
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects (2015) - kick
https://drewdevault.com/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html
======
t0mbstone
Acting like IRC is equal in functionality to Slack or Discord is straight up
delusional.

One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious
way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history.

Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there,
one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's.

IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or
reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party
integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen
sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and
Discord have.

If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord, then
people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it (at least
not in its current aged state).

~~~
charlesdaniels
> One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious
> way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history.

There are many solutions available to do this. Many channels publish chat logs
publicly, which can be downloaded and searched using grep or your tool of
choice. And there are web clients that can do this.

> Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there,
> one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's.

That’s rather the point of a protocol, no? IRC isn’t a platform, it’s a
standardized way in which various clients and servers can communicate. Much
like email, different clients support features useful for different users.

> IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or
> reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party
> integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen
> sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and
> Discord have.

I consider this a feature. I expect many others would. Constant reaction gifs
/ emojis / etc seem to be a distraction. I don’t believe I’ve seen these used
in a way that had a positive impact on productivity, or effectiveness of
communication.

> If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord,
> then people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it
> (at least not in its current aged state).

matrix.org / riot.im is what you want. The matrix protocol supports all of
these features. Riot is an open source web client for it. I use it regularly
and would recommend.

~~~
api_dolla
This reminds me so much of the ‘Show HN: Dropbox’ post

~~~
piva00
I have linked to that post quite a few times here in HN along the years, it is
surprising for me how many times this same kind of answer pops up and I don't
understand if it's lack of vision or empathy that there are people out there
that want tools with better ergonomics and are willing to pay for that.

Quite a few of us here work in software, of course we can just jerry-rig a lot
of solutions based on existing tools, it doesn't mean it is sufficient to be a
product or useful for a broader set of users...

------
PebblesHD
My only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user
hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool,
and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or
hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain
the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from
enterprise tools and other integration providers.

Personally, I’m a big fan of MatterMost[0] as its also open source but
provides a much more Slack-like experience which new users will be immediately
familiar with. You can host it yourself and it works with lots of existing
integrations.

[0] - [https://mattermost.com/](https://mattermost.com/)

~~~
cnst
> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool,

If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run
smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools!

Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history,
ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste
that comes with Slack.

~~~
oefrha
> Sharing files is trivial with Gist

Apparently not all files that need to be shared are text files. Developers
have a million ways to share text files, thank you.

(I know how to use gists to share images and other files. It's not pretty.)

------
why_only_15
I totally disagree with this article. IRC is incredibly user hostile and for
even a technical user is intimidating, complex, and nonobvious. Everyone uses
Slack or Discord, and everyone knows how they work, and the UI is easy. All
the features that ddevault says are bad are things that almost everyone else
cares about. I, for one, am thankful that more communities are moving off IRC.

~~~
kragen
> _IRC is incredibly user hostile and for even a technical user is
> intimidating, complex, and nonobvious._

When I started using IRC in the 1990s it was full of college freshmen
flirting. Most of them were not CS majors or otherwise technically adept. I
really don't think it's "intimidating, complex, and nonobvious" in a way that
makes people not use it. It just doesn't have images or history, that's all.

There are aspects of IRC that are nonobvious, but that's true of any software,
including Slack (and, I assume, Discord), and you don't have to know them to
start using it.

------
ddevault
Funny to see this reposted today, as just today I encountered an open source
project which primarily uses Discord for chat - a terrible idea for all the
same reasons. I had planned on writing a similar follow-up article reminding
people that Discord is a bad communication medium for open source projects,
too. I think that this is something the community ought to be occasionally
reminded of, lest we lapse.

~~~
philliphaydon
What's wrong with Discord?

~~~
armitron
Everything that's wrong with slack, and more.

No IRC gateway.

Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients.

Centralized control.

Ownership of your data.

~~~
gizmo385
> Developers are extremely hostile to 3rd party clients.

Example? As someone who has written a library to facilitate creating 3rd party
bots, I've never seen anything to suggest this.

~~~
saagarjha
3rd party bots≠3rd party clients. Discord _very_ actively goes after the
latter _and_ those who use them.

------
saagarjha
> Slack provides an IRC bridge that lets you connect to Slack with an IRC
> client.

Which doesn't exist anymore:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539857).
As far as I'm aware, there is no way to connect to Slack anymore without their
official client, unless you use something that is either their website in an
app wrapper or probably violating their ToS.

~~~
prsy
weechat has a plugin called wee-slack that I've been using every day for over
a year [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-
slack/wee-slack)

------
me551ah
The biggest problem for me in IRC is lack of good mobile clients. You can't
get push notifications and if you want to stay persistently online then you
need to keep a perpetual battery-draining socket open. You could setup a relay
on your server ,but it's cumbersome and too technical for most people.

~~~
pbui
My wife uses thelounge (self-hosted instance) as a progressive web application
on her Android phone. It supports push notifications and file uploads. Before
this, she used IRC Cloud, which also has a convenient mobile application with
those features.

As for myself, I use Weechat-Android (for about 6 years now) and am very happy
with that on my Android phone. It uses a websocket with SSL, so I get
notifications and it uses very little battery (or data).

~~~
me551ah
IRC cloud is paid with a monthly subscription right?

Are you using weechat as a relay for the Android client or is it a standalone
irc client? Cause to receive notifications a websocket will still have to be
always connected.

~~~
pbui
> IRC cloud is paid with a monthly subscription right?

That is correct, although there is a free tier, which my wife used for a
while. The only major downside to the free tier is that IRC Cloud disconnects
after two hours of idle activity.

> Are you using weechat as a relay for the Android client or is it a
> standalone irc client? Cause to receive notifications a websocket will still
> have to be always connected.

The former. I have a weechat instance (it is a terminal IRC client) on a VPS
(the same one also running my wife's instance of thelounge) that I normally
use when I'm on my laptop. On my phone, I use Weechat-Android as a relay
client to the weechat instance. So the websocket connection on my phone talks
to my weechat relay. Fortunately, Weechat-Android handles connecting and
disconnecting seemlessly, and I don't have a problem with notifications.

------
sandGorgon
Riot/Matrix is a decentralised, open source slack alternative. Almost like irc
.

[https://about.riot.im/](https://about.riot.im/)

------
esotericn
I totally understand that IRC has issues, but there's really nothing that
beats just being able to hit '/j #channel' on freenode and it's probably there
and my client works how I expect it to.

The fragmentation pretty much excludes me from switching away. It's completely
impractical to maintain notifications / check new messages / reasonably
understand the interface of 5+ different clients (on multiple machines too!),
so the theoretical benefit of using a new platform doesn't exist.

There's what - Gitter, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Matrix? I'm sure there are
more.

How do people actually manage this? Do people really have 5 of these clients
open, or do they just arbitrarily pick one? Slack, when I've used it, has been
a 'per organization' thing, can you have multiple orgs open at once or do you
need a tab for each of those?

I just find the whole thing bonkers. IRC wasn't an arbitrary choice ten years
ago, it was a defacto standard.

~~~
johntash
> How do people actually manage this? Do people really have 5 of these clients
> open, or do they just arbitrarily pick one? Slack, when I've used it, has
> been a 'per organization' thing, can you have multiple orgs open at once or
> do you need a tab for each of those?

You can definitely have multiple orgs/communities/whatever open in slack. But
you still have to make an account for each one, so it's no where near "/join
#someproject". It's more like "Go to invite.someprojectthatusesslack.tld, put
in an e-mail for slack to send you an invite, go find the e-mail, register for
a new slack user using that e-mail, login to the project's slack and find
channels to join"

------
shmerl
Agreed. And neither use Discord! Matrix is more appropriate. It's quite
annoying Rust project went with Discord and didn't pick open options.

------
_sharp
I've used RocketChat at a previous company, basically a clone of slack. I
didn't have to manage it, but it seemed to work great.

~~~
ptman
rocket.chat is open core, please avoid it

~~~
Ruthalas
Can you elaborate on this? I am currently using RocketChat and would
interested to hear of security issues or similar problems it has.

------
locusofself
I do like IRCCloud, and use it often. But it's not Slack. Slack is one of
those things that seems sortof dumb and simple but it just isn't. They've
built a very compelling set of features that many of us now just take for
granted. Mattermost is the closest 'freemium' alternative to Slack I've seen.

~~~
ptman
Have you looked at matrix.org/riot.im?

------
imtringued
As someone who heavily used IRC in his childhood I disagree. IRC is pretty
much dead. If you want opensource instant messaging then go with Rocketchat or
Matrix with Riot.

~~~
pmoriarty
The FreeNode IRC network is alive and well for opensource support. Lots of
devs for many, many projects, and users for many Linux distros, for instance,
hang out there all the time.

------
pieq
It's almost 2020… what's the status of IRCv3?

We use IRC at work, but I think when you setup an open source project
community, you have to think carefully. IRC is for instant communication. If
parts of your community are located in a timezone that is only online when you
(the maintainer of the project) are not, that will create frustration, unless
you start setting up all kind of bouncers or tools to let you be online at all
time. In the end, I tend to prefer forums or mailing lists, because people
writing can elaborate a bit more, and receive more meaningful feedback later
on... but I guess I'm old school :)

------
sayusasugi
As much as I dislike using a proprietary chat app, Discord is well designed
and easy to use. Reliving the early internet is great and all but my time is
limited, and I'm sick of sacrificing my time and sanity faffing around with
bouncers and garbage IRC clients. It's the same reason I use macOS instead of
Linux. I don't just want a Unix environment, I want a __polished __Unix
environment where apps don 't have Linux UI syndrome and plugging in an
external monitor doesn't require me to pull up the man page for xrandr. That's
a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

~~~
f1refly
Discords design is horrible, there's huge gaps everywhere, it won't obey any
themes and it limits options severely compared to other clients while
disallowing third party client developement. It also eliminated the
possibility to host your own server while for malicious marketing reasons
using the same term for their hosted channels. It's one of the best examples
how companies exploit the technological illiterate and it's a shame some of
literate people don't care.

Also external monitors work ootb, like basically everything nowadays.

------
fouc
Most FOSS projects that aren't on Slack/Discord/IRC seem to be on gitter.im

gitter.im's frontend/SPA client has a bunch of glitches, but the backend seems
solid.

~~~
ptman
Gitter is very much tied to gitlab/github/twitter. I for one would prefer if
open source projects didn't force to accept terms of service of those
services. There is a gitter bridge for matrix, but open source projects should
probably just use matrix.

------
hgoel
I think one often overlooked alternative is riot.im, basically discord/slack
but with the ability to host custom servers and an emphasis on security.

------
CharlesW
Previous discussions:

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136)

~~~
cnst
Let's do another one!

Note that it's often been an excuse that Slack has an IRC and XMPP gateways,
but, per the article, they've been shutdown in 2018.

I really hate Slack for how much memory it requires, and how many bugs it has.
The Android app, for example, logs me out of every community if I'm removed
from one of them; really "nice" when someone cleans up the resources of an old
hackathon to be logged out of all the dozens of various teams you're part of.
(Noone even knows how to call each of these individual teams or communities,
either; requiring a separate login for all of them is pretty annoying, given
that it's all maintained by Slack anyways.)

Or when they remove you from an existing hackathon team to make up space for
new members, and now you lost all your contacts, and/or have to be re-invited
again if you're still participating in the next-year-edition. It's basically a
mess.

Even for employee communication — from a contractor's perspective — it makes
you a non-owner of your own communication, unlike IRC, so, if you so happily
accept it, you're basically working against yourself again.

------
znpy
> "Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects"

I'm looking at you, Kubernetes.

------
jonnydubowsky
Keybase is a great alternative to Slack with end-to-end encryption.
[https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-
teams](https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams) The slack importer
makes it pretty easy to move over existing slack channels.
[https://keybase.io/slack-importer](https://keybase.io/slack-importer)

------
pedrolucasp
There's also another option. Spectrum.

Solves all of your points... It's open-source, has file sharing, code
snippets, and proposed to help FOSS.

------
Bnshsysjab
Can anyone suggest irc plugins that fix phone chat history / syncing?

The big killer for me is not being able to see/ get notifications

------
trothamel
There have been months where the spam on freenode was unbearable, and
fundamentally IRC is, like SMTP, a protocol where spammers have the advantage,
and only heuristics stop spam.

A big part of the value of IRC-replacements are accounts that are tied enough
to a person's identity (For example, by requiring sms confirmation) to deter
most spam. IRC hasn't been able to do that.

~~~
cnst
Doesn't IRC support the registration of usernames?

~~~
armitron
Most servers do, and a simple channel mode solves the spam problem (which
isn't nowhere near as much of a problem as email spam).

~~~
trothamel
I don't believe that it does. For a week or two about a year ago, freenode had
a problem where accounts would join channel, spam links to sites accusing
prominent people of child porn, and be kicked a moment later.

If there's a channel mode that can stop that, while still keeping the channel
useful for people who need support, I couldn't find it.

~~~
c-cube
in my experience, even just setting +s to enforce TLS connections was enough
to remove all spam.

~~~
lifthrasiir
In my experience of operating an IRC network, some channels hate to set +s
because it hampers the channel's discoverability. Unlike +n, +s shouldn't be a
norm.

