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This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. The

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

davidw 7y ago
> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  You can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1] to get history and make some folks happy that prefer using a http client. [1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
- ergothus 7y ago
  > Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. I don't actually agree with this. Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications, which does NOT mean you can't have a history. Indeed, history and search is the real selling point of Slack for me. Everything else Slack has over IRC is trivial and not worth abandoning the standards.
  - antisthenes 7y ago
    I didn't really feel the overhead of email until Gmail switched to their current theme. Now everything feels so sluggish and unwieldy that it really does constitute overhead, in real time seconds. Whenever I used a native desktop software, like Thunderbird or Opera Mail, I was able to have conversations with people as quickly as in a chat client (and faster than texting, because of a real keyboard)
  - e12e 7y ago
    > Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the SMTP/LMTP format, or clients or what? If anything email lacks overhead - a proper thread meta data field that actually works across implantations (in-reply-to is a start, but not enough). It's not like "xmpp overhead" made gräll unusable, is it?
    - mrmuagi 7y ago
      > Email has hefty overhead per message. I don't think that poster was talking about protocol innards, although kudos for you for having that knowledge, but perhaps they were, but in terms of user experience, slack/group chat is very low cost in terms of requiring any sort of mental pause before sending the message, specifically as a cost for the message itself. So much so, that a type of usage of verbal diarrhea can occur, so as to caution oneself against such usage, a little bit of thought before sending messages is always advised. Specifically, if I can echo the primary differentiation, all you need to initiate a chat communication is a name and a message, that simplicity works a lot for people. I've used both e-mail and Slack, and a combination of both is great in my opinion, but the comparison can seen by an example message in my workflows (I don't use Slack anymore though): Slack: 1) Find user/group by name lookup 2) Hi X, QUESTION_TEXT. 3) When done conversation, write outro E-mail 1) Find user/group by name lookup, if user is not encoded in e-mail alias, query relevant databases 2) Write subject 3) Write intro, message, and outro From my experience the reply from Slack 2) vs. E-mail 3) is much faster in the former case.
      - e12e 7y ago
        Interesting points. I suspect this is why chat is such a crap, low-throughput form communication; it's trivial for the sender to ship of a half-assed message - and very hard for the receiver to handle low-hundred conversations in a work-day - precisely because few(er) senders take the time to write a short, but dense message - and expect a reply-response dialogue "to quickly sort things out". Which is much harder to both do in parallell and concurrently when busy with more than one snowflake problem at a time. I'm sometimes shocked at how slowly things get done now, compared to when I worked a support desk in the early 2000s. But mostly I'm just a little sad at the overhead generated by chat.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- hnaccy 7y ago
  >IRC works pretty well. No, it sucks.
  - sonthonax 7y ago
    I second this. Things like the lack of multiline messages is something one would expect out of the early 90s.
    - davidw 7y ago
      IRC is actually older than the web by a few years. No reason you couldn't update the protocol to improve some things if you wanted to invest in it somewhat seriously.
      - maccam94 7y ago
        It's actually pretty hard to update the IRC protocol given the number of client and server implementations and IRC's federated nature. https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html
        davidw 7y ago
        Correct, but, if you wanted to invest a chunk of change because it's important to you, you could get it done. And it does work right now, pretty well, for a lot of people, even if it could be better, which was the original thing I was refuting.
      - PeterisP 7y ago
        As soon as you update the protocol in any way, then it becomes an incompatible new not-IRC protocol. And if whatever you're building is not going to be compatible with IRC, then what's the point in starting with IRC? You might as well make a protocol from scratch like Mattermost or Slack has done.
- ivanbakel 7y ago
  >Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. That assumes that every discussion which eventually is important enough to be made permanent starts out that way. One of the nice things about a history-keeping chat is that the barrier to starting conversation is low, and the barrier for preserving that conversation is also low (i.e. nil). That has a double benefit - anything that becomes important is automatically preserved, so you could have tuned it out at the time and later be able to come back to it. There's no need to always focus on a chat if it's guaranteed to saved for later, unlike with IRC, which you can't always risk tuning out.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  email is just untenable for collaboration / discussion
  - davidw 7y ago
    That's not true though. The Linux Kernel was built via email. You can say you don't prefer it, but plenty of people have built some very big, complex projects via email.
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  Nearly every client I work with these days expires their email after N days, where N ranges from 90 days to a year. Even corporate email pretty much has little history any longer, and it won't be long before the chat systems also come under the same policies across most corporates. I don't quite understand why history is such a big deal for US-based enterprise chat, when the consistent US trend has been to nerf internal communications history. Not that I agree with this nerfing. It just causes people in my observations to inefficiently store and retrieve items of interest to them elsewhere, mostly into files.
upofadown 7y ago
We have XMPP for 1 to 1 messaging, IRC for group messaging and SMTP for store and forward messaging. All are way easier to set up local instances of than setting up a PBX. The difference is that there was a whole lot of money to be made by installing and maintaining PBXes.There was no good way to monetize phone services by advertising or privacy violation. The equipment and trunk lines simply cost too much. Every PBX had proprietary phone sets, but the companies that made them could not get around the fact that the phone trunks were standardized by what was in the end a government enforced standard. So it was an example of forced federation of proprietary systems. It is interesting how well that worked. We have a weird situation right now where the cheapness of communication is inhibiting standardization. Everyone can afford to do their own thing and fund it using super marginal revenue streams.
- rakoo 7y ago
  Funnily (or not) XMPP was designed to replace them all, at least functionally. Too bad there wasn't an XMPP champion pushing the development early on.
  - upofadown 7y ago
    Well, IRC sorta as it does group chats. But email? Is there an XEP for that? XMPP can probably gateway to/from email, but XMPP can gateway to pretty much everything in the known universe...
    - rakoo 7y ago
      An Email is a message with a subject line and potentially attachments. XMPP has the former in the core, can do the latter with XEP-231 (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html). A message can have one or multiple recipients, just like an XMPP message. Email is really a simple form of messaging, where you put some content and expect the chain to route it to your destination; pretty much any IM system can emulate it, and XMPP goes a little bit beyond in providing the bits that different an email message from an IM message.

davidw 7y ago

> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.

LinuxBender 7y ago
You can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1] to get history and make some folks happy that prefer using a http client. [1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
ergothus 7y ago
> Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. I don't actually agree with this. Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications, which does NOT mean you can't have a history. Indeed, history and search is the real selling point of Slack for me. Everything else Slack has over IRC is trivial and not worth abandoning the standards.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  I didn't really feel the overhead of email until Gmail switched to their current theme. Now everything feels so sluggish and unwieldy that it really does constitute overhead, in real time seconds. Whenever I used a native desktop software, like Thunderbird or Opera Mail, I was able to have conversations with people as quickly as in a chat client (and faster than texting, because of a real keyboard)
- e12e 7y ago
  > Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the SMTP/LMTP format, or clients or what? If anything email lacks overhead - a proper thread meta data field that actually works across implantations (in-reply-to is a start, but not enough). It's not like "xmpp overhead" made gräll unusable, is it?
  - mrmuagi 7y ago
    > Email has hefty overhead per message. I don't think that poster was talking about protocol innards, although kudos for you for having that knowledge, but perhaps they were, but in terms of user experience, slack/group chat is very low cost in terms of requiring any sort of mental pause before sending the message, specifically as a cost for the message itself. So much so, that a type of usage of verbal diarrhea can occur, so as to caution oneself against such usage, a little bit of thought before sending messages is always advised. Specifically, if I can echo the primary differentiation, all you need to initiate a chat communication is a name and a message, that simplicity works a lot for people. I've used both e-mail and Slack, and a combination of both is great in my opinion, but the comparison can seen by an example message in my workflows (I don't use Slack anymore though): Slack: 1) Find user/group by name lookup 2) Hi X, QUESTION_TEXT. 3) When done conversation, write outro E-mail 1) Find user/group by name lookup, if user is not encoded in e-mail alias, query relevant databases 2) Write subject 3) Write intro, message, and outro From my experience the reply from Slack 2) vs. E-mail 3) is much faster in the former case.
    - e12e 7y ago
      Interesting points. I suspect this is why chat is such a crap, low-throughput form communication; it's trivial for the sender to ship of a half-assed message - and very hard for the receiver to handle low-hundred conversations in a work-day - precisely because few(er) senders take the time to write a short, but dense message - and expect a reply-response dialogue "to quickly sort things out". Which is much harder to both do in parallell and concurrently when busy with more than one snowflake problem at a time. I'm sometimes shocked at how slowly things get done now, compared to when I worked a support desk in the early 2000s. But mostly I'm just a little sad at the overhead generated by chat.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hnaccy 7y ago
>IRC works pretty well. No, it sucks.
- sonthonax 7y ago
  I second this. Things like the lack of multiline messages is something one would expect out of the early 90s.
  - davidw 7y ago
    IRC is actually older than the web by a few years. No reason you couldn't update the protocol to improve some things if you wanted to invest in it somewhat seriously.
    - maccam94 7y ago
      It's actually pretty hard to update the IRC protocol given the number of client and server implementations and IRC's federated nature. https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html
      - davidw 7y ago
        Correct, but, if you wanted to invest a chunk of change because it's important to you, you could get it done. And it does work right now, pretty well, for a lot of people, even if it could be better, which was the original thing I was refuting.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      As soon as you update the protocol in any way, then it becomes an incompatible new not-IRC protocol. And if whatever you're building is not going to be compatible with IRC, then what's the point in starting with IRC? You might as well make a protocol from scratch like Mattermost or Slack has done.
ivanbakel 7y ago
>Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. That assumes that every discussion which eventually is important enough to be made permanent starts out that way. One of the nice things about a history-keeping chat is that the barrier to starting conversation is low, and the barrier for preserving that conversation is also low (i.e. nil). That has a double benefit - anything that becomes important is automatically preserved, so you could have tuned it out at the time and later be able to come back to it. There's no need to always focus on a chat if it's guaranteed to saved for later, unlike with IRC, which you can't always risk tuning out.
chrisweekly 7y ago
email is just untenable for collaboration / discussion
- davidw 7y ago
  That's not true though. The Linux Kernel was built via email. You can say you don't prefer it, but plenty of people have built some very big, complex projects via email.
yourapostasy 7y ago
Nearly every client I work with these days expires their email after N days, where N ranges from 90 days to a year. Even corporate email pretty much has little history any longer, and it won't be long before the chat systems also come under the same policies across most corporates. I don't quite understand why history is such a big deal for US-based enterprise chat, when the consistent US trend has been to nerf internal communications history. Not that I agree with this nerfing. It just causes people in my observations to inefficiently store and retrieve items of interest to them elsewhere, mostly into files.

upofadown 7y ago

We have XMPP for 1 to 1 messaging, IRC for group messaging and SMTP for store and forward messaging. All are way easier to set up local instances of than setting up a PBX. The difference is that there was a whole lot of money to be made by installing and maintaining PBXes.There was no good way to monetize phone services by advertising or privacy violation. The equipment and trunk lines simply cost too much. Every PBX had proprietary phone sets, but the companies that made them could not get around the fact that the phone trunks were standardized by what was in the end a government enforced standard. So it was an example of forced federation of proprietary systems. It is interesting how well that worked. We have a weird situation right now where the cheapness of communication is inhibiting standardization. Everyone can afford to do their own thing and fund it using super marginal revenue streams.

rakoo 7y ago
Funnily (or not) XMPP was designed to replace them all, at least functionally. Too bad there wasn't an XMPP champion pushing the development early on.
- upofadown 7y ago
  Well, IRC sorta as it does group chats. But email? Is there an XEP for that? XMPP can probably gateway to/from email, but XMPP can gateway to pretty much everything in the known universe...
  - rakoo 7y ago
    An Email is a message with a subject line and potentially attachments. XMPP has the former in the core, can do the latter with XEP-231 (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html). A message can have one or multiple recipients, just like an XMPP message. Email is really a simple form of messaging, where you put some content and expect the chain to route it to your destination; pretty much any IM system can emulate it, and XMPP goes a little bit beyond in providing the bits that different an email message from an IM message.