7 ms·
Goodbye, Slack. Hello, Spectrum
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sincerely 8y agoIt really feels like by exclusively targeting the enterprise market, Slack is leaving money on the table. Like it says in the article, the paid plan is prohibitively expensive for casual users and it's very easy to run up against the limitations of the free version.
- jjordan 8y agoThere's a tech community slack in my area with dozens of vertical channels of discussion. I'm sure that at there's been many interesting conversations, but because the free version limits a server to 10,000 messages across all channels, the majority of chats are 'empty' until someone decides to pony up the $8,500(!) per month to fully unlock the community.
- vishnu_ks 8y agoHey, Zulip offers our Standard plan[1] for free for communities like yours. There is no restriction on message history. Plus the unique threading model of Zulip makes it easier to run communities[2]. If you folks are interested feel free to create an organisation in zulipchat.com and mail us at support@zulipchat.com for activating Zulip standard. We support exporting the data from Slack as well :) [1] https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/ [2] https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/ https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/
- molsongolden 8y agoZulip rocks. Streams + topics are great when I can’t check chat constantly and need to later skim a large amount of activity.
- nebulaserfer 8y agoZulip not rocks at all. Maybe topics are handy buy overall user interface so clumsy, small fonts and so on. Tools like Slack spoiled us in terms of UI. Mattermost maybe closest one to slack slickness.
- alrs 8y agoWithout a hint of vitriol: any tech community that wants to use something like Slack is not the kind of tech community I want anything to do with. I'm glad they exist, I'm glad they like that kind of thing, and I'm glad to never have to touch it.
- markmark 8y agoConcentrating on selling their product to companies with lots of money seems to be working out pretty well for them so far.
- muzani 8y agoI've active in at least two free Slack communites. The limitation of message history isn't so bad; it's at least better than IRC. And one can still set up dozens of private chat rooms.
- Grue3 8y ago>The limitation of message history isn't so bad; it's at least better than IRC. Many IRC channels have logs that go back decades.
- dmitriid 8y ago> by exclusively targeting the enterprise market, Slack is leaving money on the table No. By targeting the enterprise market, Slack is not leaving money on the table, it's not losing money. The claim that there's money in targeting regular users needs proof.
- pjmlp 8y agoMaybe because casual users go to greath lengths to avoid paying for any kind of software tools, which leaves enterprise market as the only viable option for anyone wanting to sell tooling to developers.
- black_puppydog 8y ago"we're switching from a walled garden to another" how do these kinds of posts end up on page one so often?!
- sandGorgon 8y agohttps://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum >That being said, this codebase isn't your typical open source project because it's not a library or package with a limited scope—it's our entire product. Not sure what you mean by that.
- coldtea 8y agoThey mean that it's not just some library or package they created for their own use (which many companies outsource, e.g. Facebook outsourcing React). It's their full product -- you can get all their code from GitHub and run your own version of their service locally (so it would be like Facebook the company outsourcing the whole codebase behind Facebook the website).
- kakwa_ 8y agoIt also means that it's probably not practical to deploy it yourself as it relies on a big infrastructure deployed in a particular way.
- mysterydip 8y agoA phrase I just heard of recently: the magpie developer https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-magpie-developer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-magpie-developer/
- basil-rash 8y agoIn which sense do you mean "walled garden"? The article actually discusses moving away from Slack because it is a walled garden, which to them means that the content inside Slack is only accessible/discoverable via Slack - versus Spectrum, which is indexed by search engines.
- Dwivid 8y agoI don't think Spectrum is a replacement of Slack. There lots of people who are using Slack and satisfied with its features.
- sprremix 8y ago"I don't think a bicycle is a replacement of a horse. There lots of people who are using a horse and satisfied with its features."
- revskill 8y agoApollo and its ecosystem (apollo-links, apollo-client,...) is an example of "How not to design program": Full of magic, over-complicated API, broken modular design. Holly crap, I prefer better simple, more boilerplate rather than deal with their ecosystem.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoInteresting, I didn't see any mention of cost with a casual search through the pages. Presumably they are planning on paying their developers with something at some point?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dickeytk 8y agothey disabled their paid tier when they were acquired by github: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...
- 0x0 8y agoSo Spectrum is now owned by Microsoft? How long until they are assimilated into Skype for Business or MS Teams (which is a poor carbon copy of Slack in my experience)?
- godzillabrennus 8y agoIf it’s anything like Sunrise they’ll just destroy the product and never assimilate it’s festures.
- yebyen 8y agoFWIW, Microsoft has bought other companies that had (perhaps more) prominent open source products, and later marked them as EOL, with future-dated grace periods for companies to move off and migrate away, and they haven't all died (community takes over.) I say that as an admin of Team Hephy, the fork/continuation of the Deis Workflow Kubernetes PaaS, which is open source and from the team that invented Helm. They didn't actively destroy the product when MS bought out Deis, they did collectively decide and deem it "not strategically important" and subsequently allowed the community to decide what to do with it, helpfully adding MIT licenses to everything on the way out, so there would be no difficulty for us. There's a strong argument for that position ("not strategically valuable") even without imagining that "Corporate got involved," as some of us believed. Workflow is not positioned where the demand is, and I can tell you that is objectively true. (I can't tell you why, though. New users absolutely love Workflow!) Many of the Deis people now work at Microsoft, making more Open Source and working on Azure Cloud. We're still kicking it here at Team Hephy. I hadn't heard about Sunrise. But if Microsoft is aligning their company against Slack, it is not such a big stretch to imagine that building an OSS competitor to Slack actually fits right in with the strategic goals, even if they are also selling their own brand of chat, in Teams. (Has there been any news about GitHub's developer commitment to Atom? Many predicted that with the acquisition, Microsoft wouldn't commit resources to both Atom and VSCode, but as far as I know both projects continue to be developed.)
- gregknicholson 8y ago> After extensive research and weighing the pros/cons of different collaboration options (covering tools like Discourse, Discord, Gitter, etc.), we’ve happily landed on Spectrum. What was wrong with each of those other options? To me, Discourse seems like a much better option, because it's designed to interoperate (rather than to trap).
- muzani 8y agoAnother lesser known alternative to Slack is Jandi, which is cheaper, better free tier, has more eastern language support and is built more like a chatroom. Though the walled garden is still there and free tier only goes up to 500 members. I'd actually like to see more communities adopt it and see how it goes.
- joshfraser 8y agoWe made the switch from Slack to Discord at Origin and have been very happy we did. Not only does it have better message history and fine-grained permissions, it's far better designed for large groups of strangers on the internet vs. Slack which assumes that everyone knows and trusts each other.
- intertextuality 8y agoA big downside for discord is plenty of people already use it in their personal life. The last thing I'd want is mixing personal and business environments in the same app. Additionally, discord's fine-grained structure is great but takes time to set up. Slack is pretty painless, isn't it? Technically if you're working at the same company you wouldn't need such finegrained control, unlike with random strangers on the internet.
- microcolonel 8y agoI'm administrating Discord at my company, and we actively use these features to invite random strangers from the internet to our Discord, and figure out their roles from there.
- reustle 8y agoHow is that a downside? I use slack for personal and business and there is a pretty clear separation based on community.
- intertextuality 8y agoWith slack it's on a per-workspace basis (I don't use the os apps). With discord I see every single server that I'm in. When I see a slack alert, on mobile, I know I have something that needs my attention, because I have most alerts off. With discord alerts, I know that someone has pinged me with a question or wants to go grab a beer or something, but it's not urgent. I enjoy separating my life/work like this, but maybe to others it won't pose an issue.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 8y agoSpectrum is owned by Github which means it's owned by Microsoft.
- fastball 8y agoAnd...?
- Kiro 8y agoJust saying. I thought it was an FOSS project by the description in the post.
- basil-rash 8y agoIt is, it's licensed under the BSD 3 clause license.
- aliswe 8y agoI never got the usp of slack its a searchable private irc server is that it?
- geoah 8y agoIRC is annoying to use on mobile even with bouncers or services like irccloud, in addition file uploads, easy third party integrations with mostly everything, and given a pretty sane ui/ux it makes it an easy choice for many companies/projects. Yes, you could do most of these with irc's v3 protocol, but no one seems to be investing time and money to do that. Matrix bridges for irc are also interesting as you get some of these benefits, but to the dismay of the IRC users that will see links for messages longer than what their server allows, and weird usernames that include [m].
- dingaling 8y agoSlack is even more annoying on mobile; I can't post through the mobile webapp, only read.
- bencollier49 8y agoAlso you can post gifs.
- IshKebab 8y agoIt's a modern version of IRC with useful modern features, notably: * Threads * Images * File upload * Markdown-like formatting (although very annoyingly it is arbitrarily different to markdown and doesn't support links). * Emoji reactions (you probably think that is frivolous but it is genuinely useful) * Channel history (i.e. you don't have to be online at the time to receive messages)
- autotune 8y ago> Threads Some folks would vehemently disagree with this being considered useful.
- 8y ago
- pexaizix 8y agoGrown men using emojis... Now that's something I will never understand.
- arnoooooo 8y agoEmojis sometimes make it a lot easier to convey sentiment than text. Also, "grown men" are allowed to have fun.
- koonsolo 8y agoYou will once you grow up ;) (See what I did there, putting a wink emoji after that sentence?)
- pexaizix 8y agoThat's not an emoji.
- notacoward 8y agoThe shortcomings of pure text for online communication have been recognized since forever (mainframe-based forums and Usenet in my own experience). Emoticons were invented to provide some of the visual/tonal/emotional cues present in RL conversation but missing from text. Emoji are the natural evolution of emoticons, providing a richer vocabulary and often requiring less interpretation. Is it really hard for you to understand why "grown men" might want to communicate in something other than a flat, dry, emotionless format? Do you not see the problem with that? Because that would be :(
- dbbk 8y agoSlack has never made sense for open source communities, and I don't know why they have persisted in trying to use it for so long. Even Slack themselves have basically come out to discourage it.
- znpy 8y agoWe will begin migrating from Slack to Teams from Microsoft, and the will phase out the former. Quite frankly, Teams is at least "good enough" and quite frankly I didn't even bother looking at the advanced functionalities (if available at all). But Teams fits a lot lot better with our existing Office 365-based infrastructure (domain authentication and everything) and it's already included in the office 365 subscription that we already pay.
- newscracker 8y agoSerious question: how do people even stay sane in chat groups with 12000 members? Even if you assume only 50 people message in a day, that's probably several thousand messages already. Even if you use hashtags and separation through channels, to me it seems like these platforms aren't intended for such large groups. Similarly, Telegram allows groups with hundreds of thousands of members. I can't imagine what people even do in those or how they can even keep up when several people are talking. Note: I get that most people wouldn't even check it every day or catch up with unread messages most of the time. I'm referring to so many people chatting in near real time in such large groups and keeping up with the messages while they flood the place ("flood" is an apt term borrowed from IRC, though I'm using it slightly differently here).