
Slack's bait and switch - jcbrand
https://opkode.com/blog/slacks-bait-and-switch/
======
black_puppydog
With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue,
I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a
reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly.

I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to
even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost,
or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and
a combination of IRC and email. "But you can just send images by mail!" they
shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it
doesn't even matter that I _personally_ prefer the slack-like UX. Many other
people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters. For anyone who's only
mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many.

IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in
the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere
and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might
feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Okay, I'll take the bait. I'm about as good a representative sample of the
people you're talking about as anyone else.

I'm 39. I've been in technology in a _professional_ capacity for 22 years,
longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first
computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then
eWorld and then the internet.

I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. The tech industry as a whole has, over
the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot
like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions
trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be
going.

There's nobody I can wag a finger at and say, "see, you didn't learn the last
time 'round", because with a constant influx of new people, there's always a
big group of folks that will adopt the latest thing because it's the latest
thing, and have no memory of the last 30 years of latest things, and haven't
been stung before when the latest thing fizzles out and takes a chunk of your
time or infrastructure investment along with it.

Slack had advantages, sure. But it's hardly the first time that some service
has come along and offered advantages over the tired old thing -- all except
for a public, common protocol -- and then decided to take their ball and go
home and to hell with everyone else. My staid desire for things being built on
open protocols and available to people who want to self-host it doesn't come
from some hardnosed ideology, it comes from years of, "oh no, this shit
again."

Unfortunately, comments like yours tend to dismissively shout down the
comments from the been-there-done-that folks, and so we're locked in a
particularly self-defeating Eternal September that's costing the tech industry
an incalculable amount of money.

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if a cadre of old farts oughtta start
getting together and giving the less experienced folks the advice they want to
hear, just to see how long it takes them to catch on: "building infrastructure
out of walled gardens is a good idea, because they are commercial businesses
and will be able to offer you more features than the slow-moving open source
alternatives that haven't changed much in a long time".

~~~
jaredhansen
_> Okay, I'll take the bait. I'm about as good a representative sample of the
people you're talking about as anyone else._

This starts off strong, but then ...

 _> I'm 39. I've been in technology in a professional capacity for 22 years,
longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first
computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then
eWorld and then the internet._

If I were typing this in slack, this is where the first :facepalm: emoji would
appear.

This is the mentality that caused the now-semi-famous HN post in the early
days of dropbox, arguing that it was useless because with a combination of [
simple CLI tools that nontechnical people have never even heard of ], you
could create the "same" functionality.

Say it with me: Being so simple that utterly nontechnical people can use
(edit: not just 'use', but 'deploy and administer') IS important
functionality. That's what made Dropbox, and it's what's made Slack. You don't
have to be an IT pro to deploy it successfully. You don't have to be a
programmer. You just click half a dozen buttons, all of which are helpfully
color coded so that your unwillingness to read any text on the screen won't be
an obstacle.

Yes, there are things you lose when you "build infrastructure out of walled
gardens" \-- but the reason some people prefer cathedrals vs bazaars is that
they often have much lower barriers to entry, and for many people _that is a
worthwhile tradeoff_.

~~~
simplify
What mentality are you talking about? That so-called falepalm-worthy quote is
just them describing their experience. You're reading way too much into this.

> the reason some people prefer cathedrals vs bazaars is that they often have
> much lower barriers to entry

There's nothing _inherit_ about these "cathedrals" that require them to be
walled gardens. Slack could have been an open protocol, but they decided not
to be.

~~~
sushid
Just curious, don't you think it'd be much harder to justify their valuation
if it's just an open protocol?

~~~
sangnoir
Obviously, having a captive userbase to extract revenue from is good for their
valuation. It probably isn't so great for the users though.

~~~
jacobwal
Also allows them to invest more in the product, which is great for the users

~~~
FridgeSeal
Which is why they fixed their resource hog of a client right?

~~~
jacobwal
By no means am I calling the product perfect. Resource hogging is an issue
that is particularly important to most HN users.

But would you say that they're _not_ investing in the product? They're
improving on search, their API, adding new integrations with Github, etc.
Those might not be the things that matter the most to you or other HN users,
but they are investments in the product.

------
unicornporn
> Slack, like so many others before them, pretend to care about
> interoperability, opening up just so slightly, so that they can lure in
> people with the promise of "openness", before eventually closing the gate
> once they've achieved sufficient size and lock-in.

On spot. People are lured in by hype and forget the long-term consequences.
Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.

~~~
rovek
I'd be interested to know how widely used these gateways are, since the
conventional wisdom on HN is so frequently "vote with your
wallet/feet/personal data".

As they say: Use it or lose it.

~~~
gsich
It's disabled by default. So enabling it requires effort. Then again, Slack
didn't advertise those gateways.

It's designed with termination in mind.

~~~
loceng
Well, "... is designed with termination in mind" is an assumption, it
certainly sounds designed to reduce adoption/use of it.

~~~
TremendousJudge
it stops being an assumption once the termination actually happens

~~~
loceng
No, it's still an assumption - the outcome perhaps is what a person expects
will happen, however that doesn't then validate a past assumption - it does
validate their past belief/prediction/expectation though.

~~~
gsich
It was an assumption before. Now it's a fact.

~~~
monadgonad
No it's not. You're conflating "it was terminated" with "it was designed with
termination in mind". It's a fact that it was terminated, true, but this
doesn't necessarily mean that it was designed with termination in mind. For
all we know, it may have been designed with every intention of continuing
IRC/XMPP support until yesterday when an executive decision suddenly said
otherwise. Now, I don't believe that, but that doesn't matter: the fact that
it was terminated is not the fact that it was designed with termination in
mind.

~~~
gsich
If you believe so...

------
djhworld
> One of the sad things that has come out of Slack's meteoric rise to success,
> has been how many free and open source projects have jumped over to using it
> (after previously using IRC or XMPP). In so doing, they have closed off
> their discussions from search engines and they prevent people from accessing
> their past archives.

Additionally the traditional mailing lists are full of "please can I have an
invite to the Slack workspace" spam

~~~
BuildTheRobots
It's not even that discussions have been lost from search engines, actual
slack users are loosing massive amounts of history. If you a free/OSS project
then you likely have little budget so you're stuck using hte free tier of
Slack, which means users can only see the last 10,000 messages. We're loosing
vast swathes of our history/discussion/media.

~~~
PakG1
This is the main reason why my team switched to use self-hosted Mattermost.
Unlimited message history is important for us, but not worth what Slack would
cost when something like Mattermost is available. If you're a tech team with
people who know Linux, I don't understand why you would choose Slack over
something like Mattermost. If you're a small business without a tech team,
more understandable.

~~~
johnchristopher
I am more concerned about Mattermost long term future than Slack. If/when
slack gets obsoloted and abandonned for the next big thing then what of
Mattermost ? Will it have enough developpers's mindshare to ensure its
existence considering if slack is gone then there's no need to provide an
alternative ?

I suppose it'd be better to build a slack clone based on xmpp.

~~~
PakG1
I'm not so concerned. I think the only thing that would kill Slack is
financial factors (financing if it turns out people don't want to pay for it
anymore) or bureaucratic factors (if it gets acquired and then mired in
corporate stupidity). I think Slack did the favour of proving to the world
that people wanted something more than IRC or Skype.

If Slack dies for any of the above reasons, that won't cause people's need for
a solution to disappear. I imagine Mattermost would survive just fine. If
Mattermost dies, it will be because something came along that's better,
similar to how I started out with ICQ, then jumped to MSN Messenger, and now
I'm on Whatsapp, WeChat, Kakao Talk, Slack, and Mattermost. Same for Slack. If
Slack dies because of better competition, perhaps we'll shift to that away
from Mattermost. Who knows?

Gah, how is it possible that the number of chat clients I use keeps growing?

edit: typo

------
zachlatta
I think this is pretty silly. Anyone that has actually used Slack on their
team - especially if they've built integrations - will know otherwise.

It is unbelievably painful to build integrations that cater to the regular
client (users want forms, buttons, dropdowns, etc) that have clean fallbacks
for text-only clients (at best 1% of your users). The real reason they're
dropping support is because it will make it easier for developers to build in
their ecosystem. That's it.

That said, we shouldn't let Slack off easy - there are many basic issues that
seem to plague Slack and Slack alone (ex. I can't believe this is an issue,
but it seems nearly every message I try to send through iOS rich notifications
fails to send). We should demand better, but an IRC or XMPP gateway is not the
fight to pick.

P.S. If you're in high school, you should join our relatively active Slack
community at [https://slack.hackclub.com](https://slack.hackclub.com) \-
started as an IRC community and switched when our members started demanding a
decent mobile client.

~~~
erezsh
What's so difficult about providing a link to the slack client when the
feature is incompatible with IRC? 99% of the messages are text and images
anyway.

------
moosingin3space
Sorry, I really don't see the "bait and switch" here. IRC/XMPP gateways were
never a selling point of Slack. Bots were always supposed to use the
proprietary WebSocket/HTTP APIs, and in all the companies I've worked in that
use Slack, not a single person used the IRC or XMPP gateway.

Open-source project communities should not be using Slack, if for no reason
other than the 10k message limit and the fact that it's annoying to be present
in multiple Slacks. I prefer IRC or Gitter for those communities, as they're
better designed around the flow of "drop in, drop out" than Slack.

~~~
michaelt
So I'm a mid-level manager at a company with a few hundred developers.

The more developers you hire, the higher the chance you'll start collecting
people with obscure (but usually reasonably easy to satisfy) tool preferences.
You know, the guy who changes his IDE to emacs key bindings, the guy who does
all his e-mail using mutt when everyone else uses gmail, the girl who uses a
Dvorak keyboard layout, the guy who insists he works best on a 1024x768
screen, and so on. Having tried a variety of industry tools and thought about
about how you work best is usually a good sign[1].

Their favourite tools aren't my favourite tools, but they work for me so if
they're not happy, I'm not happy.

The bait and switch is we adopted a tool that would keep IRC users happy, and
it dropped IRC support.

[1] Although I keep my settings conservative, as it's hard for others to pair
program or assist you with problems if they can't operate your computer

~~~
warrenm
The beauty of choice is that you and I can have different favorites - so long
as we can get our work done, who cares?

____________________

(thanks to [http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-
internet...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/3/16/stuff-the-internet-
says-on-scalability-for-march-16th-2018.html) for finding this comment)

------
merlincorey
The author I think is confused about the meaning of Slack's "emoji reactions".
They are "badges" that can be applied to messages by any one who is in the
channel the message was sent. Discord also has this feature.

At any rate, that doesn't change the fact that it probably could have been
implemented in XMPP.

As one of /those/ people still using IRC, I would personally have been totally
fine continuing to use the IRC gateway without these features.

~~~
linsomniac
My company switched to a free slack account a couple years ago, from our own
IRC server. The primary reason for the change was to get something a bit
richer in abilities, and emoji reactions is something we make extensive use
of. Just saying there are people out there that find these sorts of "XMPP
breaking" features not only useful, but mission critical.

Would have been useful if their announcement included some of their data for
reaching the conclusion, like "95% of channels use emoji reactions in more
than 5% of their messages". The announcement, as it was, didn't read very well
to me.

~~~
pavel_lishin
How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way?

~~~
root_crontab
Someone says 'about to push this potentially breaking change to a shared
resource, is that ok?'. Then everyone else posts a :thumbsup:

Obviously, this could be done differently. But it's easy to do it like this
and come to depend on it.

~~~
cup-of-tea
And is that an acceptable paper trail? If you break something can you show
your bosses "look, Jack thumbs-upped me on Slack!"

~~~
root_crontab
It is a perfectly adequate paper trail. It's much easier to check in a
postmortem than shouting something across the desk. Like code review, because
you know your approval will be recorded irrevocably, you just think it through
that little bit extra before approving.

~~~
wgjordan
Well, you can undo your own reactions, so not 'irrevocably'.

------
amedvednikov
I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem by building a free native
desktop client for Slack, Skype, XMPP, Twitter etc.

It doesn't have the 10 000 messages limit, it's very light (~100 KB) and fast:

[https://eul.im](https://eul.im)

I recently started working on it full-time, so I expect a stable release to be
out this month.

~~~
jimmy1
I will always cheer on someone building something cool, but here's the problem
I have: Everyone wants to build an open source alternative, no one wants to
make money. What is wrong with making money? Money is great -- it lets you buy
clothes, food, shelter, water, and even a night out on the town or two. We
need to be able to make money on software again, not just have user data be
the product. This is partly to blame on the FOSS zealots. Sure they say it's
"just fine" to make money on your software, but they never seemed to offer a
method that is based in reality.

~~~
amedvednikov
Hi,

I 100% agree with you. I want this product to make money so that I can devote
my full time to it.

The basic functionality will always be free without ads and tracking. But
there will also be a very affordable ($1-2/mo) premium plan. I haven't yet
decided what it's going to have. Most likely an ability to add more than 5
accounts or multiple accounts on the same platform (e.g. 3 Slack profiles).

~~~
rawrmaan
Don’t price your service so low! Anything below $5/mo gives the perception of
having little value to offer. Plus you’re gonna lose a fat percentage to
credit card processing.

~~~
amedvednikov
To avoid credit card fees I was thinking about $12-24/year.

I don't want to charge a lot for a chat client, but these prices are not
final. I know that charging too little is a mistake.

------
Maro
I don't know the numbers, but if there's not a lot of users/companies using
these alternative protocols, it makes sense not to support them. I'd do the
same thing.

The Facebook/Twitter analogy is flawed, because those are ad-supported
businesses, so the company has a strong financial interest in having users on
its own/primary platform, where it can deliver ads. I think that's not the
case with Slack (?). But even there, I think the incentive to not support N
protocols is not to get the +0.1% revenue from IRC/XMPP users, it's
velocity/simplicity in product development, which is worth more money in the
long term.

Disclaimer: I worked for FB previously, on Workplace, which is a direct
competitor to Slack.

~~~
rplnt
I think it's even worse than "supporting" it, it was breaking their UX if
certain users didn't have certain features (namely threads).

Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack

~~~
merlincorey
> Disclaimer: I hate threads in slack

When you already have too many channels, and then they give you the ability to
have too many threads.

I feel like they do a worse job at the supposed value add of being able to
archive and later refer to a topic of conversation than channels simply
because they are so light weight and proliferate so many of them, potentially.

Plus it's really jarring to be pulled into a bunch of threads.

~~~
jochung
I think the too-many-channels problem is a symptom of the excessive walled
gardening.

Slack segregates by interests and social group, and bundles that with strict
gatekeeping. There is no way for people to remix that to suit their own
preferences. You can only fragment existing communities more.

I would love a slack multiclient where I can put channels I care about side by
side, regardless of origin, and keep the rest out of sight. Instead now
everyone has their own #random and #offtopic and so on. Cruising between
Slacks and Discords is like navigating a hall of mirrors. If there is
disagreement, the only solution is complete schism.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Slack's use as a "community" chatbox is a mangling of its original intent to
be used by teams. That's where your pain points are coming from, and some of
my own (no /ignore feature, for instance).

~~~
allwein
I have some of the same issues, but I'm not part of any community slacks. I
run my own consulting company, and as such, I've been invited to most of my
client's slacks. So I've currently got 37 Slack workspaces going. But most of
the time, I'm only concerned with the specific project channel that I'm
working on for a client, and I might only be active in 2-3 projects at a time.
So I'd love, like OP, to be able to just have those 3 channels front and
center.

~~~
pavel_lishin
That's definitely a use case I hadn't considered.

------
asterius
Oblique to the predictable Slack XMPP decision, but relevant to federation:
Mastondon is a facinating federated social network. It addresses the
identity/reputation issues without embracing fb-fascism or one-site-to-rule-
them-all nonsense.

[https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/)

How it works Anyone can run a server of Mastodon. Each server hosts individual
user accounts, the content they produce, and the content they subscribe to.

Each user account has a globally unique name (e.g. @user@example.com),
consisting of the local username (@user), and the domain name of the server it
is on (example.com).

Users can follow each other, regardless of where they’re hosted — when a local
user follows a user from a different server, the server subscribes to that
user’s updates for the first time.

~~~
s73v3r_
It seems rather easy to impersonate other users, though. Similar to how one
can impersonate domains by being one letter off or something like that.

~~~
asterius
I'm not sure how battle hardened Mastodon is, obviously they don't have the
resources of Twitter or Facebook. Probably easy to DDOS an individual server.
However, it might be possible for other nodes to transparently cache updates.

As to spoofing, we've got to move beyond humans memorizing unicode strings or
profile pictures as a means of identity validation. Its shambolic enough that
twitter users constanly change their display string, obscuring the twitter
handle, but even without that problem, how many people send bitcoin/ethereum
to @eloon_musk?

------
maxehmookau
I, like many others, are starting to fall out of love with Slack. This may
well be the straw that breaks the camels back.

\- Resource hogging \- Buggy iOS app (especially on iPhone X) \- Missing
accessibility features \- Lack of native app

They've taken $0.75bn in funding over 10 rounds and still suffer from some
_basic_ issues.

~~~
juststeve
750 million USD?

~~~
tedd4u
Looks like $790M [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-
fundin...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#section-funding-
rounds)

------
iambateman
This article fusses about how big mean slack took advantage of people by
providing a free service and then dropping support for a protocol. I think
Twitter’s treatment of developers perpetuated a David-v-Goliath storyline in
which developers inevitably get short shrift while corporations take the
profits.

But this is different. Slack is a business and they’re making a business
decision. I’ve never heard them imply that IRC would be a core part of their
business. The vast majority of their user base has never even heard of IRC. It
doesn’t make sense for them to spend money to support a feature used by 0.5%
of their users.

If IRC support is so important, build a business that supports IRC and get
people to pay for it.

Until then, can we stop acting like the mean boy on the playground stole our
lunch?

------
nateguchi
> Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then
> to sell you access to their record of your conversations.

Whilst this is partially true, One of the key features enterprises need and
that Slack supplies is the ability to fully export messages for transfer and
compliance purposes.

One of the main differentiators between paid and unpaid slack is message
retention. To my knowledge, I don't think the XMPP and IRC were used by anyone
to overcome this limit but I'm pretty sure it's been done using their API.

They haven't shut of usage of their API for this purpose so I'm pretty sure
that lost sales is the motivation behind this change.

The OP talks about the relevant ways Slack can implement features into their
XMPP and IRC endpoints to allow new features. But this probably generates a
lot of technical debt for a feature that isn't used by many people. (Also,
anecdotally, I've found very few XMPP clients that actually support any of the
proposed extensions).

~~~
james_pm
My biggest issue with Slack is that on the free plan they store everything
forever, but only allow you to access the last 10,000 messages.

I'm fine with limits, but the users should be free to delete messages beyond
the limit. It's my data that I entered in and they are preenting me from
deleting it which is a pretty nasty thing to do.

I suspect this will all change in May when the GDPR comes into play. The
policy is clearly not compliant. They will likely either need to allow for
deletion, or give users access to the data (even on free accounts).

~~~
rmc
Existing EU data protection law since the mid 90s gives people the right to
get a copy of their personal data, with big players, like Facebook, supporting
it for years.

I don't know if Slack has any offices or entity in the EU, but you could try
making an access request today./

~~~
detuur
They take money from EU clients, in Euros, so they are bound by EU law. GDPR
will tighten the net around this sort of business models.

------
zaidf
OP must have little idea or has given little thought to how hard it can be to
maintain on-going support for a feature a very, very tiny percentage of
customers use.

As far as I know, Slack never pitched as the guys who would rescue IRC out of
obscurity and into mainstream. If they did, then you could perhaps fault them
for giving up too easily without serious effort.

------
gsich
From the XMPP Foundation:

[https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480](https://twitter.com/ralphm/status/971461404900372480)

~~~
mic47
With this attitude of the XMPP Foundation, I doubt XMPP have any future.
Better question would be to ask what should be improved in XMPP so that they
could implement that properly.

Why? Facebook, google, slack are not using XMPP internally for chat products,
because of technical reasons. They dropped XMPP gateway for mix of technical
and strategic reasons. Instead of trying to be a warrior for technical
correctness, XMPP foundation should rather seek feedback and try to make sure
that developers integrating with XMPP will do everything correctly as easy as
possible. Otherwise, more and more projects would be dropping XMPP support.

~~~
ralphm
Let me first turn this around. I actually personally tried to interact with
the Slack team on how they implemented their XMPP gateway, early on. I pointed
out how a relatively small missing protocol feature (server-side group chat
bookmarking) was severely impacting the usability of the gateway, as it caused
caused you to have to explicitly join the group chat room representing a Slack
channel on every client (re)connect. In fact they violated protocol in case a
client requested the list of bookmarks, causing clients to hang while
connecting. It took them a year to start responding, and the problem was not
fixed.

Additionally I had pointed that their statements on XMPP security were
factually wrong. No useful response or changes were made.

That all said, I really like a bunch of things about Slack and have repeatedly
pointed out in discussions in the XMPP community that there is a lot to be
learned from Slack in terms of features (and how they work technically), UI
consistency, and usability. As JC points out, this is surprisingly hard to
achieve in open source projects. Even harder to pull off for a very diverse
community around a set of protocols, rather than a single software product.

There are also things in Slack that I think would be a lot better if they were
modelled after recent protocol proposals in XMPP. For example we are working
on something called MIX, an evolution on group chat, based on Publish-
Subscribe. This allows for orthogonal streams of information bound to a
channel, besides just chat and presence, like merge request notifications,
Twitter mentions, etc. that could be displayed in a side-bar or ticker,
instead of (annoyingly) interleaved with chat messages.

I would have welcomed Slack interacting with the community, but they didn't.

~~~
mic47
Thanks for adding more context! It's hard to get that from twitter, sorry.

------
nickjj
What do you guys think about using Discourse as an alternative?

It's not quite real time chat, but it almost is. You get the same attachments
/ decent UI benefits of Slack, it's open source, you can self host it without
too much pain and it has a pretty nice API. No limitations on chat history
too.

I think in some ways it's much better than Slack because you have proper
categories and threads so I think Discourse is a million times better if
you're looking to use it as a mailing list alternative.

In some ways it's worse than Slack because there's something very nice about
just having to enter in 1 line of chat to get a message across, but with
Discourse you would have to start a thread in some category.

I'm going to be using either Slack or Discourse to build a private community
but I haven't decided on which one yet.

In case you've never heard of Discourse before, here's a live demo hosted on
their official site [https://try.discourse.org/](https://try.discourse.org/).

~~~
larrysalibra
If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your
community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store
of community information new members or potential new members can browse to
learn about the community.

Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is
also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using
it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.

~~~
nickjj
Yeah, basically I have a bunch of people who signed up to my programming
courses and I want to give them a place to hang out, ask questions and
interact with each other.

I've used Slack with other organizations and it really is a black hole. Not
just for the 10,000 history limitation, but it's really hard to find and read
previous conversations.

------
crispyporkbites
When I try to sign up for [https://inverse.chat](https://inverse.chat), I'm
given the following information:

> Create your account > Please enter the XMPP provider to register with: >
> Tip: A list of public XMPP providers is available here.

When I click on the XMPP providers, I'm taken here:

[https://xmpp.net/directory.php](https://xmpp.net/directory.php)

There's like a hundred options, so now I just close the tab and give up
because I have no idea what to pick.

Can you instead provide a sign up form that let's me sign up directly to a
default provider? The process should mirror how webmail works, e.g. when you
visit outlook.com, gmail, fastmail etc. you also end up with an email account
with them.

~~~
jcbrand
The server input suggests conversejs.org, you can use that as a default.

~~~
crispyporkbites
Nope - conversejs is just the front end.

Even if I go to conversejs.org I still have to pick a public XMPP provider
when trying to use this for the first time (what is that, what are the
implications of picking one, why is one better than then other, which Geo
should I pick, why do some have weird names, ...)

~~~
jcbrand
It's not just the frontend, there's also an XMPP server hosted under
conversejs.org, so you can have an account like crispyporkbites@conversejs.org

------
kolbe
I can't understand HN's algo. This story is 5 hours old with 202 comments and
552 points, and currently ranked at 15 on my list. Whereas there's another
story 8 hours old with 89 points that's at 4. It always strikes me as more
than a coincidence when startups that YC is affiliated with (Slack has
purchased a few YC alum companies) get their bad news briefly commented on,
then buried.

~~~
eertami
Yeah this dropped off the front page very quickly. Came back to find the
comments probably half an hour after viewing it at the 5th spot, but it was no
longer there.

It's obvious why it's done but always serves as a reminder of HNs lack of
impartiality on submissions.

------
giancarlostoro
What are some highly recommended XMPP servers? I've only ever used one that
would always crash on me. I'm looking for something that I can run on DO for
$5 a month without issues.

Edit:

Also for anyone who wants a simple to setup IRCd I highly recommend ngIRCd.
Setup is as simple as: sudo apt install ngircd

See:

[https://ngircd.barton.de/](https://ngircd.barton.de/)

~~~
petre
Ejabberd and Prosody. Ejabberd has the most features and massive scalability
(millions of concurrent connections), but it's not trivial to set up. Prosody
is usually a five minute set up to get up and running and scales pretty well
with luaevent installed.

~~~
ge0rg
For prosody you'll need the community modules repository from
[https://modules.prosody.im/](https://modules.prosody.im/) to have modern
features.

Also please don't enable public registration on your server, or it will become
a spam relay in a matter of weeks: [https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-
reduction-on-yax-dot-...](https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-
yax-dot-im/)

It's perfectly fine to host XMPP for family&friends, and you can give them
access directly if needed.

------
madeofpalk
> Still, there's nothing fundamental about XMPP that prevents emoji reactions,
> and work is currently underway to add support for them.

> The protocol is designed to be eXtensible (hence the X in XMPP) and new
> features are continuously being added.

I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on
XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every
feature they have now.

My theory is that people would complain about how many extensions are required
for third party clients to implement before you get a passable experience.

~~~
Shoothe
> I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on
> XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every
> feature they have now.

Writing and maintaining a protocol and a client and a server is certainly
harder than just having a private proprietary protocol.

For what it is worth it seems XMPP is cherry picking features proven in
proprietary protocols and standardizing them. It seems like there is a small
set of such critical features as can be seen by supported XEPs in modern
clients ([https://dino.im/](https://dino.im/)
[https://conversations.im/](https://conversations.im/)).

------
atopuzov
Anybody using matrix protocol? And riot.im client? Thoughts?

~~~
nukeop
Riot has everything Slack does, but it's more competent and free. And
obviously the main selling point is compatibility with all kinds of other
chats.

~~~
akerro
>Riot has everything Slack does

Gitlab integration?

~~~
nukeop
Yes, of course. But unlike Slack you are not limited to "official"
"integrations", you can add arbitrary widgets and can write your own.

------
SXX
> So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can't extract
> their conversations out of the silo.

I totally agree with article itself, but this is rather moot point. Slack
still provide full history export for free and it's rather easy to self-host
said history. IRC and XMPP didn't made it any easier to extract that data.

I aware that export doesn't include private messages, but it's not what Slack
used for mostly anyway.

~~~
inteleng
> Slack still provide full history export for free

Wrong. If you want to export messages earlier than the last 10k, Slack will
extort you to the tune of $10 per user (even if they aren't active). And
that's _per fucking month_. Does your startup/club/laboratory of 29 people
have $290/mo of income to incinerate, when you could just host an AWS IRC
server for 1% of that?

~~~
SXX
Before making comment that you claim is false I went to our team management
panel and exported full history for our team since 2016. It's not super active
team we have, but it's still 20MB of logs in JSON and 64939 messages according
to simple grep:

    
    
       grep '"text"' "./VCMI Slack export Mar 12 2018" -rn | wc -l
    

It's team with open registration so it's would obviously be impossible to ever
pay for it. After all it's open source project.

~~~
inteleng
You must be grandfathered in. Teams that I've been part of see their history
actually cut off at the 10k mark.

~~~
SXX
If that is the case I probably won't ever find polite words for this kind of
shady lock-in behavior. Certainly one more reason to abandon Slack.

------
yani
Everytime someone mentions bait and switch it is always about someone who is
not paying for the service/product. You found a way to not pay for the
service, they decided to close it, you are angry that either you have to pay
or find alternative.

~~~
dingaling
The IRC gateway was also available on the paid plans. Slack have not offered
paying customers a discount for removing this feature.

------
erikb
I'm a huge fan of increasing our freedoms. But truth is there are things a lot
bigger than even a few humans together. e.g. a vulcano breaks out means you
can't go on top of the Vulcano without dying. A big corp or government wants
your data, they will get it one way or another. So the goal of freedom cannot
be reached. You always depend on something.

However, that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to keep power over ones own life
by accepting to work hard for it, by accepting to not use some maybe-nice-but-
exploitative things, etc, by spending money and votes on people and projects
and politicians who fight for freedom of everybody.

I feel at work Slack is really the right thing, because what you produce there
is not free anyways. My company owns the data I produce at work. So why
shouldn't they own the chat logs (and pay for it)? For opensource and spare
time projects certainly IRC and XMPP are the way to go.

Therefore I'm not really pissed with Slack, but with the people who choose to
use Slack for things where it's clearly not the right solution. It's a
Sisyphean decision, though. Because you can't really make people not let
themselves be exploited, especially if you try to give them freedom. The pain
is that most people decide, totally freely, to sacrifice their freedom for a
quick feeling of comfort.

------
icc97
My major preference for Slack was replacing Skype chats, so there was no loss
in terms of open source.

Lots of people complain that it's just a fancy IRC client, but they don't
realise how painless it is to get non-tech people to start using it.

But quite clearly there needs to be a fully open sourced alternative.

I think WordPress is a great example of how it should be done. Provide a super
simple way to create xxx.slackclone.com in exactly the same number of steps as
it takes to create a slack group whilst also providing something that you can
download and install yourself.

I think any project would have to be in PHP. Perhaps that sounds stupid but I
think again following the WordPress model is a good track. PHP is the most
easy way for low-tech people to get their own up and running. It should be as
easy as the 5-minute WordPress install to get your own server.

edit: Plus PHP is what Slack is built on and I quite like the irony. The
further irony though is that WordPress use Slack now. Perhaps in a similar way
that WordPress fought against the React licensing they might replace Slack if
there was a good enough clone.

As far as I can tell the aim could be to create as close as possible a clone
of slack, ripping off as many features as possible without stepping over a
boundary where Slack could try and shut you down.

~~~
simion314
I agree, no idea why you are downvoted. At my job the Slack was forced on us
by boss, probably because of the hype, we were using Skype before and we still
use it because the team was used to Skype, it worked good enough, slack just
added for us extra distractions.

I think that even a good alternative appears if the hype is not enough it
won't catch, also before Slack we used Hipchat for a short time, same story,
it was imposed to the team because of the hype, in the end Slack got a bigger
hype I assume.

------
vinceguidry
Slack grew compared to IRC. That showed the world what people want out of
real-time messaging. Email grew relative to walled-garden solutions. That only
shows what people want out of asynchronous messaging.

My conclusion to all this is that people tend to use synchronous messaging in
teams, and asynchronous messaging for everything else. Interconnectivity is
more important for asynchronous messaging. Ease of use is more important for
synchronous messaging.

Email could never have been unseated by any of it's would-be competitors,
whereas IRC was always bound to get usurped. It could never have kept up with
the needs of the market.

Now synchronous messaging is moving in the direction that web browsers started
moving 15 years ago. The killer app has been found, now entrants are going to
compete on ideology, while the standards people try to balance the profit
motive with the need for interoperability.

edit: missing is SMS, which occupies a weird middle ground between synchronous
and asynchronous messaging. But its openness is more akin to email than Slack.

------
linsomniac
If you want "takeout", getting the last 10,000 messages from slack is a pretty
easy programming exercise. "channels.history" works really well in their API.
Considering that one of the up-sells they provide is better searching and
access to more messages, I was surprised it was so easy to grab your history.

My team at work is using Slack and likes it. But, honestly, I don't think we'd
pay a grand a year for it. We'd probably switch to Mattermost, which we
already have set up as part of our underused gitlab server, or maybe to one of
Slack's less expensive competitors. Though, there is some incentive for us
staying with Slack, we have a couple custom bots. Over the last 2 years of
use, the free account has rarely been too confining. Though the message
history search isn't very usable, that's probably our biggest pain-point.

------
gist
> For example, email is federated. You can set up your own email server, and
> then send emails to people with their own email servers, or to people with
> Gmail or Yahoo! accounts.

Gmail actually does control somewhat inbound email by restricting certain mail
and flagging it as spam according to their own arbitrary definition of spam.
Oddly that even ends up flagging mail from one gmail account you own to
another gmail account (both @gmail and @domain with google apps). And even in
cases where it is clear there is an existing relationship between the parties.
Other providers do that as well. And there is not an easy way to prevent it
from happening either as a sys admin or a user (there are jump through hoop
ways of course). And ultimately yes they do treat email (despite my own
example) on their own network differently than email coming from a domain
outside their network.

------
harlanji
XMPP is a good machine for bait and switching. I discovered it after building
my own AOL-like chat systems from scratch in high school, in VB, C, PHP, etc
(many iterations) and engaged heavily. To this day all I hear when people talk
about why not XMPP are lazy excuses. No doubt they come out as blaming XMPP
rather than the hard problems it's solving at scrum meetings. I built a chat
app backend recently and was met by FUD from senior engs on the team when I
proposed it, and hostility by the CEO who trusted them... forced to build an
MVC-based node backend PoC which wouldn't have scaled if I didn't already know
how to build chat systems (force="this discussion is over" and "if you don't
like it you can quit" type comments... which I did).

------
sharemywin
I even hate the sound of "surveillance capitalism". It sounds so evil and
insidious.

------
jdc0589
explain it like I'm 5 please: why can't.we just build an actually user
friendly IRC client (including non technical people) that doesn't look like a
dos app, and add client specific extensions for expanding image urls inline,
etc... ?

~~~
ge0rg
In theory, we can. However, building a well-working multi-platform chat client
is a significant task, imagine a 5-10 person team working over a year, plus
the long-term maintenance support.

IRC might not be the right protocol for that, because you'll be adding quirks
on top of quirks, but you could easily do that with XMPP. However, you won't
find anyone willing to sponsor that development. Old protocols like IRC and
XMPP just don't cut it in Silicon Valley.

Examples for creating a new IM solution out of nothing, provided funding,
include Signal and Matrix/Riot.

------
tombert
I don't particularly care if the thing that companies use for private chat
isn't open-source and doesn't have an open gateway, but it does worry me a bit
that Slack has slowly started to replace IRC for open-source software support.

Typically if I need help with something FLOSS, I open up my Weechat and log
onto Freenode, however increasingly I'm seeing FLOSS projects go to Slack
(like Elementary OS). I understand that Slack is simpler, but it's also kind
of antithetical to use a proprietary protocol for something open.

~~~
jjrh
Seems like there is a opening for someone to start something similar to
freenode but for XMPP. Or Freenode could run a XMPP<->IRC gateway.

------
iknowstuff
Love the idea! XMPP was well on its way to dominate until Apple released the
iPhone and killed XMPP with the APNS requirement. Here's hoping we can go back
to the federated model.

~~~
ge0rg
There is some serious work on making federated XMPP work together with APNS.

The iOS client developer needs to run a proxy server that will accept
notifications from XMPP servers and wake up the client via APNS (this is
required by how APNS authentication works).

The client can connect to any server that supports XEP-0357: Push
Notifications [0], and can register the respective push proxy with the XMPP
server.

ChatSecure for iOS [1] has implemented this approach, but the client still
needs some more polish.

[0]
[https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html)

[1] [https://chatsecure.org/](https://chatsecure.org/)

------
kemonocode
Hard to believe this is the same people who once worked in Glitch[0] and I
wager that long after Slack is dead and buried, people will probably remember
"that one quirky online game" with more fond memories than their productivity
and resource-sapping amnesiac-unless-you-pay-up abomination of a product.

[0] [https://www.glitchthegame.com/](https://www.glitchthegame.com/)

------
my_ghola
Is there an open source IRC/XMPP (or Matrix) client with features similar to
Slack (side-threads, pinned messages) and preferably not using electron?

~~~
Aaronn
Well Riot (Matrix and indirectly IRC client) has pinned messages and will soon
have message threading but it is a web app (although it does have native
mobile apps).

------
oldpond
This is the same old model; give them something free, then monetize it.
Thankfully, the internet allows us to just go somewhere else or write your
own. [https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-
with-...](https://medium.com/@benhansen/lets-build-a-slack-clone-with-elixir-
phoenix-and-react-part-1-project-setup-3252ae780a1)

------
Dowwie
Taking services away hurts everyone more than never giving them in the first
place. The author of this article feels betrayed. However, I doubt anyone
intended to bait customers with extra value added services just to take them
away later. More likely, managers eventually addressed costs or developed new
business models.

------
JeanMarcS
> You can set up your own email server, and then send emails to people with
> their own email servers, or to people with Gmail or Yahoo! accounts.

Well, there’s a good chance they’ll go straight to the SPAM folder if you just
bring your server up, but yes, you can try.

------
dandare
Everybody keeps talking about selling your data, but as a small startup
prospect I have no understanding of this business model.

Why is the personal data so valuable? Is it valuable outside advertising? Who
is the buyer of the data? What is the price?

------
dyeje
How is it a bait and switch if Slack never advertised itself as an open
platform?

------
aurelien
IRC is just so good because its flexible to the wish of the tools and type of
desktop you use that people should get time to think before use that type of
trap for geek.

------
ris
Well there you go.

Not going to run a webapp that occupies a gig of ram or two for _text chat_ ,
so goodbye to slack it is.

------
sandGorgon
if there was an XMPP based hosted chat application that lets me create private
rooms for my company (using google auth), I would migrate in a heartbeat.

however, XMPP mistakes open-ness in the protocol with openness in
conversations. Every showcase XMPP product is public, open chat rooms.

~~~
jcbrand
I've added OAuth support for converse.js, it's not released yet, but the code
is written.

I intend to release that soon to [https://inverse.chat](https://inverse.chat).

Rooms can be made private, members-only and non-searchable. This is standard
XMPP behavior.

~~~
sandGorgon
its not just at the room level, its at the org level.

the standard practice is that people create rooms in a slack org - and they
are guaranteed that they are private to the org. one more step is where i can
create private rooms to a few people within the org.

XMPP obviously can support this, but the products built on top of XMPP are too
open. The protocol doesnt have an issue - but the people building products on
top of XMPP have an inherent distaste for organizational workflows.

~~~
jjrh
I'm not following. You can run a 'private'/'silo' xmpp server by turning off
S2S.

There are various commercial solutions that offer this.

------
Quarrelsome
what's wrong with freenode.irc? As far as I can tell it still works as it did
before.

------
tmaly
maybe this could be an opportunity for something like mattermost to pick up
the torch

------
detuur
Embrace

Extend

Extinguish <\-- YOU ARE HERE

------
some_account
Why do we fall for this behavior over and over again? As long as we trade
freedom for convenience, this will continue.

~~~
gkya
I'm always amazed how easy it is to lure people with castrated fancy UI and
things like emoji.

~~~
s73v3r_
You're seriously downplaying the usability and simplicity improvements Slack
brought to the table.

~~~
gkya
No, I'm not. For one, I've never used it. The parent comment was referring to
how they provided endpoints for programs connecting through open protocols,
and now that they have some sort of critical mass, just dismissing the users
of the service that utilize it through those. And my comment supports the
viewpoint that we fall in for UX and convenience and low/no cost, then get
screwed like this.

~~~
s73v3r_
"No, I'm not."

Yes, you are. That is a large reason why Slack became popular in the first
place. Nobody "fell for" the UX and convenience; those were solid improvements
that people took to because they made things better.

~~~
gkya
I'm not going to play this game of yes you are no I'm not, but even if you're
right, then that's not actually the topic of the dicussion: both I and the
initial commenter was talking about how they lured people in with UX stuff or
solid improvements like you said, and now pulled of this move.

------
fwdpropaganda
Off-topic. Every time I hear about XMPP I remember signal's moxie bashing it.

What is currently the mainstream opinion regarding XMPP and good security: is
it possible? Is moxie an outlier in saying that it's not possible, or is that
the mainstream opinion too?

~~~
pedroaraujo
When Moxie wrote that blog post[1] he was only speaking on behalf of his
business interests. Signal is a proof-of-concept application that Open Whisper
Systems uses to show off and sell their technology to other chat companies
like how they have been doing with WhatsApp[2], Google[3] and Microsoft[4].

He was not really speaking for what was best for the community, you can read
the blog post as marketing material.

[1] - [https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-
moving/](https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

[2] - [https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-
complete/](https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/)

[3] - [https://signal.org/blog/allo/](https://signal.org/blog/allo/)

[4] - [https://signal.org/blog/skype-
partnership/](https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/)

~~~
fwdpropaganda
So your take is "what he said is not true"?

~~~
pedroaraujo
My take is that he makes it sound more dramatic than it is. The entire blog
post loses credibility when you look at the Matrix.org project.

~~~
whyever
Why? The blog post was before Matrix.org even had encryption. The Signal
project has limited resources, which it focused on the Signal protocol. Matrix
builds on this work and invests in federation.

------
rburhum
So how do you propose they make money instead?

~~~
andybak
Their business model is fine for many groups of user. However - open source
projects in particular should be thinking about archiving, accessibility,
discoverability etc. Slack is a bizarre choice which I can only ascribe to
"nice UI and good timing".

I'm personally getting a bit sick of it for another pragmatic reason. It's
bloody slow to open, slow to switch accounts and even slow to switch channels.

~~~
LeoNatan25
There is very little "nice" about their UI. UX isn't good (subjective, I
know); it's not accessible at all; their "apps" take gigs of RAM and waste
CPU, very slow search, not intuitive, etc.

I was able to search years of intensive mailing in both server and local cache
in an almost instantaneous fashion in Outlook {2003, 2010 & 2016} for Windows,
but Slack can't properly search a year and a half of history without choking.
On almost every level, slack is a complete technological failure (where it
matters).

~~~
andybak
Note that I said "nice UI" and not "nice UX" ;-)

~~~
LeoNatan25
I'm really not sure how the two can be separate. In user interface concepts,
UI design and UX go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, they do not just for UI
but almost everywhere else. Case in point, Apple's glass windows that caused
people to hit their heads in them by mistake. Terrible design and terrible UX.

------
emodendroket
Emoji reactions are a different feature than sending emoji.

Also, the idea that e-mail predates the surveillance aspect of the Web...
Well, that was baked in from the beginning, as detailed in Surveillance
Valley.

------
patrickaljord
Bait and switch is a bit harsh, I guess most of their users don't use IRC and
it's a huge waste of resource and time for them. Even Open Source projects
drop support for old tech like debian dropped support for old SPARC
architecture in 2015. Of course the difference is that with Open Source anyone
can pick up where they left but that's an issue with any proprietary/close
source software and it's a risk one takes when going with a solution such as
Slack.

~~~
patrickaljord
Anyone can explain why I'm being so downvoted here? Is anything I stated wrong
or offensive or something? Genuinely curious.

~~~
crispyporkbites
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

~~~
patrickaljord
They never embraced IRC, they just had a gateway for people still using it.
This would be valid if Slack's protocol was based on IRC and they later
extended it and made it incompatible with IRC. This is not the case here.

