ways to solve that Most common solution is to use something else.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    I’ve honestly never found an IRC client with a sane UI. If it’s tedious for technical folks, why do you expect it to be preferable to slack?

IshKebab 8y ago

I wonder if part of the reason we don't have any great open source Slack competitors (yes I know about Mattermost, Zulip, etc.) is that so many open source developers (or at least commenters here) seem to be under the illusion that IRC is a reasonable alternative to Slack.

mgbmtl 8y ago
What's wrong with Mattermost? We use it for our FOSS community (and I use another instance for our company), works well.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  Our company still have a lot of guys on irc so a bridge was put in place to mattermost :)
- clarry 8y ago
  Just terrible UX in general, and a very bloated & power hungry client. Search is borderline useless, and it's difficult for me to find anything that was talked about a couple weeks ago (meanwhile I can easily grep IRC logs for things that were said years ago). People at work turned off mobile notifications because they sometimes work, but usually not when you want them to work. I wish we'd just switch to IRC.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  What protocol does Mattermost use? I was under the impression that it was XMPP, but I can't find anything that says that now that I'm glancing at it. Did they invent their own as well?
SamWhited 8y ago
IRC isn't an alternative to Slack at all, which is why this argument is frustrating. IRC is a protocol, not a service. Slack could have been entirely based on IRC but they are greedy assholes who want to lock you into their clients. It could also have been entirely based on XMPP and federate with the broader ecosystem. Or based entirely on Matrix or whatever other protocols are out there. Unfortunately we as a community tend to mischaracterize things and position the public Jabber network or "IRC" as a competitor even though it's not even the same sort of thing. Another way of phrasing it is that we don't need to encourage people to use the Jabber network necessarily, we need to encourage companies like Slack to adopt the protocol and interop with the network. Then people can choose whatever they want.

walterbell 8y ago

An effort is underway to standardize E2E encrypted group messaging in the IETF with the MLS [1] protocol. Open-source participants include Wire and Matrix. Commercial participants include Facebook, Cisco, Google and Apple. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ Wire is open-source today and usable by regular people, with E2E encryption and email-only accounts.

scruffyherder 8y ago
All the usual suspects. It'll die like the google chat thing(s).
- walterbell 8y ago
  Always possible. As a counter-precedent of success, https://www.opus-codec.org https://www.opus-codec.org for WebRTC came from the IETF, Skype and others.
mtgx 8y ago
I'm curious, have you followed those discussions, and have you noticed say Google or Facebook do anything to "nudge" the protocol towards being "more convenient to use" (read: less secure) and less privacy friendly than it was originally intended to be?
- wbl 8y ago
  We're all individuals at the IETF. I have seen people agree to changes that make their job harder because it was the right thing to do.
SamWhited 8y ago
How is Wire developed and funded? This was my biggest problem with Matrix (unsustainable funding model for the protocol and no proper standards body). Why not just use XMPP? Yes, everyone hates XML, but the protocol is well designed, has sustainable funding (via the IETF and XSF), and there's lots of experience out there, and it's flexible enough to develop services like Slack on top of.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

There's a move to work on ircv3 as well. Not sure how far we are from these sort of changes, but I would love to see rich IRC clients. I've seen IRC clients that preview images and such, so Slack isn't any more special in comparison (in my opinion anyway). Since it's all things a client can just support. https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/

SUr3na 8y ago

It's ironic that Golang.org is not accessible from Iran because of app engine.also several non proprietary repos like sourceforge. The only way to get go lang's source code is through github. It is only a matter of time untill Microsoft decides to block github for Iranians as well.I don't know why github is not currently blocked but I would not be surprised if it gets blocked.

smnrchrds 8y ago
None of the Google developer-oriented resources are accessible from Iran. For example, you have to use a VPN to download Android Studio or access Google educational materials. Golang is just yet another Google project that has blocked Iran.
- SUr3na 8y ago
  My intention was to show that in reality it doesn't matter whether a software is open source or proprietary like sourceforge .golang has nit blocked Iran .I highly doubt anyone among go community and creators would think or know about this issue . it is only blocked because of app engine just like many other non-google websites which use app engine.

cmurf 8y ago

What about mtproto (which is what Telegram is using)?

TimWolla 8y ago
Google for "Telegram Security" or "Telegram Moxie" to see why Telegram / mtproto might not be the best choice. This is repeatedly the topic on Hacker News as well.

winrid 8y ago

Try to propose running your own chat server at any medium to large company. No VP of engineering or CTO wants to worry about that and the possible security risks. If Slack messes up they can blame Slack but if you mess up and expose some Healthcare data to the outside world because of your chat server they are screwed.

simonsaidit 8y ago
I’ve seen exactly those reasons by those people in those size companies to explain why slack could not be allowed.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I've seen that too, but it's usually the same people who just reject anything hosted somewhere else with statements like "we're not doing airquotes The Cloud" and think all tech companies are conspiring against us.
  - krageon 8y ago
    No, it's because all of the big chat applications are hosted in the US and this is a completely unacceptable country to have any data in.
    - winrid 8y ago
      This is true. If you are in the EU you might not even legally be able to use a US hosted solution depending on what data you are sending over the chat...
SamWhited 8y ago
I've had the opposite experience; at my last job (a medium sized tech company that you've heard of and probably use tangentially on a daily basis) they wouldn't hear of using anything cloud based because then someone else could potentially leak their data.

soheil 8y ago

That’s pretty much the point of sanctions, what did you think was going to happen, people of sanctioned countries getting a medal? The point is to put as much pressure on those countries as possible and there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change. The question should be whether or not Iran should be sanctioned. But if you agree that it should then this is an example of a perfectly reasonable outcome.

eloff 8y ago
He's a Canadian student. How is this acceptable in any way?
- soheil 8y ago
  The status of being a student does not expunge your status of being a citizen of your country of origin nor does it cut all your ties with said country. Part of sanctions is to pressure citizens of sanctioned countries in order for them to seek change in their governments.
  - eloff 8y ago
    Ah, I read that wrong. It's different if he's on a student via I suppose vs having permanent residency
vertexFarm 8y ago
Wait, so sanctions against a country should affect all people who share the common ethnicity in that country regardless of citizenship status or location in the world? So essentially it's a sanction against an ethnic group, not a state. Are you sure that's a reasonable idea? How did Slack figure out this guy's ethnicity / citizenship / status? Why are they allowed to access that information and unilaterally act on it? Sounds like there's a valid question being asked here to me.
- soheil 8y ago
  That's a question for Slack how they found out and that is a great question, but there seems to be much conflation of that question with justification of sanctions in the first place, which I wanted to address. It's a question of nationality and citizenship if Slack determined one of those to be the case then they simply followed the regulations set forth by the sanctions.