
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways - elektron
11:14 -!- Message of the day<p>Hello! We have news to share — we&#x27;ve decided it&#x27;s       
time to close down the IRC and XMPP gateways to Slack.<p>After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where      
the gateways can no longer handle all of our features     
or security needs.<p>If you&#x27;ve been using the gateways for accessibility       
reasons, we&#x27;re glad to let you know that it&#x27;s now         
possible to navigate Slack by keyboard and with a         
screen reader — and we&#x27;re making more improvements      
on a continual basis.<p>Still, we know this is a disruptive change, and we        
want to help with this transition in any way we can.      
Please follow this link to learn more about the           
upcoming changes:<p>slack.com&#x2F;account&#x2F;gateways<p>11:14 -!- End of MOTD command
======
saagarjha
I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every
other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized
protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary.

> We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year,
> we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading
> experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP
> clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of
> the accessibility features you need directly into Slack.

Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can
guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit
and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.

~~~
bramd
> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can
> guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on
> AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your
> team.

Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not
all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a
userscript in a few days. So yeah, I take this promise with some skepticism.

So either this is a lack of priority and disrespect to a part of their users
or some level of incompetence.

I might sound harsh about this, but imagine being a blind software dev that's
supposed to work with Slack to participate in teams. Every day you sign on to
your team it's possible that the Slack devs break something and you can't
function. And now they closed the escape hatch.

~~~
blindgeek
So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this
sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy
of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even
more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is
accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on
Linux. So I'm doubly a niche user.

The web (and web apps) are all about providing an experience. I don't want an
experience, I want a reliable tool.

~~~
ndarilek
Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this
thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for
a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd
actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various
elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the
correct ARIA role to a <div/>, they didn't bother adding expected keyboard
behaviors. I'm fortunate enough to work with co-ops, and the company I'm
founding hosts its own tools specifically because those I can control, and I
can pick the more accessible open source chat solution. But I can't count how
many times I've had to be some company's special snowflake because I can't use
Slack, can't use Toggl, can only use parts of Basecamp, and as such can't
participate in a bunch of their processes. Now I'll encourage companies
further away from Slack than I already do. Forget not touching it with a
10-foot pole. The 100-footer is coming out for this one. I'm sorry to post
such an unproductive comment, but if you're working for a silicon valley
company and not doing accessibility then you're doing it wrong, and you can
pay me or any number of other talented blind developers with some of that
investor capital if you want us to show you how to do it right. There is no
excuse for being so exclusionary.

~~~
fyfy18
As a developer who should probably pay more attention to this than I do, can
you recommend some reading material about how to make an app accessible, and
how to make sure it stays accessible (i.e. is there a good way to CI test
this?).

~~~
tvararu
The only way I'm aware of today is to learn to use assistive technologies and
use them on the right combinations of browser/OS/version. These are
recommendations for common combinations. [0]

I've given the CI deal a good amount of thought. You'd have to go through the
trouble of:

\- Provisioning a Windows VM with specific versions of browsers (e.g. IE11)
and AT (e.g. JAWS 17, the versions differ quite significantly)

\- Writing an automation suite that is capable of controlling the browser and
AT (Selenium probably does fine), but crucially interpreting the feedback from
the assistive tool to check for correctness. This is tremendously hard. Either
using some debugging APIs if any exist in the various assistive tools, or
reading memory / reverse engineering using IDA, or capturing the audio output
to the sound card and running it through speech recognition to figure out if
what was said by the screen reader is what you'd expect. With something like
Dragon Dictate you'd have to figure out how to trigger voice commands.

\- Expose the VM using an API that you can call from your test suite

\- `expect(jawsOutput).toBe("Type in two or more characters for results.")`

That's a potentially tremendously profitable SaaS offering (to the right
companies), if someone can build it.

[0]: [https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-
the-...](https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-2016-gov-
uk-assistive-technology-survey/)

~~~
mwcampbell
I wouldn't recommend using JAWS and IE for CI. For this purpose, I think it
would be much better to use NVDA
([https://www.nvaccess.org/](https://www.nvaccess.org/)) with any browser that
can be controlled by a test framework like Selenium. (NVDA supports all the
major browsers now.) Then, to feed the text-to-speech output back into your
test framework, you can write a simple TTS driver for NVDA, in Python.

~~~
tvararu
That would be a lot easier. I've assumed that NVDA would be the easiest to
plug into for obvious reasons but have not looked into it specifically.

I used JAWS and Windows IE11 as a specific example because that's a popular
combination with screen reader users. If something works well in NVDA and
FireFox on Linux it does not follow that it will work in other combinations,
at least in my own testing with things I've worked on in the past. Though
targeting the low hanging fruit to begin with is how I'd also start if I was
building something for this in earnest, ideally I'd want to automate testing
with all the popular combinations that I expect users to have.

------
FooBarWidget
Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open
platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view.

Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck?
IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending
sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with
mobile, is fragmented (not every client implements desired extensions), etc.

Why not accept that there _are_ legit technical reasons why existing open
protocols are unacceptable?

We should not be blaming Slack so much. If we want to make a difference we
must come up with a better open protocol that satisfies all the requirements.
And it does not end there: there must also be an open client that normal
people actually want to use, and there must be tons of marketing to promote
it.

Stop complaining about companies not adopting open protocols and do something.
Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will
follow. It is not easy, it may even feel wrong, but it is the only way.

~~~
cyphar
There are open protocols like Matrix which are superior to Slack in that they
are decentralised, have support for full e2e encryption, entirely self-
hostable, don't store your data outside of the home-servers used for
communication, etc. Riot is a perfectly fine client (looks just like every
other chat application), and there are weechat plugins as well as native
applications as well. Open protocols exist, and people are using them, but
that doesn't change that Slack dropping support for bridges is just typically
disappointing. Matrix also has full Slack/IRC/whatever-else-you-want bridges
(which you can stack to talk between IRC and Slack). So there's that.

However, this is simply untrue:

> Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies
> will follow.

When you are Slack Inc and the only differentiator you have is that you are in
control of how chat works, why on earth would you switch to a protocol that
you don't have full control over?

~~~
LeoPanthera
I really wanted to like Matrix but it expects you to independently verify the
keys for each device every person is using. If they get a new device, new keys
to verify.

This is crazy. The keys should be per person, not per device.

~~~
cyphar
Matrix has an identity key that is shared between devices (hence why you can
link up the sub-devices). The reason for having per-device keys used for e2ee
that you can verify is so that you don't automatically trust new devices if a
users' account is compromised. Each new login creates new e2e keys that only
persist with the session. In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly,
but the actual concept makes sense. If you want to just trust that the other
users' account hasn't been compromised (which is what having a system designed
around a single per-user key would effectively mean) then you can just blindly
accept all keys, because each device key is first registered with the identity
service and signed (requiring access to the account's identity key).

To be clear, there are several hiccups with e2e at the moment, but they are
being worked on (from what I can tell).

~~~
bb88
> In terms of UX this system is currently pretty ugly, but the actual concept
> makes sense.

This seems like a trivial gain for lousy UX, since it's possible the account
and the device is compromised.

~~~
cyphar
They are working on the UX side of things. I disagree that it's a trivial
gain. Signal works in the same way, except that they only really support
having a single device (that's where the safety number changing warning comes
from).

Having per-device keys also means that the server cannot decrypt your messages
(because the identity key is not used for communication, it's just used to
register new keys that clients will encrypt their messages to). Having a
global decryption key stored on the server would be a less secure design.

------
pc2g4d
Of course they do. This is exactly the path Google took. Once you achieve
enough power in the market, you can throw open protocols overboard.

It's a symptom of the centralized world the internet has become.

~~~
tjwds
Yeah, I don't want to be a downer, but this is pretty much the exact
definition of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

~~~
haroldp
Google is the new Microsoft. We all need to get comfortable with this idea,
and fast.

~~~
dsschnau
i thought it was old news that google isn't cool any more

------
Dunedan
Well, another day of being disappointed by Slack.

Aside from missing native clients mentioned in other comments my biggest pain
point is their awful implementation of threads. Every time I think: They must
be kidding, they can't be serious, that's just a bad dream. A few examples:

\- The only place where you get noticed about responses to threads is the "New
Threads" view, which makes it easy to miss responses, when you have responses
to multiple threads waiting to be read.

\- While having the "New Threads" view open, new messages aren't shown
automatically and you have to click a link to show them.

\- "Threads" for snippets and files are displayed directly in the channel the
snippet/file got posted in.

\- You can't post snippets and files in Threads.

\- You can't use "/me" in Threads.

~~~
AlexandrB
Slack threads are like a bad version of email built into an OK IRC client.

------
o-
Great, I feel like an idiot. I advocated slack, because it granted the freedom
to choose a client. Now I helped lock-in others.

Suggestions for alternatives, that I could migrate to? The requirements are:
mid sized teams, desktop and mobile, all major os. People used web based
client, native clients, irc gw, and bots. We need search and archive. Self-
hosting is an option.

~~~
brodock
rocket.chat is the best alternative

~~~
e12e
On paper I like matrix, or prosody (xmpp/jabber) with extensions (ditto irc +
logging bots etc).

But after looking a bit at rocket.chat along with the api - it's hard to
recommend something else as a self-hosted, open slack alternative.

I'm not enthusiastic about the stack/mongodb dep - but boy is the api nice and
documented, and their docker-compose a joy to get started with:

[https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/docker-
containers/dock...](https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/docker-
containers/docker-compose/)

[https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/rest-
api/](https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/rest-api/)

[ed: oh, and there's a hosted option and you can pay if you want. I think
that's also a big plus]

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mattermost? How does it compare? About
three years ago when open source Slack alternatives were starting to hit,
Mattermost and Rocket.Chat were the top options. GitLab even ended up bundling
Mattermost with their Omnibus installer (and were going to bundle Rocket.Chat
as well, had they made it possible to support Postgres, but I don't think
that's the plan any longer).

~~~
e12e
Not really. I'd prefer matrix (open protocol, federated) - but I seem to
recall after reluctantly accepting that rc is a great product, I had a look.

And that bundling code inside a mysql container felt like it fell well short
of the simple rc setup of db+app via docker compose...

[https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker-
preview/blob...](https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker-
preview/blob/master/Dockerfile)

------
munificent
> After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where the gateways can no
> longer handle all of our features or security needs.

Oops. They misspelled "where we are dominant enough that we have more to lose
than gain by being able to interoperate with our competitors."

------
kev009
Demerit. These idiots need a few more hundred million dollar financing rounds
to figure out how to use the rest of the RAM on my computer.

------
AndrewUnmuted
For weechat users, there's always the wee-slack plugin [0] which runs on the
Slack API, rather than the IRC gateway.

[0] [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack)

~~~
tyrust
Does anyone know if there is an equivalent for irssi?

Perhaps it's time I give weechat a try :/

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
I've yet to find one, which is unfortunate because I am a much bigger fan of
irssi.

------
Grollicus
Is Slack the Platform where you can have multiple accounts with the same
displayname? A bit surprising to hear them talk about security

~~~
adrianN
Yes:
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/970732100201697282?s=19](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/970732100201697282?s=19)

~~~
gboudrias
I was already against Slack out of principle, but this is pure madness. Their
justification boils down to "some people want to".

------
yason
Ah, the good old "just when I began to think Slack is pretty decent after
all", still remembering fights with Windows office communicator and others.

The reason I use the IRC gateway is primarily to cut down all the extra crap
except textual messages, and to be able to message from the console without
having to switch windows or launch web pages (I run irssi 24/7 under tmux).
This has been a nice sweet spot, with the improvement of seeing message
history as well.

The trend for things built in the 10's seem to be constant change and fear for
shutting down. Conversely, IRC from the early 90's still works fine. IRC is
like water pipes. It doesn't come with flashing lights but it does what it
needs to do, does it reliably, and nothing more. And you can buy bottled water
in various flavours but if water pipes didn't exist life would be far worse.

------
aestetix
It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies (maybe
tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT
feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base.

To an extent this makes sense, like if there is a new company CEO who has a
different vision, etc. But many of these decisions-- dropping Google Reader,
the trend to ditch the headphone jack, and now Slack killing IRC-- seem to be
made for no apparent logic reason, and giving some bullshit excuse like
"security reasons."

Is this driven by data? If so, why don't they release the data and show us?
Alternatively, in a free market, the way to best compete is to offer more
options to your customers, unless you've attained a semi-monopoly, or have
some kind of trust agreement.

Is it that difficult to maintain these things? Apple and Google are among the
richest companies in the world, and Slack just raised $250 million. Given that
not only are all three features I'm discussing established and probably only
need occasional maintenance, the headphone jack has been around for over 100
years. It's not like they need new science breakthroughts for it.

None of it makes any sense, unless the entire Bay Area has gone Dilbert.

~~~
FooBarWidget
> It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies
> (maybe tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT
> feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base.

You should read the book "Crossing the Chasm". This strategy actually makes a
lot of sense if you want to be successful. Summary: your early adopters are
not your main customers, and there is a divide there. You will hit a ceiling
in growth if you continue to focus on the early adopters.

~~~
aestetix
There's a difference between focusing on people and completely abandoning
them. One of the reasons many people (myself included) are leaving Twitter in
droves is because Twitter has made changes which betray its original
community.

In fact, at this point I would argue that Bay Area tech companies are actively
hostile towards the people who helped create them. To use Twitter again as an
example (because they have done so many stupid things), to come out with the
ridiculous "we decided to change likes to hearts" icon crap when many, many
people were crying out for some solution to the rampant abuse on the platform,
was not just a lack of focus, but a show of active contempt.

One of my biggest criticisms of the growth model (in part championeered by YC)
where you focus on getting users first and then figure out how to make money,
is that it almost always leads to this sort of betrayal. This is also the
general problem with offering "free" services to bootstrap things. There was a
period of several years where some of us (again, myself included) were
outright begging Twitter to let us pay for our account. This happened again
with Ello, and when they took VC money I lost all trust in them.

When you have an entire paradigm of companies that are following this strategy
as proposed, over time people will see a pattern, and when a company practises
the first steps in that pattern, it's not hard to see where it leads. As a
result, I'd argue it leads to an erosion of that initial base, and therefore
companies in the future will not be able to bootstrap in the same way.

------
endgame
I see Slack is now big enough that they can stop pretending to care about
interoperability, and essentially pulled a Google Talk on us all. Fool me
once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

------
strmpnk
It looks like IRCCloud has done an API based integration which is then exposed
again via their own IRCv3 system:
[https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721](https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721)

~~~
dewey
That looks super interesting. That might be the reason to finally push me from
self hosted znc to irc cloud.

------
cbm-vic-20
Surprising absolutely nobody, private company closes access via open protocols
with 3rd party clients.

------
vletrmx
The IRC gateway was the only thing that made slack even barely usable for me.

------
ksk
This currently seems to be the only successful business model. Give something
for free to get traction. Then slowly erode the free part, and try to get as
many people as possible to run on the subscription treadmill. In most
situations open source, open protocols and open data formats are an anathema
to the cash register going ka-ching. When you start spending other peoples
money, they are sure to remind you of this simple fact.

------
saltcured
This change, if it goes through, means I will disengage from Slack other than
passive browsing from their Android app. My teammates will have to remember
how to read email if they want non-trivial input.

It feels like a mixed blessing though, as it is a nice excuse to detox from
this mess.

~~~
jest3r1
Well email is due for a comeback.

------
beavis2
This is good news for me.

My company was considering Slack - the only reason it was agreed was due to
the IRC gateway.

So it looks like slack is out of the question now.

~~~
pas
What are the other candidates? What's your criteria?

------
j45
I remember mIRC at this moment. It let an entirely new internet generation
connect easier, compared to the chat clients of its' day.

Slack still strikes me as a modernized IRC client at heart. Today's IRC
client. Discovered by a new internet generation with today's integration
trimmings.

Let's look at IRC rooted technologies as waves of improvement for a moment.
Platforms are guaranteed to come and go, no matter how big. Protocols seem to
survive.

The need to chat will remain. Protocols like XMPP are important for this
reason. Developing XMPP quickly as private protocol builds should be a
worthwhile undertaking. XMPP innovation is something I should go learn about
more, though.

No one platform can be the entire ecosystem. They all try. Maybe it's vanity,
or a little insulting to create digital wells of content that the odds say
will shut down one day.

A step like disconnecting is a challenge for that reason. It will invite lots
of people to look elsewhere, trying to find how it should be.

It's not unreasonable to provide a limited subset of messaging features with
via IRC/XMPP. It doesn't seem unreasonable to improve XMPP itself either.

I'm perfectly comfortable with a business strategy argument and wonder if
Slack isn't looking long enough. Taking a 50-year vision might actually be
better if something like XMPP interoperability and evolution remained to
outlast everyone. Leaving the garden nicer than you found it, when possible,
isn't always a bad thing.

Due to this walling of gardens, my phone has no less than 8 or 10 chat apps
silo's I can't avoid. (Skype, Hangouts, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, Messenger,
etc.). To all chat visionaries, none of you are that important. I would
replace you all in a heartbeat with something that had a longer shelf life.

The tech that keeps integration and interoperability are the ones that I care
about most.

Tools like Pidgin or Trillian connected the worlds of MSN Messenger, ICQ, aim
and IRC. Connection and connectedness is blissful for a reason - including
across platforms.

------
bitL
Step 1: Build your initial product on open technologies, harvest goodwill of
enthusiastic people

Step 2: Become popular and highly profitable

Step 3: Ditch openness of your platform, implying your initial supporters were
just useful idiots

~~~
jake_the_third
As much as I hate to admit it, I was android's useful idiot. I seem to have
learned from my mistake though. I never bought into systems controlled by
commercial entities afterwards.

Unfortunately, the pool of useful idiots doesn't dwindle with each cycle
iteration since there are always a new batch of idiots willing to take the
bait (and attack you if you voice your concerns). So this strategy won't loose
its effectiveness. Expect to see many iterations in the future :(

------
drdaeman
Okay, I get that IRC isn't able to convey lots of modern fancy stuff, but
XMPP? Really? I swear, it can do almost anything that fits into stanza
exchange logic, as long as one's not afraid of adding an XML namespace (of
course, it's being nice to search for already existing XEPs first). Afterwards
it's client developers' problem to support shared threaded animated gif
sticker emoji reactions or whatever.

~~~
dmitriid
> Afterwards it's client developers' problem

Riiiight. And how many clients do you know that have that? Or read receipts?
Or file sending? Or... Or...?

There’s basically just one client that supports modern XMPP features. So no,
it’s not the client developers’ problem. It becomes the end-users’ problem.
And they will abandon XMPP in favor of solutions that don’t have tgat problem.

~~~
drdaeman
XMPP is a protocol. Slack's own RTM API is a protocol. It was claimed that the
former cannot be extended but the later can be - which I argued is wrong.

Now you're arguing about something completely different. It's not like it's a
death sentence if some RTM API-consuming app is not capable of something - why
does it suddenly becomes an issue when we switch protocol to XMPP?

~~~
dmitriid
Because Slack both develops the protocol, and provides apps for all platforms
that support all features in this protocol.

There’s exactly one XMPP client (Conversations for Android IIRC) that supports
all the XMPP features (many of them in still experimental XEPs) that make it
barely suitable for a modern mobile-heavy world, much less for anything else.

So yes. When you say it’s developers’ problem to develop clients, it’s not. It
immediately becomes the end-users’ problem.

------
lol768
This is disappointing.

Why isn't there a public blog post about this? Why is the "more information"
page behind an auth wall?

~~~
saagarjha
If _you_ were Slack, would you post a blog post about this? It's clearly a
negative, so there's no point in drawing attention to it.

------
hedora
I was about to set up a native xmpp/irc client because “Safari reloaded this
tab because it was using too much energy”

 _sigh_ Richard Stallman was right. Again.

------
synack
Is there a specific list of IRC's deficiencies somewhere? Could we start on an
IETF draft to address some of those rather than throw our hands in the air and
build yet another walled garden?

~~~
shiado
Well for starters IRC doesn't let you keep your hands warm when somebody posts
a giphy and your system resource usage goes up to crypto mining levels.

~~~
paganel
I don't rely on slack at work (we use mostly emails and some skype), I'm also
part of a small-ish team, so I have to ask: do people in bigger-ish teams
really send gif after animated gif in their work-related slack conversations?
And if the answer is "yes", what does that help accomplish?

~~~
nikanj
The more your work chat resembles an attention-addiction-skinner-box social
media, the higher engagement numbers it gets.

It's relatively easy to see how these engagement numbers can be leveraged as a
sales tool.

------
dal
This is super shitty.. the only reason to use slack was that you could escape
from the shitty web/electron crap. Good bye slack.

------
alokitr
I just recently started using slack and that's because a) of the irc gateway,
b) people expressed interest in me connecting to a few "rooms" (I don't even
know the slack terminology for room). Yes it's always peer pressure from the
ones that know "better". It's sad that I 'll have to disconnect from those
rooms and it's even sadder that I did not stand my ground but rather gave in
and connected to slack. At least I 'll have the consolation I was right I the
first place. Bye slack. You will NOT be sorely missed.

------
Improvotter
I'm honestly looking forward to a worthy competitor. Slack has literally been
slacking, I haven't seen any noteworthy features in 2 years. And we still
don't have a proper client imo, can we please get a native one with some more
progress?

~~~
nxc18
Came here to say this.

I was on slack in 2015, took a break and came back in 2017. Nothing changed -
no new features, and yet it was less reliable than I remembered.

They aren't even up to date on emoji. I just can't find symbols I expect to be
there. Talk about low effort. And yet they had time to redesign the ones they
did have (and the new ones are fugly).

------
progval
> After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where the gateways can no
> longer handle all of our features or security needs.

I don't think Slack ever cared much about the gateways. I have used the IRC
gateway for years, and it was never compliant with IRC protocols. I even had
to patch my IRC client to work with Slack.

IRC is also being extended with new features [1], some of which are designed
specifically for gateways to services like Slack. But Slack never used these.
It does not even use features that are supported by all IRC clients literally
for decades (eg. AWAY)

[1]: [https://ircv3.net/](https://ircv3.net/)

Could you be more specific about what features IRC/IRCv3 lacks?

~~~
jgkamat
I attempted to use the xmpp gateway for a while before realizing it had a bug
which caused the gateway to spam messages on reconnection. I contacted support
and they said it was an intended feature and they wouldn't support proper xmpp
group standards. That was the day I ditched slack forever.

------
jhgg
This sucks, but it makes sense. I'm willing to be <1% of their users use these
gateways, and it's becoming an engineer burden to maintain as they try and
ship new features. I don't think this will translate to any significant loss
of users anyways, as their main money-making users use it in a business
setting where you kinda /have/ to use it.

------
1024core
Why is anyone surprised? Almost every software company embaces "open
standards" when they're starting up, because it helps them get a foothold. But
once they're established, they want to kick out that ladder, in case the newer
competitor comes along.

Establish yourself, then build a moat.

This is also a sign that they may be planning to IPO. How else would they sell
a walled garden?

------
bwooster
Despite being a walled garden, the IRC gateway was Slack's saving grace. It
was what made it palatable to many old-school chatters and people who didn't
want to add another proprietary client to the giant list of other proprietary
chat clients needed to keep in touch with people.

------
dethos
It is a shame. People with older computers will have a harder time, also
people with their own work-flow and clients.

Deep down, we knew that the Gateways were just a temporary thing, to help
people enter the walled garden and also to shut down who might complain about
the move to slack.

Even though your company might use it (you can't do much there), you should
resist when communities choose this system to their chat, there are open
alternatives that fit better the use case.

------
hultner
WeeChat Slack API plugin (works without IRC-gateway)

[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack)

Background

I'm not associated but I thought I had to share this. Since about a year back
I've migrated to wee-slack for slack usage in my WeeChat IRC-client, it's also
possible to use WeeChat as a bouncer through WeeChat relay (if not mistaken
there's irssi-proxy:esque proxy-plugin too).

I've been a die hard irssi-fan and still use it for much of my IRC interaction
and been using weechat as a irssi-like slack client. As a bonus we can use
many of the features that didn't work through the irc-gateway.

You can also see a preview of my setup on my twitter

[https://twitter.com/ahultner/status/923588418126348289](https://twitter.com/ahultner/status/923588418126348289)

If you're interested of my personal setup you can find it in my dotfiles

[https://github.com/Hultner/dotfiles/tree/master/cetrezMBP/.w...](https://github.com/Hultner/dotfiles/tree/master/cetrezMBP/.weechat)

~~~
strkek
This is what I use. Unfortunately as soon as you load previous Slack messages,
the log file gets all messed up with their message order, so you can't rely on
it as-is.

------
smilesnd
I think this just proves slack can no longer do what it was originally made
for sending/receiving messages to boost productivity. Their are a ton of
articles posted on hackernews discussing how slack turns a productive person
into a slave of answering questions on slack. Slack is a distraction now, a
glorified way to show your boss and others you are doing stuff while achieving
nothing. Them removing these protocols isn't about forcing people to use their
closed source protocol or shitty gui web technology. It is about taking a
techie and forcing him to interact with the reset of the team like a good
little sheep. Now he can't ignore the pings from pm and channels. Now he can't
ignore the voice/video calls that someone demands of him/her sucking up more
of his day with useless trash. All I hear in my head while I read this was
either be a sheep like the rest or else.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Slack's official clients allow the user to control notifications, and
therefore when they respond.

------
syshum
Embrace - Extend - Extinguish...

Never lock yourself in to Propriety systems. Open Code, Open Hardware, open
Protocols

------
bryanlarsen
Zulip. Open source with IRC gateway, but most importantly a model that lets
you tame the firehose.

------
bwooster
It was working great and seriously used and appreciated by our users. This is
a tragedy. Many feel the electron clients are extremely clumsy and massive
resource hogs. Nobody likes threads. Nobody needs threads.

------
newnewpdro
Slack never intended for these gateways to stick around.

They only offered them as a way to get a foothold in organizations where
vestiges of influential IRC/XMPP users required them.

------
mrmondo
What a depressing, disappointing move.

An already closed ecosystem is making itself further insulated from open
culture and competition.

This further solidifies my position of avoiding the product.

------
m-p-3
Is Mattermost a viable alternative, and is it possible to bridge it with IRC
and XMPP?

~~~
cyphar
Mattermost has bridges[1]. There's also Matrix[2] which is decentralised and
has bridges for almost everything.

[1]:
[https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge](https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge)
[2]: [https://matrix.org/](https://matrix.org/)

~~~
PeterMikhailov
Have you tried running this stuff?

Have you tried running your own home server and then bridging your irc network
to it?

It's not simple.

~~~
cyphar
I have run my own homeserver, you're right it's not simple. However, the main
Matrix homeserver has those bridges set up (so if you don't mind using it, you
can). But in the context of a corporate environemnt, you have people who are
paid to maintain services like this.

~~~
PeterMikhailov
Can I bridge my Slack to the main Matrix homeserver ( matrix.org )

~~~
ATsch
Yes, it's even included in the Riot UI.

Note that unlike IRC, where bots or users must be on the same server rooms are
completely independent of any single homeserver. There's nothing that says a
room belongs to a certain homeserver. So the bridges set up by matrix.org will
work with any room, unless you explicitly turn off federation.

~~~
PeterMikhailov
I'm dumb, I really don't see it in the UI.

I read [https://medium.com/@RiotChat/slack-bridge-
improvements-44c52...](https://medium.com/@RiotChat/slack-bridge-
improvements-44c52fb712f4)

I don't see a way to "add a slack" in Riot.

~~~
ptman
AFAICT the key is the "manage integrations" -button (nine squares, 3x3) in the
UI.

------
donatj
Huh, looks like I'm not using Slack anymore. There's a couple slacks I connect
to casually only because I can in my already running IRC client.

------
cortesoft
I wonder how hard it would be to write a custom bridge with the real time api,
to make your own IRC gateway?

~~~
duncan_bayne
I was thinking about this too, then I realised I'd be spending some of my own
precious life helping Slack mitigate the consequences of a user-hostile, and
Open Web-hostile, decisions. Screw that.

~~~
cortesoft
Looks like it has already been done, thankfully :D

[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack)

------
gelstudios
Not to simply pile on to the complaints about this, but I rely on the IRC
gateway on my paid account for: Memory constrained use Bandwidth constrained
use _Attention_ constrained use

I hope there will be a text only or “low latency” mode in the native client.

------
stevefeinstein
TIL there was an IRC gateway that I would have definitely used if I knew about
it. Darn.

------
morsch
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

------
stuaxo
Something that is quite "fun" is to accidentally leave a few slack tabs open
in the browser, while running pycharm.

(If you like watching the computer slow to a crawl and have to power it down).

------
sciurus
Earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16536254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16536254)

------
tlrobinson
This seems like as good of a place to ask as any:

Are there any decent terminal-based Slack clients? (at least until Slack
decides to shut down their API...)

------
oiluj
Seems like alot of us have an issue surrounding walled gardens. We too see the
problem and have recently launched [https://m.io](https://m.io) to tackle the
lack of interoperability across teams and platforms. For now we're allowing
for anyone to chat across teams and with users that are on other enterprise
messaging platforms like Cisco Spark.

------
gazarsgo
Does anyone actually prefer coding to the IRC and XMPP protocols instead of
the Slack API ?

[https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-
term](https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term) seems more than sufficient
to me, and hackable if I find an itch to scratch...

Better yet, would anyone here pay for development of a self-hosted IRC or XMPP
gateway to Slack? :P

------
stuaxo
This is how I find out these existed, I could have been using something that
didn't a shitload of memory in firefox the whole time :(

------
tdewitt
That sucks. The IRC gateway was the only way I could ignore the rampant not
spam and image dumps. I'll miss you, /ignore. RIP

------
valeriansaliou
This opens up a market for someone building a Slack app and putting it on the
Slack marketplace, that would relay in/out messages from/to XMPP o IRC. I'd
pay for this, I definitely don't want to use Slack from their Electron app
that sucks both my battery and my RAM. I'd stick with Adium as an XMPP client
connected to Slack.

~~~
u801e
When connecting over the XMPP gateway, have you ever had issues where your
client would lock up while connecting and take multiple attempts to establish
a connection? I had that problem and ended up switching to the IRC gateway.

------
omginternets
Has anybody here switched to mattermost? How has your experience been so far?

Any "gotchas" or unanticipated pain-points to be aware of?

~~~
JeremyNT
My org uses mattermost - a logical addition since we were already heavily
invested in gitlab.

I don't run the services personally but I know the guys who do, and from what
I can tell it mostly Just Works. We use our org's SSO for gitlab, and we use
use gitlab auth for mattermost, and all the pieces work together well.

I don't use IRC with mattermost, but there are bridges available.

------
harisamin
maybe its time to revive my macOS native slack client MacSlack :)
[https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889](https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889)

I've posted about it before here on HN but wasn't sure if there's enough
interest

------
Shoothe
Good riddance. Their XMPP gateway was extremely basic, frequently dropped
messages. Why pretend it's working when it's clearly not?

Here's the compliance ranking:
[https://conversations.im/compliance/](https://conversations.im/compliance/)

------
dickbasedregex
This sort of app gets rewritten every two years. People act like it’s the
second coming every time.

IRC with persistence? Oh that’s acana, slack, hipchat, whatever this year’s
VC-backed boondoggle is. I haven’t seen anything new after IRC beyond ICQ.
Just like movies now. Same meh, new packaging.

------
beshrkayali
What must-have/killer features won't work with IRC/XMPP gateways? Also, even
if there is something, shouldn't it be optional then?

I don't mind them wanting to discontinue support for it, it's their business
after all. I mind the BS reason.

Feels like a Google Reader scenario...

------
skykooler
...Welp; so much for being able to access Slack from a phone running a third-
party OS. The Slack mobile web page is useless; you can't chat or view
conversation logs from it, I've never figured out why it exists in the first
place.

------
Adutude
I stopped using the slack client because it was causing my desktop to hang, so
I started using the IRC interface, which works great for my purposes. Since
they are getting rid of how I access slack, I guess I'm done w/ slack.

------
davidgerard
We went to paid Slack _because_ it was, functionally, a hosted IRC server. I
even recommended it to others on that basis.

Looks like we're going elsewhere. What else is there that does the job? IRC
interface, archives messages you missed.

------
jasonvorhe
One colleague at my last employer demanded to use the XMPP gateway and
everyone hated it, because he constantly missed information, didn't get
personal messages and didn't receive emoji reactions.

I'm glad the finally removed this.

------
endymi0n
From a business perspective, this is incredibly stupid, as they‘re basically
abandoning their early, nerdy adopters who brought them into companies in the
first place. It‘s a big „fuck you, now that we‘re a REAL COMPANY“, we don‘t
need you anymore.

It’s also a bad sign on who has taken charge and what the culture is like by
now. If they had REALLY wanted, nothing of this would have been impossible. If
you can‘t secure a weak or weird protocol, just go down the route Google did
with the Cloud SQL proxy and tunnel it. There‘s no big complication connecting
to a localhost gateway instead that handles all the authentication and
encryption - we‘re talking about a nerdcore audience anyway.

FWIW, I don‘t give much about IRC and love Slack as is, but I still can‘t
believe they‘re acting this nearsighted.

------
racer-v
From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a
"tube" from [https://sameroom.io](https://sameroom.io) \- not free though.

~~~
rekoros
Free for some providers that have Sameroom-operated "BridgeBots".

Any combination of Hangouts, Skype, GroupMe, Telegram, and Gitter is free to
connect.

We also had a Freenode BridgeBot, but couldn't get around the max connections
per user issue.

~~~
MaxLeiter
Freenode permits I-lines for multiple users from the same IP. Have you looked
into that?

~~~
rekoros
We’re all whitelisted in terms of IPs. The issue is with # connections from
the same nick. We worked with Freenode to find a solution and it didn’t pan
out.

The overwhelming majority of customers connect to Slack though, so it wouldn’t
matter price-wise.

I think I’m the only one reading #stripe from Skype :-)

------
Steeeve
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

------
joeevans1000
Duh of course. I can't believe the wholesale abandonment of IRC by so many
open source communities for Slack. It's been so... so... horrifying to watch.
Can't you see we're giving up critical data and history to an outfit that no
one has control over whatsoever.

Slack charges you to search the history beyond a certain number of messages.

SLACK CHARGES YOU TO SEARCH THE HISTORY BEYOND A CERTAIN NUMBER OF MESSAGES!

Yeah, let's make everyone all across the world pay to access a software
community's most vital resource regardless of their income or even means to
pay. Let's actively make this information sit behind a paywall accessible only
by those privileged enough to breach it, but only as long as they keep paying
month after month.

------
timkeller
This kind of announcement needed to include "and today we're announcing native
apps across all platforms". Honestly, the Slack app has become worse (not
better) over time.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Used you to grow, don't need you anymore. Thank you, but bye.

------
Luke-Jr
I guess I'll bid farewell to the Slack communities I've been participating in.
I'm not interested in using a browser or installing additional software for
chat.

~~~
ptman
You could try to get them to bridge to matrix

------
dougluce
Bitlbee will compensate.

~~~
mvanbaak
As much I would love this, it looks like the only real option right now is
wee-slack plugin for weechat. I have been using it for almost a year now and
it does it's job very well. Bitlbee for hipchat, wee-slack for slack. I'm ok
(for now, it's just a matter of time before slack cannot be used without one
of their official clients like the shit that happened with whatsapp and
others)

------
seangrogg
Mmm, while this wouldn't have impacted my decision in the slightest, I am
mostly glad that I have moved over to Discord for everything I used to do in
Slack.

~~~
rocky1138
Is Discord any better? It's still a centralized service run by one company, is
it not?

~~~
aepiepaey
Can't speak for Slack, but Discord is a fully walled garden, and they make
sure to control how content on the platform is consumed.

You can't automate your own account in any way without risking a ban due to
breach of ToS (see "self-bots").

This makes it impossible, for example, to get local chat logs (as the official
client doesn't support it).

------
samrocksc
I just want to point out that a use case is that some people like to conserve
resources and the electron app is the biggest resource hog in my ecosystem....

------
shortformblog
Slack is the company that can't be bothered to support Opera, let alone open
protocols. Incredibly lame, but par for the course.

------
ggm
The UI looks easily clone-able. (if anyone wanted) -the LHs selects major
groups, then a list of minor groups and identities, then a pane of content.

The _" value"_ is the persisting storage and maybe the integration with bots
(which IRC had first anyway) and Markdown, which is a really low barrier to
entry.

So it feels to me like (and I speak as one who often says others can do it,
but with no intent to do it myself so be warned) its a low bar implementation
goal to do an IRC backed open slack.

------
Endy
Well, that's the end of me using Slack.

------
benbristow
Since Slack's APIs are open to use would it not be possible to make an
IRC/XMPP 'proxy' server?

------
turdnagel
Relatedly, are there any 3rd party Slack apps out there? Their APIs are
powerful and seem pretty complete.

~~~
dblohm7
Those APIs will probably be deprecated soon enough.

~~~
saagarjha
I doubt it. Many companies depend on Slack's APIs to do things like post build
failures or provide custom commands.

~~~
beavis2
Same could be said about their IRC gateway.

------
mach5
this sucks. i use smuxi specifically so all my chat apps can be in the same
window. why do this? your web app is just not nice to use for text chat. its
busy and poisoned by emotes and confusing menus.

------
gsich
Which features? Seems like an excuse to not maintain those services.

------
znpy
I am unsure why Microsoft Teams isn't used more.

Compared to slack, it has not much less, and it comes for free with each
subscription to office 365.

I've seen the whole office 365 in action at my current company and quite
frankly, it's well worth its price.

------
lolikoisuru
And with that goes any chance of me ever even trying slack.

------
umen
I don't understand ... im using slack at work , and why should i use IRC or
XMPP with slack ? and why it is so bad they cancel it ? realy.. its just tool
.. why i need IRC on top of that?

~~~
hvidgaard
Using IRC "on top" is to avoid using the Slack client at all. I can understand
that, and Slack would shut down a lot of critics if they made native clients,
and a CLI client.

~~~
umen
just to be clear when taking about IRC we are talking about mIRC type right ?
native client to what ? i'm using their electron client .. what is wrong about
it ? ( memory hangy?)

~~~
hvidgaard
IRC can be any client you want. Not much IRC, but the ability to leverage the
hundreds of good IRC clients to use one in your workflow that fits your needs
exactly.

The Electron client is a glorified browser and webpage with none of the
benefits of a native app, but with all downsides that entails, including using
gigabytes of memory for simple chat.

It's a damn chat client that needs to listen to and submit events, and order
them into channels. That is it, it shouldn't use much, or feel slow at all.

And then there is the CLI issue. If you want developers to promote your
product, then make it good for them. Many developers want to use live in the
commandline.

------
rdflterr
Couldn't be more bummed about this.

------
Findeton
It's just another private messaging system. It's making money, that's what
counts for them.

------
bhaavan
Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

------
rdflterr
This is a huge bummer.

------
220V_USKettle
Closed garden. :(

------
invalid_
Bye bye slack

------
nopacience
Slack was fine, now it is time to move back to IRC.

Some people like slack or telegram because they provide an API for BOTs.
Something IRC has been open to since the begining.

Non power users might have trouble using IRC with the usual clients
(mIRC/irssi/bitchx).

Today a family member, not technical and 60+yrs asked about "that tool" that
is like whatsapp however it allows users that just joined a group to read old
messages. He was referring to slack. He wanted to create a group and when new
users from his company joined, they would be able to read whatever was written
on that group.

So with this in mind, i think what would really work (also) is to have
something on the front of IRC (some bouncer) with a pretty UI that logs
everything and allows new users to connect via mobile, standard irc clients,
and also send pictures, and read backlog (stuff slack does). However the
backend chat server should be the decentralized existing ones,
efnet/freenode/etc.

So maybe its time to re-invent slack and make a pretty UI to access usual
standard IRC. ie. a new slack that uses old irc networks (decentralized
networks) as its backend. But also allows users to talk from mobile apps,
browsers, etc

~~~
MaxLeiter
A few projects exist that try to be "modern" UIs for IRC (bias: I contribute
to Lounge)

TheLounge - [https://thelounge.chat](https://thelounge.chat) (FOSS, self-
hosted)

IRCCloud - [https://irccloud.com](https://irccloud.com) (mobile clients OS,
hosted)

~~~
merb
they don't look "modern"..

~~~
amiga-workbench
Yeah, there isn't enough low contrast text and excessive white space.

~~~
MaxLeiter
TheLounge has full support for themes and custom CSS on the client

------
s73v3r_
I appreciate the creativity in the presentation, but isn't every post here a
"Tell HN" post?

------
908087
Why is it that the worst tools and companies constantly seem to end up
floating to the top in terms of popularity?

------
Froyoh
Time to use Discord

~~~
escapecharacter
I've used Slack as part of a few organizations. If I'm starting my own ad-hoc
technical organization, is there any reason not to use Discord? Seems to have
all the features I need.

~~~
jakebasile
I've used Discord extensively and it's high quality software.

The only reasons I could see someone choosing not to use it are:

\- Doesn't have the same plethora of plugins that Slack does, although it does
have a fairly complete API.

\- It is a gaming product and it shows, which might make some more straight-
laced people balk at its perceived unprofessionalism.

------
tudorw
evolution sucks

------
w0m
:(

