6 ms·
Well, it’s time to ditch slack. What is a good alternative that isn’t Microsoft or Google owned?
by tabob 6y ago
Well, it’s time to ditch slack. What is a good alternative that isn’t Microsoft or Google owned?
- redisman 6y agoDiscord ?
- zitterbewegung 6y agoDiscord if you still want to use someone else's service. Rocketchat if you want full control (open source).
- CharlesW 6y agohttps://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- angulardragon03 6y agoWe use Mattermost internally, it’s pretty good. Don’t think the mobile client is quite as good as Slacks, though.
- TechBro8615 6y agoI consider this a bonus. (Mattermost is great)
- wcarss 6y agoI've been building an alternative around asynchronous audio, called heysync[0]. I can't stand being in long video meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever. I also deeply miss the easy chats we used to have in the office, when we didn't have to schedule meetings just to talk. But I don't want to dedicate my time to sitting in a discord-like audio channel while I'm doing work. So, heysync is the answer to my own problems. It has a similar feature set to IRC or to Slack, because I love those products, but it's built with asynchronous audio communication in mind, in a way a Slack app just couldn't provide. You just talk, and heysync transcribes the message and stores the audio for easy playback. Your colleagues can either read or listen to what you just said. They can listen live, or later, so you can seamlessly talk even if the person you're talking to isn't there, or is multitasking. 0 - https://heysync.chat https://heysync.chat (edit: I was downvoted pretty hard for contributing this -- if anyone wants to share why, here or via email at carss.w@gmail.com, I would love to learn how to do so better.)
- _underfl0w_ 6y agoNot sure about the downvotes either. Your comment doesn't read as being any more "spammy" than similar comments hocking self-made projects on HN as alternatives to existing things. This fits my use case - having a team lead that can code and speak fine but has difficulty writing intelligible sentences in English. Sounds useful for e.g. slightly-less distracting pair programming too.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI love these types of posts when they're clearly on-topic. With all respect to the author, this didn't seem close enough to the conversation at hand. A platform for asynchronous audio communication is not going to replace Slack, which is made for text messages. If the GGP had said "I hate Zoom meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever", the post would have made more sense to me. Or, if the GP's product can also function as a more basic Slack replacement, their post should have led with that.
- 6y ago
- m-p-3 6y agoMatrix, and you can host your own federated instance (Synapse).
- rubyist5eva 6y agoZulip (zulip.com)
- JoshTriplett 6y agoZulip. It's Open Source, you can either pay to have it hosted or host it yourself, it has mobile apps and a web interface, it has a good API for integrations, and the conversation model feels great.
- dsr_ 6y agoZulip is an excellent user experience, and when deployed self-hosted is also quite secure. The only thing it doesn't have is federation, which would involve rethinking security.
- gvurrdon 6y agoI've found it very effective after deploying a local version for our team. One issue: Some users get confused over streams and topics, often posting anything in whatever was the last topic they accessed rather than going to the correct topic or starting a new one. These same users also say they can't find anything via search.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago> One issue: Some users get confused over streams and topics, often posting anything in whatever was the last topic they accessed rather than going to the correct topic or starting a new one This has been a problem ever since email: many people reply to the last mail they have from a list, sometimes changing the subject, and then get surprised when the mail is threaded under the mail they replied to. I've seen this occasionally on Zulip instances, but a reminder and a suggestion that the topics are like email thread subjects or forum thread subjects tends to help.
- gvurrdon 6y agoIndeed, it's very much the same thing. I have brought up the similarity to email, but it's been of limited help. I'm hoping that moving posts between topics will become possible at some point, which will allow me to clean things up.
- sz4kerto 6y agoSimilarly to how people ditched GitHub when Microsoft bought it. :)
- cutenewt 6y agoThese days I have more confidence using Microsoft products than Google Google's erratic roadmap, less than stellar enterprise support, and shady privacy practices from their ad tech side just drive me away
- alacombe 6y ago> Google's erratic roadmap, less than stellar enterprise support, and shady privacy practices from their ad tech side just drive me away Tell that to Windows phone owners...
- cutenewt 6y agoThere aren't too many Windows Phone owners Microsoft needs to apologize too Most of them were Microsoft employees And MS paid for their phones
- alacombe 6y agoEven if every of the 163,000 Microsoft employee got a company sponsored phone, that's still pretty much 2 orders of magnitude below the Lumia 520 sales figure alone.
- Technically 6y agoWhat could this possibly add to the conversation?
- swebs 6y agoYes. I switched fully to Gitlab.
- tabob 6y agoI moved the past 3 companies I work with from GitHub to self-hosted gitlab after the Microsoft purchase. When Microsoft bought GitHub, all of the "Developer Evangelist" / "Open Source" evangelist crowd made all of those noise about how "Microsoft is great for our community! They ARE an open source company! Everything is wine and roses!" Blech. I can't do business with evil companies.
- throwaway5752 6y agoIRC. I'm serious. It's free and you realize how much of the slack feature set is not productive. Yes, some different administrative challenges and not a direct substitute.
- andrethegiant 6y agoSelf-host with https://rocket.chat https://rocket.chat
- snth 6y agoWhy?
- simonswords82 6y agoWhy?
- 29083011397778 6y agoIf Matrix is good enough for the German Armed Forces [1], the French government [2], and the German education system [3], I can't think of any reason not to use it :) [1] https://messenger.bwi.de/ https://messenger.bwi.de/ [2] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed-as-the-basis-for-frances-secure-instant-messenger-app https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed... [3] https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/ https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/
- ThePadawan 6y agoI might be biased here as a German native that follows the German tech media a fair bit... ...but those are among the three organizations I would trust the least with such a choice. It would be like recommending a housing strategy implemented in San Francisco, or a public transportation strategy implemented in New York.
- Arathorn 6y agoWhat about Mozilla, or Wikipedia, or Fedora? They all use Matrix too :P
- spurgu 6y agoBe honest now, there's no way you can honestly claim that Element is a good UI/UX. I'd love it to be the other way around but it's just plain and simply bad. At least on all MacOS combos I've tried - native client as well as web app (Chrome/FF/Safari). And Android. Oh and fuck not being to have different notification schemes for desktop/mobile. I end up having mobile notifications turned off altogether. So many inconsistencies in the UI. Almost non-existent keyboard navigation. Typing notifications and read receipts on by default (supposed to be a privacy focused chat). Handling unread messages. Lack of threads. I could go on...
- tabob 6y agoI don’t know about Mozilla or Fedora, but have you ever interviewed with Wikimedia? It’s a circus of insanity. The most bizarre corporate culture ever; and the most psychotic receuiter i’ve ever come across. Whatever they choose, I choose the opposite.
- paxys 6y agoMaybe wait till it is more than a rumor at least.
- gnulinux 6y agoWe use Zulip and I think it's amazing. I'm probably biased since I've been using zulip for 3 years and have always hated slack, but yes, it's a good tool.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoTelegram.
- niutech 6y agoMattermost, Element/Riot, Rocket Chat, Zulip - all of them open source.