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Twist: Slack alternative from the makers of Todoist
- eterps 3y agoCurious about the quality of its search feature.
- necovek 3y agoI am surprised to say this, but this actually looks pretty neat and sensible!
- eterps 3y agoJust like you, I was pretty doubtful when I first clicked the link. But it actually seems like a lot of thought has been put into this.
- j1elo 3y agoInteresting to see that the Developer API is already on v3. Designing good APIs is hard!
- h1fra 3y agoIt was actually launched few years ago I think
- j1elo 3y agoOh, silly me thinking this was newly launched
- necovek 3y agoPredicting future is hard. Using a few recipes to avoid having to break backwards compatibility every so often is pretty easy, as long as you know what they are (eg. you may need to live with your "referer" typo for a long time), and enforce them through coding standards and reviews and automated tests.
- wilde 3y agoI’m glad folks are trying things. But if the messaging triggers a sync notification, they probably haven’t solved anything
- gtirloni 3y agoIt seems pretty customizable: https://twist.com/help/articles/change-your-notifications-settings https://twist.com/help/articles/change-your-notifications-se...
- wilde 3y agoYeah I can turn off notifications in slack too. What are the defaults? If they’re all on by default it sets the expectation of online availability 24/7.
- fidotron 3y agoYou have to applaud someone taking on the Slack and Discords of the world, but isn’t the problem with Slack the total lack of discipline of the users? This is a repeated pattern over the years, whether management or tech but when you get huge gains simply by not doing something invariably some group of people will gravitate towards exactly that problem and cause a net increase in BS for everyone. This tends to lead to technically imposed measures to attempt to insulate you from colleagues that themselves end up overstepping the mark. Great to see serif fonts making a comeback too.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago> Great to see serif fonts making a comeback too. For what it's worth Slack has a hidden command to let you set the font to whatever you want: `/slackfont $fontname`
- rpgbr 3y agoIt reminds me of Basecamp, but with less features.
- midasuni 3y agoI don’t get why people dislike slack. I find it brilliant. Maybe your company requires certain behaviour, but that’s not a problem with the tool, nor will any other tool make things better.
- j45 3y agoInterruption is the enemy of productivity. Notifications rarely work for you. Slack seems to work around keeping people looking without context A well designed and well run slack requires a thoughtful setup and we’ll trained users which itself can become a barrier to participating. In the free slack world, far too much information is lost after 90days and those slack communities stagnant and die. Slack could offer tools free for non profits and join the other software tools who help support open source projects.
- JoyfulTurkey 3y agoI agree on the notifications thing. A few friends and I are doing some side consulting and decided to use a Google Space within our public Gmail accounts. It has worked great and I haven't missed a thing, especially with the Gmail app on the phone, but I can mute pretty easily if I want to.
- midasuni 3y agoWhy do you have notifications turned on? I have notifications on a couple of critics channels where time critical incidents are logged, they fire every month or two and that’s where I want to stop what I’m doing and look at those. With teams however I can’t seem to find a way of muting corporate spam channels, so I have to keep the program closed when deep working. I prefer teams to zoom now I’m afraid, the persistence of meeting chat windows for example, but for textual collaboration slack is orders of magnitude better. Maybe because we have managed to get our entire organisation at least federated and most channels are global or in large enough departments that you only need to be in one or at most two.
- j45 3y agoI’m not sure I have notifications on. I don’t get many. Teams definitely misbehaves in respecting notifications, less so on Apple products. I believe some notification settings are employer side settings.
- MildRant 3y agoPricing is almost identical to what Slack charges. I like the idea and I know that not having meeting support here is a feature but Slack huddles are convenient for quick syncs and we lean on them a lot. The alternative is adding another tool like Teams or Zoom which I do not want to do so not having that feature would make this a deal breaker.
- gizmo 3y agoDoesn't seem to be end-to-end encrypted. Otherwise, really cool.
- viraptor 3y agoOne of the features is sharing historical context with new hires as part of onboarding. You can't have that and e2e.
- junon 3y agothat's not true at all.
- viraptor 3y agoThere's a company-public thread that 2 people participated in and nobody else has read it. Both have left the company. A new hire wants to read that thread. Where do you get the encryption keys from?
- nailer 3y agoThat’s true but also an edge case. It may even be intended: why should people not in the conversation have access to the chat?
- viraptor 3y agoBecause that's the front-page-advertised feature of this system. If you're happy to lose the context of older decisions, you can use a more private / e2e system.
- nailer 3y agoodd, the front page advertised feature I see is: > makes collaboration easy from anywhere by using threads to organize your conversations. Do you see something else? E2E can by made discoverable by encrypting the session key with an additional account's public key.
- benterix 3y agoIt looks like you get only one month history as opposed to 3 months for Slack, and shortening the history was the reason for the recent uproar. So the creators of Twist mist be very confident regarding other features.
- apples_oranges 3y agoWould be cool if it came with a useful AI assistant that can answer questions based on data from chats
- obeavs 3y agoTheir competitor Threads has this (the .com, not .net).
- drcongo 3y agoThis landing page would lure a lot of people over from Slack if it just said "We won't keep breaking your workflows by constantly moving stuff around for no reason, or removing stuff you rely on, or forcing things into new windows that used to be integrated, or replacing perfectly fine features with really crappy versions."
- vxNsr 3y agoMaybe they can’t make those promises either? Todist hasn’t changed much but it has changed…
- deanc 3y agoI feel like we're reinventing forums. Some of the major self-hosted options already have real-time updates.
- krastanov 3y agoI am surprised that Zulip is not mentioned in this thread yet. For people frustrated by slack's defaults of encouraging interruption and lack of structure and lack of long-term retention of knowledge, Zulip fixes many of these issues. For people that just need any sync/async messaging tool, Zulip also happens to be open source and easy to self host.
- davidmurdoch 3y agoLack of long term retention of knowledge? What do you mean by that?
- krastanov 3y agoIn slack (or discord), due to its lack of structure, if someone explained some piece of institutional knowledge, that explanation gets lost in the "slackhole". Other tools are at least marginally better at preserving institutional knowledge
- barbazoo 3y agoThere are deep links and, if you pay for it, retention. Are you looking for a CMS, something like Notion maybe?
- lygaret 3y agoin this tool (and others I've seen, maybe zulip does this), you can mark threads as "done", and mark messages as canonical. with slack, it's easy to have a thread with 15 different answers which are all slightly different. The "knowledge retention" features I'm looking for is being able to mark a thread as "this is the decision made", have that highlighted in metadata and archival, maybe be able to link off to a notion page, and have the thread closed to finalize the decision. EDIT: the number of times I've had to kick people off a thread because they're adding bad info during a crisis reallllly drives my desire for marking canonical messages lol
- nkko 3y agoTried to watch the video but it was painfully slow and unclear, they lost me immediately. Just get straight to the point.
- LVB 3y agoThey start demoing the product in 6 seconds and the whole thing is less than a minute. It seemed fine to me.
- eole666 3y agoThere is also one really nice alternative to slack that can be self hosted easily : it's called mattermost.
- habosa 3y agoI’m not the biggest Slack fan … but does anyone else think Slack is massively underpriced? For most companies I know it’s the central communication hub and often the integration point for dozens of other tools. Yet it’s one of the cheapest per-seat SaaS apps I use. I feel like Salesforce will wake up one day and triple the price and 95% of customers will just say OK.
- stevesearer 3y agoOne note on pricing is that is it actually $/user/month/team rather than $/user/month. With free accounts we had organized our account into different teams per site we run like Office Snapshots, Education Snapshots, etc with some people on multiple teams. When we upgraded a couple users after they were really enjoying Twist, the upgrade only applied to a single team and not across all teams for the upgraded users. It would have cost $30/month/user to have a user get the Unlimited features on each of the 5 teams they were in. I’m still not sure if we organized our teams in a weird way, but I still feel like it the pricing wasn’t presented in a way that made this clear.
- mrcwinn 3y agoAs they say, it's not the tool, it's how the tool is used. After reading this, I cannot understand how this is better or even different from Slack. If people are disorganized, allow themselves to be distracted, distract others, store information in the wrong place - all of that remains unsolved by Twist, as far as I can tell.
- throwaway106382 3y agoThe only other Slack alternative I found was actually better than Slack and not just a "sidegrade with different pricing and less integrations" was Flowdock - unfortunatley, now defunct. It was all down to how Flowdock implemented threads. They did it better and long before Slack ever did; Slack's threads frankly kinda suck. I've heard Zulip threads work really well but I've never had the chance to use it with a team that was willing to try something else.
- programzeta 3y agoHear-hear for Flowdock. Been a decade and I still can't help but think of it when I bump into the latest annoying Slack-ism.
- solarkraft 3y agoI've tried Zulip and found the styling and overhead to be hard to bear for simple use cases.
- solarkraft 3y agoIf the Matrix ecosystem was more approachable, maybe we'd have multiple good, free, interoperable versions of this already.
- qorrect 3y agoI still don't know what was wrong with IRC.
- necovek 3y agoThe only problem with IRC and many of the open protocols (XMPP too) is that there is no "one true IRC": so while you can get all the same features as Slack, you've got to choose a particular server, a particular set of extensions (I am sure ChanServ/NickServ stuff eventually got "standardised" like DCC stuff did, but remember that DCC file sharing was direct-IP comms between clients), and on a specific client with the same set of features. Slack and other tools are obviously inspired by IRC, but they do resolve a bunch of issues that IRC never got properly solved (or maybe did, but deploying it was too complex or it came too late).
- splix 3y agoWe considered it as a replacement to Slack to decided to stay on Slack. The reason is that we were unable to configure any meaningful network/firewall policy for it. The app reports all your actions to a bunch of 3rd parties, which we obviously want to cut, but as I remember the main problem was that their backend API is also non static and changes its IP all the time so that was a total mess to track and configure properly.
- bdcravens 3y agoAs our company uses Zoho, we use Cliq. For a while we had 2 chat apps - engineers using Slack, rest of the company using Cliq. I reluctantly agreed to give up Slack. It's not bad, and even have a few unique features (remote work status, dev environment for extending it with Javascript, etc)
- guluarte 3y agoand another electron app...
- sharts 3y agoSo many alternative tools for alternative tools make us feel like fools.