4 ms·

> Slack is asynchronous. You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.

by Jedd 8y ago

grogenaut 8y ago
Don't forget mailman + elastic search.
StavrosK 8y ago
I very much like Zulip, it's open source and much closer to email, even culturally. It encourages long-form replies and messages with subjects, so it requires at least a tiny amount of thought before you start talking to someone. I think it's a great cross between Slack and email.
- ethbro 8y ago
  Just looked at it. What keeps Zulip threads from exploding in practice? Either on the UI or usage side? E.g. How to I keep from going from "One channel with a hundred unread messages" to "One channel with twenty unread threads"? Also, what features exist when a thread diverges from the original topic? E.g. We were talking about the "afternoon lunch" at the "annual meeting", and then someone mentioned their favorite restaurants in the area, and now people are replying to both? Organization seems more like a usage problem than a technology problem. Or at least one that I can't see manual categorization solving.
  - tabbott 8y ago
    The point is that it's a lot faster to process 20 unread threads with 100 messages than 100 unread messages, because they're nicely grouped. E.g. you can skip reading the 30 messages in the thread about "afternoon lunch", without having to look at those messages (as you would with slack if you wanted to find out that the 'annual meeting' announcement happened). For diverging topics, you can easily edit the topics of the messages that are a diversion to be a new topic. This helps a huge amount when you have new users who haven't learned the convention of creating a new topic when bringing up something unrelated, since anyone can clean it up in a few seconds.
ethbro 8y ago
This is the Slack vs Jabber/XMPP debate. Pro and cons for each side. But Slack is certainly easier to install and use (by being centralized).
ebiester 8y ago
The protocol isn't the issue. It's like SMTP, if nearly every conversation went to list-all and our email clients were designed to intelligently allow us to choose what sub-section of the thousands of messages a day are important to us. Or, like we already knew, it's an expensive, intrusive, proprietary upgrade of IRC.

> Slack is asynchronous. You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.

by Jedd 8y ago

> Slack is asynchronous. You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.

grogenaut 8y ago

Don't forget mailman + elastic search.

StavrosK 8y ago

I very much like Zulip, it's open source and much closer to email, even culturally. It encourages long-form replies and messages with subjects, so it requires at least a tiny amount of thought before you start talking to someone. I think it's a great cross between Slack and email.

ethbro 8y ago
Just looked at it. What keeps Zulip threads from exploding in practice? Either on the UI or usage side? E.g. How to I keep from going from "One channel with a hundred unread messages" to "One channel with twenty unread threads"? Also, what features exist when a thread diverges from the original topic? E.g. We were talking about the "afternoon lunch" at the "annual meeting", and then someone mentioned their favorite restaurants in the area, and now people are replying to both? Organization seems more like a usage problem than a technology problem. Or at least one that I can't see manual categorization solving.
- tabbott 8y ago
  The point is that it's a lot faster to process 20 unread threads with 100 messages than 100 unread messages, because they're nicely grouped. E.g. you can skip reading the 30 messages in the thread about "afternoon lunch", without having to look at those messages (as you would with slack if you wanted to find out that the 'annual meeting' announcement happened). For diverging topics, you can easily edit the topics of the messages that are a diversion to be a new topic. This helps a huge amount when you have new users who haven't learned the convention of creating a new topic when bringing up something unrelated, since anyone can clean it up in a few seconds.

ethbro 8y ago

This is the Slack vs Jabber/XMPP debate. Pro and cons for each side. But Slack is certainly easier to install and use (by being centralized).

ebiester 8y ago

The protocol isn't the issue. It's like SMTP, if nearly every conversation went to list-all and our email clients were designed to intelligently allow us to choose what sub-section of the thousands of messages a day are important to us. Or, like we already knew, it's an expensive, intrusive, proprietary upgrade of IRC.