
Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces - abdullahdiaa
https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663
======
anonu
Previous outages:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912)
\- 5 months ago (longer discussion)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461)
\- 7 months ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431)
\- 8 months ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815)
\- 1 year ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743)
\- 3 years ago

~~~
nojvek
In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent
level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web
applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably
Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If
google is down, probably your internet is down.

Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm
guessing because they have datacenters everywhere with huge fat pipes in
between, and their SREs are probably top notch who don't take shortcuts.

Google gets a whole bunch of things wrong at times, but somethings I gotta
say, they've nailed it.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Facebook springs to mind as well.

~~~
seba_dos1
Facebook quite often breaks their stuff and/or goes down, however, their
outages usually last for just a few minutes.

~~~
wlesieutre
They recently pushed out an iOS update for Messenger that crashed to
springboard any time you tried to resume it from background. It took a couple
of hours to get a new build up, plus however long for affected users to all
install the new version.

I'd love to hear the story of how that made it through testing.

~~~
wuliwong
What does "crashed to springboard" mean?

~~~
wlesieutre
Sorry, should have just said "home screen" for clarity, but SpringBoard is the
iOS application that makes the home screen. It's akin to Finder.

A fresh launch of Messenger worked until you switched out and put it in the
background. When you tried to resume it (either from home icon or task
switcher) it would immediately die and could be launched fresh on the second
try.

Basically every time you wanted to use it you either had to kill it in the app
switcher and then launch it, or launch it twice.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468136/facebook-
messeng...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468136/facebook-messenger-
ios-update-crash-bug)

My favorite part is that since Facebook doesn't do useful release notes (best
guess because they're testing different features on different users and
changes never actually land for everyone in a specific version), all the App
Store said for the busted version was "We update the app regularly to make it
better for you!" Oooops.

Though that's an interesting thought, I wonder if a feature had rolled out to
a subset of users and it was crashing because it tried to pull some piece of
account info that doesn't exist on accounts without it? Testing still should
have caught that, but if the test accounts were all testing the new feature I
could see it sneaking through. From my end it looked like a 100% reproducible
crash on resume which is pretty sad to release.

------
sarreph
You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes
after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page!

This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company
comms.

It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-
dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its
outage...

ITT: Chat about decentralisation that will ultimately lead to no action.*

*Because we've had this discussion so many times before...

~~~
FooBarWidget
Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care
whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether
_I_ fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it
may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration,
and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix
this problem for all customers faster than I can fix my problem for myself.
And it's not like I'm crippled when Slack is down. If it's urgent I can use
the phone, and my todo list is stored outside Slack.

~~~
mikec3010
I think it's inexcusable for a chat program to go down in 2018.

* your hdd failed? Use a raid

* your power went out? Use a UPS

* your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2)

* your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over

See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us
the same problems as before, just with a recurring bill for "chat as a
service".

And inb4 "chill Mike it's just a chat server not life support firmware" yeah
but slack is the most trivial software you can think of: send _text_ from one
computer to another. I see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable
as life support firmware in 2018. We've had over 30 years to get this right.
Raise the fricking bar.

~~~
jaredhansen
>slack is the most trivial software you can think of

This is like saying that food service at 30k feet in a passenger airline is
trivial because all the server has to do is walk up and down a narrow aisle
handing out food from a cart.

Since "you see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life
support firmware", one of two things must be true:

1) You know something nobody else knows. In which case great, you've stumbled
on a huge opportunity to go put your knowledge to work and get stupendously
rich by outcompeting this "trivial" software company. Get to it, genius!

or

2) The reason you "see no reason..." is that you're unaware of one or more
relevant facts.

Which of these do you think is more probable?

~~~
mikec3010
3) slack will get their "chat as a service" monthly fee whether the service
actually works or not, so why commit to higher levels of service? We can get
our users acclimated to outages and then sell them "slack Premium, for Serious
Business", charge an even higher fee, and get stupendously rich all over
again. This is the "growth" that investors demand, no?

------
dannyrosen
Hope Slack considers doing a post-mortem similar to Gitlab[1]. Sharing what
they learned and giving customers context is appreciated.

[1]: [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-
database-o...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-
outage-of-january-31/)

~~~
trcollinson
Yes, that way we can beat them up for years to come based on whatever mistake
they made. It would be even better if they told us which employee made the
mistake so we can incessantly mock that employee openly and publicly every
time Slack is ever mentioned on HN. When GitHub was purchased by Microsoft,
Gitlab came up quite a bit and we got to rehash that whole database outage
over again many times over those few days. It was sad.

If it were my company, I would say a little as humanly possible.

~~~
coryfklein
It's not about assigning blame, it's about sharing lessons learned with the
broader community and being transparent and honest with paying customers about
issues that may have significant impact on downstream productivity.

~~~
trcollinson
I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not
the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move
to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of
years back? Use them at your own risk!"

We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one
they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure the
value is there for the company to be super open about their outages and
issues.

~~~
calcifer
On the contrary, I would trust them quite a bit less, not more, if they had an
hours long outage _without any explanation_.

~~~
repolfx
Perhaps - but would you even remember it, without the juicy details of what
happened? I probably would forget if some service had a few hours downtime a
year or two ago, if I didn't know any details to make it stand out from other
outages.

------
bgribble
Maybe unrelated, but my AWS-hosted websockets-using app had an outage starting
at the same time. Also a third-party API provider we use for handling inbound
phone calls. So this smells like a wider outage than just Slack.

~~~
switch007
That's interesting. More speculation: they haven't given any detail in 2
hours, perhaps if it's an upstream/3rd-party problem, they haven't been given
any info.

~~~
bgribble
I know it's not exactly scientific, but the front page of
[https://downdetector.com](https://downdetector.com) shows a number of
services that have problem spikes starting anywhere from 3am US/Eastern to 9am
US/Eastern and continuing through now (11:24 US/Eastern): Google Home,
Fortnite, Exede, Level 3, New York Times, AWS. Maybe totally unrelated to each
other, who knows.

~~~
dawnerd
That certainly does look suspicious there - especially level3.

------
r1ch
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but "We've received word that all
workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack." makes it sound like their
internal monitoring didn't catch whatever is causing this. I was personally
experiencing issues for about 20-30 minutes before the status update was
posted.

~~~
bsiemon
I think that is just the tongue in cheek language they like to use.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Yeah, it's really funny and ironic when you cost customers money!

------
castis
It's interesting to me that the update messages are posted every 30 minutes
from 1st notification until resolution. Judging by this and every other outage
I assume this is automatic, and probably implemented to appease the people who
are probably frustrated by the outage.

[https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

~~~
switch007
We have a similar policy at $WORK (but manual). In our experience customers go
mental if you say absolutely nothing.

------
tapoxi
It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick
from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

~~~
sanderjd
It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user
experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of
engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as
someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually
and inevitably switched to Slack.)

~~~
ummonk
Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients
available for it.

~~~
swozey
Technical people who haven't used IRC can barely figure out IRC their first
time using it. Trying to sell IRC to a company would be hilarious. Bob in
Accounting getting on IRC and feeling comfortable with it's UX?

~~~
danmg
Then you've never seen the 'hilariously' bad UX they already put up with, with
things like Quickbooks.

mIRC is pretty straight forward compared to that.

~~~
price
A hypothesis I like is that when it's an application you use to communicate
with other people, people are a lot less tolerant of a confusing UX.

The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to
find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody
sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing
it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating maybe, as you waste time, but
almost everyone has some frustrating wastes of time at work.

If you're on IRC and people are talking at you and you sit there fumbling to
figure out how to respond, it's like you're in a conversation and tongue-tied
and everyone's looking at you. And if you screw something up, like send a
message to the wrong channel... now you've done it in front of all your
coworkers, in real time. Humans _hate_ looking stupid in front of the group.

And if you screw something up on IRC in front of your coworkers, and you're
someone with even a little anxiety about not being tech-savvy... that's going
to flare right up.

Also, because now you're embarrassed, you're going to want something to blame.
So you blame the tool.

~~~
extra88
Yes. Also, QuickBooks is accounting, which is supposed to be hard while
"chatting" with people is supposed to be easy.

QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing
similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared
(unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a
time, etc.

~~~
danmg
mIRC offers a fairly good UX compared to all those.

If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files
so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can
join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The
UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear,
there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of users on the side.
It's written in MFC and Win32 APIs, so it's blazingly fast compared to most
applications, and you can find a version that will run on every computer made
in the past 25 years.

The united states military used mIRC extensively for battle field
coordination. I think it's up to the task of handling bob from accounting.

~~~
extra88
An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit. It has a sidebar to
list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess
of handles, commands, and actual conversation. Stored communication is mainly
a server-side problem but I don't know if mIRC has an interface to show DMs
you missed while offline or to indicate which part of a channel's conversation
happened since you last looked.

Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc.
Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't
known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a
tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a
pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.

~~~
danmg
> An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit.

ok

> It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an
> undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation.

No.

Each channel and private message get their own MDI window you are free to
minimize, maximize or layout however you want.

Notifications are turned on by default, but they can be disabled. You'll get a
tray notification if mIRC is minimized, and inside the title bar of the window
will flash. Notifications happen when your nick is mentioned.

There's a horizontal line that goes across the dialog window that indicates
the location of the conversation the last time it was focused.

>Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc.
Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

Other clients work on other platforms. mIRC is just what I brought up since
it's desktop windows client and that the most common case for an office
environment.

> The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't
> known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using
> a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish
> beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good
> enough.

It's a simple, light-weight way for people to send short text messages in near
real time with tens of thousands of people. I think that's good enough, and it
works at a scale that far surpasses the SaaS chat options.

------
nixgeek
Despite having a vote increment velocity far exceeding other items, a publish
time of only 25 minutes ago, and more points, this item just dropped from #5
to #7 on the front page.

How’s that work exactly?

Edit: It’s now droppped to #14 even with comment count also rapidly
increasing.

~~~
maxerickson
Comment count is a factor.

edit: it's a negative factor...

~~~
nixgeek
Thanks for the clarity, this makes more sense now!

------
EamonnMR
This might be the longest downtime I've ever seen for Slack.

------
sdf43543t345
IRC had uptime in the scale of decades. Why are our 2018 solutions so fragile?

~~~
dswalter
Native emoji support, aesthetically pleasing front-ends, and clear product
direction are some of the main positives I see, even if the combination of php
on the backend and electron on the frontend aren't the most sophisticated
technical components in history.

I prefer decentralized and open things, but a cohesive vision can sometimes
provide a better user experience across a more restricted set of functionality
than an army of hackers, each solving their own problems.

~~~
mynewtb
Offline messaging, mobile clients, push notifications, history, search, rich
text formatting, message editing, file transfer, etc etc etc

~~~
rkuykendall-com
..., inline images, display names, deleting messages, editing messages,
reactions, avatars, multi-user private messages, etc etc etc

------
amarraja
Spare a thought for the chatops crowd who may be blissfully unaware that their
own infrastructure is down

~~~
neuromantik8086
I have little pity for the folks who decided that re-implementing a shell in a
chat application was a well-conceived notion.

~~~
amarraja
Hopefully they're learning this lesson.

I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a
slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.

~~~
bovermyer
Oh god. Who would have a Slack webhook as a blocking part of their pipeline??

------
sammorrowdrums
Surely some of the Slack team are hiding on here? Any idea what's going on? ;)

~~~
ufmace
If they are, I sure hope they're doing something more productive than surfing
HN

~~~
sammorrowdrums
Very much agreed. I meant it as a tongue in cheek comment. I am however deeply
disappointed by the vague and useless updates on
[https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

They might as well have written:

    
    
      - nope but maybe at some point a yep
      - still nope
      - nope
      - nope
    

... I know many companies don't like to give details in the heat of the moment
(and the engineers that understand are likely working on it), so I really do
hope they give us a good retro after it's all over.

------
nopriorarrests
Downtimes happen, I get it, but this one lasts for 3+ hours already. Can't
even remember the previous time when such a large service was down for so
long.

------
parliament32
Seems to be fixed... with zero info on their status page about what went wrong
or otherwise.

>We're happy to report that workspaces should be able to connect again, as
we've isolated the problem. Some folks may need to refresh (Ctrl + R or Cmd +
R). If you're still experiencing issues, please drop us a line

Hilariously, their "uptime in the last 30 days" still shows 100%.

------
james_pm
While I appreciate the timely status updates, it almost seems like Slack has
built a random status update bot to post updates that don't say anything
exactly every 30 minutes.

[https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

------
majewsky
Even Slack Enterprise is affected. So much about "this runs on your own
infrastructure".

~~~
nixgeek
Slack Enterprise has never run on your own infrastructure.

~~~
majewsky
It doesn't? I thought that was its only reason to exist.

~~~
nixgeek
It’s pitch is a little different, it gives you ‘Workspaces’ which are somewhat
connected, and tools to manage big deployments.

IBM, Oracle and many large companies use it because 100,000+ participants in
one workspace is quite unmanageable.

Think channel namespacing whilst unifying user provisioning and enabling DM
and MPDM across the entire company. Users can have access to one or many
namespaces, they sign in once and it populates all enabled workspaces into
that users client.

You can share channels between workspace within Enterprise Grid fairly
trivially (although this now works between Slack tenancies owned by different
companies too!)

Still runs on the same infrastructure in AWS as other Slack customers though.

From a policy perspective you can push down settings to all Workspaces in your
SEG, and define whether you “centrally control” or “delegate to Workspace
owners” on a setting by setting basis.

------
fsiefken
for a decentralized alternative:
[https://matrix.org/blog/home/](https://matrix.org/blog/home/)

~~~
Theodores
They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing
page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder
kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared
to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is
decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few
cryptokitties to get your messages and where you earn a few dogecoin to
forward on other peoples messages?

~~~
detaro
Just to be clear, the Matrix protocol and technology does not involve
Blockchains in any way.

------
collinvandyck76
The issue I'm having is that I can't send messages. Reading them is fine. The
dashboards on the walls at SlackHQ must be pretty interesting right now.

~~~
bshimmin
If you want to stop being able to receive them as well, just hit reload (then
you won't be able to reconnect).

------
chatmasta
This is a weird outage...

\- I am in UK

\- I had similar problems last night (around 2AM GMT) but status.slack.com was
all green, and my colleagues in the US seemed to be using it okay

\- Currently it's completely down on desktop for me (waiting to reconnect...)

\- Connecting through a US VPN does not resolve the problem on Desktop, even
though my US colleagues are using it on Desktop successfully right now

\- Mobile works for receiving and sending messages, but there is a delay

Anyone else seeing symptoms like this?

------
spraak
What does Slack as a company use to communicate when Slack the product is
down? :>

~~~
parliament32
Almost definitely IRC, just like Google does.
[https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-
incide...](https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-
incidents.html)

------
abdullahdiaa
It's really disappointing to get this update after ~2 hours of downtime

> We have no new information to share just yet, but we're continuing our
> efforts. Your patience is truly appreciated.
> [https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

------
raphaelj
Does anyone know about any Slack alternatives that support bots, GIFYs and
emojis ? And above all that is not ridiculously slow.

~~~
sahaskatta
There's Google Chat if you use G Suite like us.
[https://chat.google.com/welcome](https://chat.google.com/welcome)

Or Atlassian's Stride is really great too:
[https://www.stride.com/](https://www.stride.com/)

If your org happens to be part of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, there's
Microsoft Teams. All of the products support bots, gifys, and emojis. I
personally think Google Chat and Stride are much faster than slack too. I
haven't tried Microsoft Teams yet.

------
drewg123
The funny thing is that sending normal messages just times out 90% of the
time. But /me comments generate an error after timeout:

slackbot9:28 AM /me _throws shoe at slack_ failed with the error "ASSocket:
timed out reading 4 bytes from adminserver-3wvr:10443"

We've switched to google hangouts as an ad-hoc workaround..

------
aliljet
Are there solid Slack-style self-hosted alternatives? (The gitlab of the slack
world, to be clear.)

~~~
oneneptune
Atlassian, the folks behind bitbucket, jira, and (now) trello have a self
hosted product:
[https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat](https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat)

They also have a Slack alternative, called Stride.

~~~
briandear
And HipChat is horrible. Doesn’t even sync which multiple devices and their
mobile app doesn’t support the iPhone X screen size which is a trivial update
to make considering HipChat is used by some pretty massive customers. Code
highlighting is still, (after years,) pretty bad.

------
sulami
My team jumped onto IRC, which is working pretty well. No custom emoji, but
that's about it.

~~~
spraak
Do you run your own server?

------
macintux
Fixed, but their status page is rather optimistically reporting 100% uptime
this month.

------
vanni
Slack and Chromecast having an almost simultaneous worlwide outage... have
they something in common? Same enemies?

[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack)

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-
chromecast...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast-
are-down-affecting-users-worldwide/)

------
coldcode
This is why I like working on iOS apps, if all hell breaks lose I can't do
anything. When something like Slack goes belly up, imagine those poor folks
having to respond.

------
smpetrey
Yikes. This one looks like a doozy. Herre's to hoping there's a post mortem
this time around.

------
7ewis
Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them...

At least it happened before we've migrated.

~~~
swozey
There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are
companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature
that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than
Slack.

~~~
iv597
Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've
worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always),
and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor).

I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service
(Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything
_other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers
at most companies, sadly.

Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at
least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable
way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering
resources problem isn't a problem).

------
pi-squared
Telegram was having an outage at about the same time, probably unrelated but
still:
[http://downdetector.com/status/telegram](http://downdetector.com/status/telegram)

------
cimmanom
What backup methods of communication are distributed teams using when Slack
goes down?

~~~
neuromantik8086
My group uses Roman fire signals [1].

[1]
[http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_syste...](http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_systems.htm)

~~~
rinchik
this is a greatly underrated comment.

------
saudioger
That's a lot of eggs in their basket. A major downside of the current way a
lot of these companies work is that there's a huge incentive for them to never
allow customers to self-host their product.

------
foxylion
I wonder who is writing those status messages. as a customer this reads like
"please wait, ETA to fix unknown" in 10 different ways.

------
l1n
Back online here.

~~~
Varcht
Here too

------
gsich
Thats the problem without self-hosting your essential stuff.

~~~
peeters
Reasons my self-hosted servers have gone down in the past year:

\- Scheduled electrical maintenance that facilities manager failed to disclose
(even though they knew about it for weeks).

\- Emergency power-down because two of the four air conditioners failed at the
same time.

\- Someone accidentally powered off the VM.

I'd much rather have an hour long outage here and there than incur the cost of
defending against these circumstances (and still have it go down for some new
unforeseen reason).

~~~
gsich
>\- Someone accidentally powered off the VM.

how is that self-hosting when you don't control the hypervisor in this case?

it usually implies that you at least have some sort of control. either having
a real server somewhere (with ups and stuff) or at home, where you know when
power is out.

while what you are doing is technically self-hosting, I would have changed the
VM provider after the first incident like you described.

------
IloveHN84
I imagine people felt more productive today without Slack

------
VectorLock
Relaxing morning off on humpday!

------
coldcode
Still no work on the cause or fixes after 90 minutes. I wonder what kind of
problem this could be.

------
buryat
give them some slack guys

------
chrismatheson
Skype still up

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evan_
back up for me.

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coldseattle
And productivity is up!

~~~
setquk
Can confirm. No wait, the first thing I did was check HN and now am reading
this and oh there's another interesting thing.

~~~
shawn
HN's noprocrast setting cures that.

~~~
pwenzel
It works all too well. This will be my last comment of the day before
noprocrast kicks me off HN.

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Sir_Cmpwn
If only there were a venerable, decentralized instant messaging system we
could use, perhaps some kind of internet relay chat system...

</sarcasm>

You reap what you sow. Depending on Slack for your communications is a bad
idea. I can't even remember the last time any of the IRC networks I frequent
had a total outage.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Irc left out federation when the spec was crafted in 1984. It was deemed to
bandwidth heavy.

Jabber/xmpp was a good step in the right direction. Too bad it overused
plugins and bad extensions and XML abuse. Would have been loads better had
they though far enough in advance.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It's not federated, but it is distributed and fault tolerant. The protocol is
open and widely implemented and the implementations are mature and stable.

~~~
peterwwillis
I mean, Slack isn't federated either. I don't know of any chat platforms that
are federated except Jabber. _edit_ Gchat and AIM federated in 2011, but AIM
is dead now, so...

