10 ms·
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015)
- CharlesW 7y agoPrevious discussions: 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136
- cnst 7y agoLet's do another one! Note that it's often been an excuse that Slack has an IRC and XMPP gateways, but, per the article, they've been shutdown in 2018. I really hate Slack for how much memory it requires, and how many bugs it has. The Android app, for example, logs me out of every community if I'm removed from one of them; really "nice" when someone cleans up the resources of an old hackathon to be logged out of all the dozens of various teams you're part of. (Noone even knows how to call each of these individual teams or communities, either; requiring a separate login for all of them is pretty annoying, given that it's all maintained by Slack anyways.) Or when they remove you from an existing hackathon team to make up space for new members, and now you lost all your contacts, and/or have to be re-invited again if you're still participating in the next-year-edition. It's basically a mess. Even for employee communication — from a contractor's perspective — it makes you a non-owner of your own communication, unlike IRC, so, if you so happily accept it, you're basically working against yourself again.
- ddevault 7y agoFunny to see this reposted today, as just today I encountered an open source project which primarily uses Discord for chat - a terrible idea for all the same reasons. I had planned on writing a similar follow-up article reminding people that Discord is a bad communication medium for open source projects, too. I think that this is something the community ought to be occasionally reminded of, lest we lapse.
- philliphaydon 7y agoWhat's wrong with Discord?
- ddevault 7y agoAll of the same things that are wrong with Slack, discussed in the OP. Don't use nonfree platforms to collaborate on free-as-in-freedom software. They also appropriate "server" terminology to dilute stuff which actually puts the users in control - unlike typical "servers", a Discord server is anything but - they run on Discord infrastructure and the user has little to no influence over their adminsitration.
- armitron 7y agoEverything that's wrong with slack, and more. No IRC gateway. Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients. Centralized control. Ownership of your data.
- rapind 7y agoAlso Tencent is an investor in Discord if that's a concern for people.
- birdyrooster 7y agoWhat do you mean by ownership of your data? 1) They own the storage by which the data resides and can dictate how the data is accessed 2) They own your IP
- gizmo385 7y ago> Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients. Example? As someone who has written a library to facilitate creating 3rd party bots, I've never seen anything to suggest this.
- saagarjha 7y ago3rd party bots≠3rd party clients. Discord very actively goes after the latter and those who use them.
- trothamel 7y agoThere have been months where the spam on freenode was unbearable, and fundamentally IRC is, like SMTP, a protocol where spammers have the advantage, and only heuristics stop spam. A big part of the value of IRC-replacements are accounts that are tied enough to a person's identity (For example, by requiring sms confirmation) to deter most spam. IRC hasn't been able to do that.
- cnst 7y agoDoesn't IRC support the registration of usernames?
- armitron 7y agoMost servers do, and a simple channel mode solves the spam problem (which isn't nowhere near as much of a problem as email spam).
- trothamel 7y agoI don't believe that it does. For a week or two about a year ago, freenode had a problem where accounts would join channel, spam links to sites accusing prominent people of child porn, and be kicked a moment later. If there's a channel mode that can stop that, while still keeping the channel useful for people who need support, I couldn't find it.
- armitron 7y agoFreenode channels can require users to be registered and identified in order to join. This solves the spam problem. Given that I am on Freenode 24/7 and have been for years, on 40+ channels, and spam has never been an issue I stand by my original comment.
- KindOne 7y agoThe spammers were using unidentified nicks. The network has channel mode 'r', that is used for only allowing identified nicks into the channel. I'm not really a fan of channel mode 'r' for support channels. Someone might join the channel for a simple question or two, they get the answers and never return. Having to register a nickname and check email can be a bit annoying for some people. The network also has user mode 'R' that blocks messages from unidentified users. They added a spam filter into the IRCd over a year ago. https://freenode.net/kb/answer/channelmodes https://freenode.net/kb/answer/channelmodes https://freenode.net/kb/answer/usermodes https://freenode.net/kb/answer/usermodes https://freenode.net/news/spamfilter https://freenode.net/news/spamfilter
- t0mbstone 7y agoActing like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up delusional. One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's. IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and Discord have. If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord, then people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it (at least not in its current aged state).
- cnst 7y ago> One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history. There's literally web-clients available where all you gotta do is click a link and write a name that hasn't been taken by anyone yet, and you're in. No email address, no password. History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by most projects. How do you get history for Slack without having an account?
- oefrha 7y ago> History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by most projects. Most projects? Really? I'd say at most 20% of IRC channels for open source projects I've been on have published history. Shopping around for a log bot and figuring out a publishing channel is not straightforward. In fact nothing is more straightforward than builtin. While I'm not a big fan of using Slack for open source collaboration, saying IRC history is straightforward and provided by most projects is indeed delusional.
- ddevault 7y agoEmojis, reaction gifs, ugh. https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...
- PebblesHD 7y agoMy only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from enterprise tools and other integration providers. Personally, I’m a big fan of MatterMost[0] as its also open source but provides a much more Slack-like experience which new users will be immediately familiar with. You can host it yourself and it works with lots of existing integrations. [0] - https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- cnst 7y ago> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools! Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history, ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste that comes with Slack.
- thrower123 7y agoI have a warm place in my heart for Pidgin. For a long, long time I had to deal with IM clients that wouldn't let you sign in more than one account per instance, and some of them used mutexes to prevent running multiple instances. It looked like hot dog vomit, but it worked wonderfully.
- oefrha 7y ago> Sharing files is trivial with Gist Apparently not all files that need to be shared are text files. Developers have a million ways to share text files, thank you. (I know how to use gists to share images and other files. It's not pretty.)
- navigatr 7y agoThere are a dozen of cloud-based web apps that interface with IRC.
- _sharp 7y agoI've used RocketChat at a previous company, basically a clone of slack. I didn't have to manage it, but it seemed to work great.
- kragen 7y agoI managed RocketChat. It was pretty easy, but we weren't stressing it.
- RyJones 7y agoI do manage an instance of rocket.chat, and I am no longer a fan.
- saithir 7y agoI don't have to manage it at our company, so from a user perspective it's good enough. Sure, there are some issues once in a while. Like with everything.
- ptman 7y agorocket.chat is open core, please avoid it
- Ruthalas 7y agoCan you elaborate on this? I am currently using RocketChat and would interested to hear of security issues or similar problems it has.
- iserlohnmage 7y agoWe use rocket chat in uni to communicate with team members for project, I think it is good enough for this purpose.
- sayusasugi 7y agoAs much as I dislike using a proprietary chat app, Discord is well designed and easy to use. Reliving the early internet is great and all but my time is limited, and I'm sick of sacrificing my time and sanity faffing around with bouncers and garbage IRC clients. It's the same reason I use macOS instead of Linux. I don't just want a Unix environment, I want a polished Unix environment where apps don't have Linux UI syndrome and plugging in an external monitor doesn't require me to pull up the man page for xrandr. That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
- f1refly 7y agoDiscords design is horrible, there's huge gaps everywhere, it won't obey any themes and it limits options severely compared to other clients while disallowing third party client developement. It also eliminated the possibility to host your own server while for malicious marketing reasons using the same term for their hosted channels. It's one of the best examples how companies exploit the technological illiterate and it's a shame some of literate people don't care. Also external monitors work ootb, like basically everything nowadays.
- sandGorgon 7y agoRiot/Matrix is a decentralised, open source slack alternative. Almost like irc . https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/
- me551ah 7y agoThe biggest problem for me in IRC is lack of good mobile clients. You can't get push notifications and if you want to stay persistently online then you need to keep a perpetual battery-draining socket open. You could setup a relay on your server ,but it's cumbersome and too technical for most people.
- baroffoos 7y agoThe best solution I have found is to use Riot/Matrix and connect to the channel via an irc bridge. That way you get a modern app/protocol which works on mobile. A better solution again would be to an actual matrix room for your foss projects.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pbui 7y agoMy wife uses thelounge (self-hosted instance) as a progressive web application on her Android phone. It supports push notifications and file uploads. Before this, she used IRC Cloud, which also has a convenient mobile application with those features. As for myself, I use Weechat-Android (for about 6 years now) and am very happy with that on my Android phone. It uses a websocket with SSL, so I get notifications and it uses very little battery (or data).
- me551ah 7y agoIRC cloud is paid with a monthly subscription right? Are you using weechat as a relay for the Android client or is it a standalone irc client? Cause to receive notifications a websocket will still have to be always connected.
- pbui 7y ago> IRC cloud is paid with a monthly subscription right? That is correct, although there is a free tier, which my wife used for a while. The only major downside to the free tier is that IRC Cloud disconnects after two hours of idle activity. > Are you using weechat as a relay for the Android client or is it a standalone irc client? Cause to receive notifications a websocket will still have to be always connected. The former. I have a weechat instance (it is a terminal IRC client) on a VPS (the same one also running my wife's instance of thelounge) that I normally use when I'm on my laptop. On my phone, I use Weechat-Android as a relay client to the weechat instance. So the websocket connection on my phone talks to my weechat relay. Fortunately, Weechat-Android handles connecting and disconnecting seemlessly, and I don't have a problem with notifications.
- why_only_15 7y agoI totally disagree with this article. IRC is incredibly user hostile and for even a technical user is intimidating, complex, and nonobvious. Everyone uses Slack or Discord, and everyone knows how they work, and the UI is easy. All the features that ddevault says are bad are things that almost everyone else cares about. I, for one, am thankful that more communities are moving off IRC.
- kragen 7y ago> IRC is incredibly user hostile and for even a technical user is intimidating, complex, and nonobvious. When I started using IRC in the 1990s it was full of college freshmen flirting. Most of them were not CS majors or otherwise technically adept. I really don't think it's "intimidating, complex, and nonobvious" in a way that makes people not use it. It just doesn't have images or history, that's all. There are aspects of IRC that are nonobvious, but that's true of any software, including Slack (and, I assume, Discord), and you don't have to know them to start using it.
- lawik 7y agoI agree that IRC doesn't hit the needs and wants of many contributors these days. But I've really found the limits of the Slack free plan a bit rough in the Elixir Slack. And I'd say concerns about being on a proprietary system are valid. It ends up being a mess of pragmatic trade-offs, rather than clear-cut. Slack and friends is overall more approachable.
- locusofself 7y agoI do like IRCCloud, and use it often. But it's not Slack. Slack is one of those things that seems sortof dumb and simple but it just isn't. They've built a very compelling set of features that many of us now just take for granted. Mattermost is the closest 'freemium' alternative to Slack I've seen.
- ptman 7y agoHave you looked at matrix.org/riot.im?
- saagarjha 7y ago> Slack provides an IRC bridge that lets you connect to Slack with an IRC client. Which doesn't exist anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857. As far as I'm aware, there is no way to connect to Slack anymore without their official client, unless you use something that is either their website in an app wrapper or probably violating their ToS.
- tom_mellior 7y agoThis is mentioned at the bottom of the article.
- prsy 7y agoweechat has a plugin called wee-slack that I've been using every day for over a year https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
- shmerl 7y agoAgreed. And neither use Discord! Matrix is more appropriate. It's quite annoying Rust project went with Discord and didn't pick open options.
- fouc 7y agoMost FOSS projects that aren't on Slack/Discord/IRC seem to be on gitter.im gitter.im's frontend/SPA client has a bunch of glitches, but the backend seems solid.
- ptman 7y agoGitter is very much tied to gitlab/github/twitter. I for one would prefer if open source projects didn't force to accept terms of service of those services. There is a gitter bridge for matrix, but open source projects should probably just use matrix.
- pieq 7y agoIt's almost 2020… what's the status of IRCv3? We use IRC at work, but I think when you setup an open source project community, you have to think carefully. IRC is for instant communication. If parts of your community are located in a timezone that is only online when you (the maintainer of the project) are not, that will create frustration, unless you start setting up all kind of bouncers or tools to let you be online at all time. In the end, I tend to prefer forums or mailing lists, because people writing can elaborate a bit more, and receive more meaningful feedback later on... but I guess I'm old school :)
- imtringued 7y agoAs someone who heavily used IRC in his childhood I disagree. IRC is pretty much dead. If you want opensource instant messaging then go with Rocketchat or Matrix with Riot.
- hgoel 7y agoI think one often overlooked alternative is riot.im, basically discord/slack but with the ability to host custom servers and an emphasis on security.
- Bnshsysjab 7y agoCan anyone suggest irc plugins that fix phone chat history / syncing? The big killer for me is not being able to see/ get notifications
- jonnydubowsky 7y agoKeybase is a great alternative to Slack with end-to-end encryption. https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams The slack importer makes it pretty easy to move over existing slack channels. https://keybase.io/slack-importer https://keybase.io/slack-importer
- pedrolucasp 7y agoThere's also another option. Spectrum. Solves all of your points... It's open-source, has file sharing, code snippets, and proposed to help FOSS.
- znpy 7y ago> "Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects" I'm looking at you, Kubernetes.
- esotericn 7y agoI totally understand that IRC has issues, but there's really nothing that beats just being able to hit '/j #channel' on freenode and it's probably there and my client works how I expect it to. The fragmentation pretty much excludes me from switching away. It's completely impractical to maintain notifications / check new messages / reasonably understand the interface of 5+ different clients (on multiple machines too!), so the theoretical benefit of using a new platform doesn't exist. There's what - Gitter, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Matrix? I'm sure there are more. How do people actually manage this? Do people really have 5 of these clients open, or do they just arbitrarily pick one? Slack, when I've used it, has been a 'per organization' thing, can you have multiple orgs open at once or do you need a tab for each of those? I just find the whole thing bonkers. IRC wasn't an arbitrary choice ten years ago, it was a defacto standard.
- ptman 7y agoMatrix has bridges. So you can access gitter, slack, discord (and I think mattermost) via you matrix client (e.g. riot)
- johntash 7y ago> How do people actually manage this? Do people really have 5 of these clients open, or do they just arbitrarily pick one? Slack, when I've used it, has been a 'per organization' thing, can you have multiple orgs open at once or do you need a tab for each of those? You can definitely have multiple orgs/communities/whatever open in slack. But you still have to make an account for each one, so it's no where near "/join #someproject". It's more like "Go to invite.someprojectthatusesslack.tld, put in an e-mail for slack to send you an invite, go find the e-mail, register for a new slack user using that e-mail, login to the project's slack and find channels to join"
- Proven 7y agooh really? and why would i sacrifice my convenience for your agenda?