9 ms·

Using Slack through an IRC client

rhabarba 8y ago
Has the Slack defense armada already found a good reason why an Electron-based proprietary, vendor-locked-in US version of IRC is even worth a comment?
- loeg 8y ago
  Man, I really don't like a lot of things about Slack, but this comment is over the top. At least assume good faith on the part of people who like do Slack and defend it. There are differences of personal opinion over which features matter most, and it's valid for people to disagree with you. I happen to agree with some of the implied criticisms in your second clause, but, please tone down the tinfoil hat and aggression by a factor of 100.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Because it works? Because it offers the same capabilities across multiple OSes and devices? Because it has message history and offline communication? Because it has multiple built-in and third-party integrations? Because it supports file transfers? Because it supports seamless ad-hoc communication between several people (with access to offline medsages)? Because it supports video calls and screen sharing? For XMPP there’s exactly one client that supports may be half of those features. For IRC there are none.
ahnberg 8y ago
I can also recommend you to look at: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
- dijit 8y ago
  I came here to say this exact same thing. It has some quirks (like not linking to pictures that are posted in chan, I did try to fix that myself) but generally it's the most full featured cli slack client I've used. You can even upload files. Highly recommended.
Thristle 8y ago
Relevent XKCD - https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
- throwaway_98554 8y ago
  IRC is still there while all the other fads are gone.
  - ralusek 8y ago
    Can I get an RSS feed as IRC messages that I can access from cli? Have you heard about how we sent a man to the moon with 1 byte of assembly, which was the fashion at the time? And now kids are driving around without type-safety and gigabytes of electrons and spectrons and scripting with coffee and garbage collectors. I remember when a man was a man, and you could send a man to the moon with 1 byte of assembly, which was the fashion at the time.
rectalogic 8y ago
I use a Slack plugin [1] for Textual IRC I wrote. It uses SlackKit [2] which needs a bit of work. [1] https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack [2] https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit
- dorian-graph 8y ago
  Well done! Looking forward to trying it
loeg 8y ago
weechat + wee-slack.py works quite well.
- lscotte 8y ago
  Very well - https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack I'm so used to using wee-slack that I try to use commands like "s/" when I use the web browser interface (which doesn't work).
  - loeg 8y ago
    Heh, s/foo/bar/ is about the only Slack extension (vs ordinary IRC chat) I am aware of in weechat. I'm sure others exist, just my use is extremely naive / basic. One thing I wish wee-slack had (and I haven't updated in months, so it may by now) is the ability to download files attached to messages without opening the URL to webslack. That, and occasionally silent failure to display long notes attached to messages, are the only major hurdles I encounter with wee-slack on a regular basis.
- fairramone 8y ago
  I agree! This is a great combo.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
newnewpdro 8y ago
I used to stay in contact with a group of friends who now exclusively communicate via slack, until slack eliminated the IRC gateway. Now I've lost contact with that group, it's quite irritating. Do any of the solutions mentioned here work well on low-bandwidth connections? I'm limited to 128kbps, and slack via web is absolutely unusable. Open to self-hosted bouncer/proxy solutions, but not interested in involving a third party.
- loeg 8y ago
  I don't know how much bandwidth wee-slack uses. You could run weechat+wee-slack in screen or tmux on a server; the ssh or mosh session to that server would be very low bandwidth.
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  If you have little bandwidth and lots of time (self-hosted anything implies “yes”!) then you could easily check out a copy of SlackKit and write yourself a tiny API client, or checkout any SlackKit-using app that has a sufficiently acceptable feature set. There are lots (see other comments in this post) and there was an ncurses one a while back too, so options abound. SlackKit would no doubt benefit from your time and attention to it as well!
SampleBourgeois 8y ago
Use matterircd
dmitriid 8y ago
> Hopefully open standards will improve enough so that people who are not tech savvy are able to use them in the future. The problem is not standards. The problem is apps. Jabber has been an open standard for god knows how long. Its standard slowly caught up to the modern world of mobile phones and multiple devices [1]. The apps? Not so much. One of the appeals of Slack is that you have the same functionality across all your OSes and devices (and there’s quite a lot of functionality). [1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html
softwaredoug 8y ago
My “mixed reviews” probably have more to do with slack being scatterbrained from a product direction. Look how poorly threading works nearly all of the time, with half of the conversation buried in a thread, the other half leaking out. Another example is how social link previews push the entire conversation up. I love a lot of the tech work being done at Slack, but a lot of the product doesn’t feel particularly thoughtful.
- u801e 8y ago
  I never really found threading very useful in a live group chat. Most people would either mention the nick of the person they were responding to, or they would quote part of the text they were responding to and append their response. That's actually a lot easier to follow compared to having to click on a link and have it open in another window panel. Though I do find it interesting that there are those who want threading in a group chat setting, yet they aren't interested in threaded discussions via email or usenet. Modern email clients/platforms actually use a limited threading model that's known as conversation view (where you only have a single thread of messages rather than a tree view like one sees on this website or reddit).
  - softwaredoug 8y ago
    I agree on quoting. I think my problem is slacks product design isn’t very opinionated. There are many ways of calling back to an earlier conversation, but slack users don’t really have guidance on what they should do. So conversations past a few interactions get hard to connect together, continue, and discover. Flowdock does a pretty good job of threaded communication. But Flowdock is pretty feature sparse and barely functioning mobile experience.
dehrmann 8y ago
It's a bit of a shame that there isn't a company that offers corporate IRC hosting with a client as rich as the Slack client.
- Aloha 8y ago
  You'd have to extend IRC so much, that it would cease to be IRC.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Is that a problem?
    - Aloha 8y ago
      Why not develop a new protocol, and not try to call it IRC - there are many things about IRC that suck, specifically its support for push messaging and mobile.
      - paulryanrogers 8y ago
        XMPP and Matrix are at least two
  - donatj 8y ago
    I don't think it needs to be. Just have the rich content be a URL and the rich client will know what to do with it, and humans using other clients can follow the link. We actual do this with an IRC client we developed for internal use.
- rocky1138 8y ago
  I know it doesn't directly answer your problem, but running thelounge on a node server can do a pretty good job. It supports user-based logins and since it's running as a service, chat history is supported. Currently there's no way to search, but I imagine that could be implemented in the future. https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/
koalalorenzo 8y ago
Why not http://matrix.org http://matrix.org ?
- EduardoBautista 8y ago
  Looks interesting but I admit I haven't really used it. Is its goal to ultimately replace IRC?
  - rhabarba 8y ago
    It rather is a "better XMPP" in my opinion.
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    Not necessarily to replace IRC but to provide a common protocol which can bridge to IRC, Slack, XMPP etc. Matrix provides free (free as in beer /and/ free as in speech) gateways to Slack and IRC, so you could use it for your purpose here if you wanted.
Endy 8y ago
If only Discord was so simple.
dig1 8y ago
bitlbee[1] + slack-libpurple[2] will work with any IRC client. [1] https://www.bitlbee.org https://www.bitlbee.org [2] https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
oda 8y ago
Or one can use bitlbee, which has been around forever and connects an IRC client to anything that works with libpurple. The full list of what it works with is here: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/ https://wiki.bitlbee.org/ Matterbridge seems interesting as well but I haven't had time to play with it yet. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge In view of those more-complete, non-proprietary solutions, you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge.
- Aelius 8y ago
  > you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge Or part of a network that doesn't want to issue generic API tokens to random users. Since this irccloud is implemented as a specific app integration, if I understand correctly this would be more appealing to administrators and moderators.
walrus01 8y ago
I honestly don't see the point. If you want to use IRC for company internal purposes with your coworkers, do it fully self hosted and with zero dependency on external hosted anything. ircd-hybrid on debian is not rocket science to set up.
jamestomasino 8y ago
ctrl-f "wee-slack"... not found. https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack It works great!
zapzupnz 8y ago
Seeing a lot of comments on the thread to the tune of "just use IRC; I don't use the features that Slack et al offer on top of IRC, so neither should anybody else". You can have your opinions about Slack, about its apps being rubbish, about it being proprietary, whatever. But imagining that your personal use case, and those of your peers who probably are of a similar technical inclination, should represent the be-all and end-all of real-time online communication for groups is really unhelpful. Yes, Slack and its ilk aren't perfect, but neither is IRC. What would be really great is if the IRC protocol could evolve to support some of these new features, perhaps with some sort of minimum specification for graphical clients that want to implement these new features — and graceful fallbacks for those that don't and text-based client users.
- dijit 8y ago
  Good news; https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/ Now if only we had millions in VC money to create nice new clients.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    I've seen this before. The changes look rather modest as far as the gap between IRC and things like Discord and Slack go.
    - dijit 8y ago
      Isn’t that kind of the point. A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least implemented well and understood? What are the main, real benefits slack has over IRC; * resilience to network disruption * onboarding of new users. * inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this) You could argue threads or SIP/VOIP but my admittedly anecdotal evidence suggests that these are seldom used. And, there’s no reason IRC could not expand to relay those.
      - zapzupnz 8y ago
        > A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least implemented well and understood? Well, sure. But while IRC slowly proposes and implements relatively basic features of modern clients, the world will go on without it. That's already happening. Not that this is a problem for existing IRC users, evidently. But if this is the case, and it's accepted, then it would be great if some HN users would stop trying to pretend that IRC has everything that people want — if that were the case, we'd not have all these alternatives. > * inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this) Which is why part of what I said, and I know you didn't specifically reply to it but I must restate it, is some sort of minimal specification for graphical clients to present the user-facing features that people expect of a modern chat client, voluntarily entered into but with the potential as a great feature to advertise the modernity of a client. My thinking is that otherwise someone will just make their own Slack knock-off IRC client, bundle it with their own IRCd, and we'll re-enter the IRC wars again. Proprietary IRC with a proprietary client — not that much different from any other proprietary solution other than IRC users reaping none of the benefits. Going on to the main benefits of Slack, I can't really speak to Slack. However, I'm a Discord user, and I know Discord is inspired of Slack. What I'd like from Discord is: - persistent session without needing a bouncer, or a simulation of such (e.g. when I connect, show me the last few messages on the server; when I scroll up, keep showing me more) - an easily customisable role-based permission system rather than the relatively simplistic op/hop/voice, with customisable symbols (as opposed to colours) - channel categories - consistent and predictable text formatting, including a subset of Markdown — if I show a code block, I want everybody to see it as a code block (even if all that means is forcing a fixed-width font for a given block of text) - separating a user's identity from their username, allowing multiple users to use the same nick differentiated by a discriminator - avatars! - push notifications! It's all the little things that add up to a pleasant experience with things like Slack and Discord. I'm sure many will see many of those things as quite separate from an IRC, but these are the things to which people are now accustomed.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
a chat client is being pushed into enterprise a fucking chat client which was free and decentralized in the 90s, and now pay one company in perpetuity

Has the Slack defense armada already found a good reason why an Electron-based proprietary, vendor-locked-in US version of IRC is even worth a comment?

loeg 8y ago
Man, I really don't like a lot of things about Slack, but this comment is over the top. At least assume good faith on the part of people who like do Slack and defend it. There are differences of personal opinion over which features matter most, and it's valid for people to disagree with you. I happen to agree with some of the implied criticisms in your second clause, but, please tone down the tinfoil hat and aggression by a factor of 100.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dmitriid 8y ago
Because it works? Because it offers the same capabilities across multiple OSes and devices? Because it has message history and offline communication? Because it has multiple built-in and third-party integrations? Because it supports file transfers? Because it supports seamless ad-hoc communication between several people (with access to offline medsages)? Because it supports video calls and screen sharing? For XMPP there’s exactly one client that supports may be half of those features. For IRC there are none.

ahnberg 8y ago

I can also recommend you to look at: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

dijit 8y ago
I came here to say this exact same thing. It has some quirks (like not linking to pictures that are posted in chan, I did try to fix that myself) but generally it's the most full featured cli slack client I've used. You can even upload files. Highly recommended.

Thristle 8y ago

Relevent XKCD - https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/

throwaway_98554 8y ago
IRC is still there while all the other fads are gone.
- ralusek 8y ago
  Can I get an RSS feed as IRC messages that I can access from cli? Have you heard about how we sent a man to the moon with 1 byte of assembly, which was the fashion at the time? And now kids are driving around without type-safety and gigabytes of electrons and spectrons and scripting with coffee and garbage collectors. I remember when a man was a man, and you could send a man to the moon with 1 byte of assembly, which was the fashion at the time.

rectalogic 8y ago

I use a Slack plugin [1] for Textual IRC I wrote. It uses SlackKit [2] which needs a bit of work. [1] https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack [2] https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit

dorian-graph 8y ago
Well done! Looking forward to trying it

loeg 8y ago

weechat + wee-slack.py works quite well.

lscotte 8y ago
Very well - https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack I'm so used to using wee-slack that I try to use commands like "s/" when I use the web browser interface (which doesn't work).
- loeg 8y ago
  Heh, s/foo/bar/ is about the only Slack extension (vs ordinary IRC chat) I am aware of in weechat. I'm sure others exist, just my use is extremely naive / basic. One thing I wish wee-slack had (and I haven't updated in months, so it may by now) is the ability to download files attached to messages without opening the URL to webslack. That, and occasionally silent failure to display long notes attached to messages, are the only major hurdles I encounter with wee-slack on a regular basis.
fairramone 8y ago
I agree! This is a great combo.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

newnewpdro 8y ago

I used to stay in contact with a group of friends who now exclusively communicate via slack, until slack eliminated the IRC gateway. Now I've lost contact with that group, it's quite irritating. Do any of the solutions mentioned here work well on low-bandwidth connections? I'm limited to 128kbps, and slack via web is absolutely unusable. Open to self-hosted bouncer/proxy solutions, but not interested in involving a third party.

loeg 8y ago
I don't know how much bandwidth wee-slack uses. You could run weechat+wee-slack in screen or tmux on a server; the ssh or mosh session to that server would be very low bandwidth.
floatingatoll 8y ago
If you have little bandwidth and lots of time (self-hosted anything implies “yes”!) then you could easily check out a copy of SlackKit and write yourself a tiny API client, or checkout any SlackKit-using app that has a sufficiently acceptable feature set. There are lots (see other comments in this post) and there was an ncurses one a while back too, so options abound. SlackKit would no doubt benefit from your time and attention to it as well!

SampleBourgeois 8y ago

Use matterircd

dmitriid 8y ago

> Hopefully open standards will improve enough so that people who are not tech savvy are able to use them in the future. The problem is not standards. The problem is apps. Jabber has been an open standard for god knows how long. Its standard slowly caught up to the modern world of mobile phones and multiple devices [1]. The apps? Not so much. One of the appeals of Slack is that you have the same functionality across all your OSes and devices (and there’s quite a lot of functionality). [1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html

softwaredoug 8y ago

My “mixed reviews” probably have more to do with slack being scatterbrained from a product direction. Look how poorly threading works nearly all of the time, with half of the conversation buried in a thread, the other half leaking out. Another example is how social link previews push the entire conversation up. I love a lot of the tech work being done at Slack, but a lot of the product doesn’t feel particularly thoughtful.

u801e 8y ago
I never really found threading very useful in a live group chat. Most people would either mention the nick of the person they were responding to, or they would quote part of the text they were responding to and append their response. That's actually a lot easier to follow compared to having to click on a link and have it open in another window panel. Though I do find it interesting that there are those who want threading in a group chat setting, yet they aren't interested in threaded discussions via email or usenet. Modern email clients/platforms actually use a limited threading model that's known as conversation view (where you only have a single thread of messages rather than a tree view like one sees on this website or reddit).
- softwaredoug 8y ago
  I agree on quoting. I think my problem is slacks product design isn’t very opinionated. There are many ways of calling back to an earlier conversation, but slack users don’t really have guidance on what they should do. So conversations past a few interactions get hard to connect together, continue, and discover. Flowdock does a pretty good job of threaded communication. But Flowdock is pretty feature sparse and barely functioning mobile experience.

dehrmann 8y ago

It's a bit of a shame that there isn't a company that offers corporate IRC hosting with a client as rich as the Slack client.

Aloha 8y ago
You'd have to extend IRC so much, that it would cease to be IRC.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Is that a problem?
  - Aloha 8y ago
    Why not develop a new protocol, and not try to call it IRC - there are many things about IRC that suck, specifically its support for push messaging and mobile.
    - paulryanrogers 8y ago
      XMPP and Matrix are at least two
- donatj 8y ago
  I don't think it needs to be. Just have the rich content be a URL and the rich client will know what to do with it, and humans using other clients can follow the link. We actual do this with an IRC client we developed for internal use.
rocky1138 8y ago
I know it doesn't directly answer your problem, but running thelounge on a node server can do a pretty good job. It supports user-based logins and since it's running as a service, chat history is supported. Currently there's no way to search, but I imagine that could be implemented in the future. https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/

koalalorenzo 8y ago

Why not http://matrix.org http://matrix.org ?

EduardoBautista 8y ago
Looks interesting but I admit I haven't really used it. Is its goal to ultimately replace IRC?
- rhabarba 8y ago
  It rather is a "better XMPP" in my opinion.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  Not necessarily to replace IRC but to provide a common protocol which can bridge to IRC, Slack, XMPP etc. Matrix provides free (free as in beer /and/ free as in speech) gateways to Slack and IRC, so you could use it for your purpose here if you wanted.

Endy 8y ago

If only Discord was so simple.

dig1 8y ago

bitlbee[1] + slack-libpurple[2] will work with any IRC client. [1] https://www.bitlbee.org https://www.bitlbee.org [2] https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

oda 8y ago

Or one can use bitlbee, which has been around forever and connects an IRC client to anything that works with libpurple. The full list of what it works with is here: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/ https://wiki.bitlbee.org/ Matterbridge seems interesting as well but I haven't had time to play with it yet. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge In view of those more-complete, non-proprietary solutions, you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge.

Aelius 8y ago
> you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge Or part of a network that doesn't want to issue generic API tokens to random users. Since this irccloud is implemented as a specific app integration, if I understand correctly this would be more appealing to administrators and moderators.

walrus01 8y ago

I honestly don't see the point. If you want to use IRC for company internal purposes with your coworkers, do it fully self hosted and with zero dependency on external hosted anything. ircd-hybrid on debian is not rocket science to set up.

jamestomasino 8y ago

ctrl-f "wee-slack"... not found. https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack It works great!

zapzupnz 8y ago

Seeing a lot of comments on the thread to the tune of "just use IRC; I don't use the features that Slack et al offer on top of IRC, so neither should anybody else". You can have your opinions about Slack, about its apps being rubbish, about it being proprietary, whatever. But imagining that your personal use case, and those of your peers who probably are of a similar technical inclination, should represent the be-all and end-all of real-time online communication for groups is really unhelpful. Yes, Slack and its ilk aren't perfect, but neither is IRC. What would be really great is if the IRC protocol could evolve to support some of these new features, perhaps with some sort of minimum specification for graphical clients that want to implement these new features — and graceful fallbacks for those that don't and text-based client users.

dijit 8y ago
Good news; https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/ Now if only we had millions in VC money to create nice new clients.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  I've seen this before. The changes look rather modest as far as the gap between IRC and things like Discord and Slack go.
  - dijit 8y ago
    Isn’t that kind of the point. A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least implemented well and understood? What are the main, real benefits slack has over IRC; * resilience to network disruption * onboarding of new users. * inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this) You could argue threads or SIP/VOIP but my admittedly anecdotal evidence suggests that these are seldom used. And, there’s no reason IRC could not expand to relay those.
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      > A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least implemented well and understood? Well, sure. But while IRC slowly proposes and implements relatively basic features of modern clients, the world will go on without it. That's already happening. Not that this is a problem for existing IRC users, evidently. But if this is the case, and it's accepted, then it would be great if some HN users would stop trying to pretend that IRC has everything that people want — if that were the case, we'd not have all these alternatives. > * inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this) Which is why part of what I said, and I know you didn't specifically reply to it but I must restate it, is some sort of minimal specification for graphical clients to present the user-facing features that people expect of a modern chat client, voluntarily entered into but with the potential as a great feature to advertise the modernity of a client. My thinking is that otherwise someone will just make their own Slack knock-off IRC client, bundle it with their own IRCd, and we'll re-enter the IRC wars again. Proprietary IRC with a proprietary client — not that much different from any other proprietary solution other than IRC users reaping none of the benefits. Going on to the main benefits of Slack, I can't really speak to Slack. However, I'm a Discord user, and I know Discord is inspired of Slack. What I'd like from Discord is: - persistent session without needing a bouncer, or a simulation of such (e.g. when I connect, show me the last few messages on the server; when I scroll up, keep showing me more) - an easily customisable role-based permission system rather than the relatively simplistic op/hop/voice, with customisable symbols (as opposed to colours) - channel categories - consistent and predictable text formatting, including a subset of Markdown — if I show a code block, I want everybody to see it as a code block (even if all that means is forcing a fixed-width font for a given block of text) - separating a user's identity from their username, allowing multiple users to use the same nick differentiated by a discriminator - avatars! - push notifications! It's all the little things that add up to a pleasant experience with things like Slack and Discord. I'm sure many will see many of those things as quite separate from an IRC, but these are the things to which people are now accustomed.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

a chat client is being pushed into enterprise a fucking chat client which was free and decentralized in the 90s, and now pay one company in perpetuity