
Ask HN: Is there a decentralised alternative to Slack? - febin
I heard a lot of slack accounts has been closed down today. I was wondering if there&#x27;s a decenteralised alternative to it?<p>I also saw a post in HN that MailChimp suspended accounts without prior notification. What&#x27;s with these tech companies and closing accounts? It&#x27;s scary.
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lewisflude
I think you'd really like Matrix.
[https://matrix.org/blog/home/](https://matrix.org/blog/home/)

Riot is a decentralised team messenger built on top of Matrix.
[https://riot.im/app/#/home](https://riot.im/app/#/home)

~~~
juliangoldsmith
One caveat to Matrix is that I wouldn't recommend making an account on
matrix.org. In my experience, their homeserver is so massively overloaded that
it's almost unusable.

There are other providers, though, and hosting your own instance isn't too
difficult.

~~~
okso
Running your own Synapse (backend) and Riot web (frontend) within Docker
containers is pretty easy and reliable.

~~~
im_dario
How is Synapse faring so far on memory consumption? Their README [0] still
warns about it in its last section.

[0] [https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#help-synapse-eats-
all-...](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#help-synapse-eats-all-my-ram)

~~~
juliangoldsmith
It is... not great, in my experience. My newly-rebuilt Synapse instance
currently has a resident size of 571 MB, for one user in two channels. I doubt
that it scales linearly with users, though, and there may be settings to get
memory usage down.

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StreamBright
IRC was and is the best alternative for Slack. Private IRC servers are easy to
install and you can create a federated service with multiple of them. There
are many great web or mibile clients as well as desktop ones.

~~~
rch
Is there a particularly good IRC client app you'd recommend?

~~~
dewey
Palaver (iOS), Textual (macOS) or
[https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/) if you want a "hosted
znc" kinda behaviour. They also have an iOS app and a web interface.

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bryanlarsen
My favorite slack alternative is Zulip; IMO it's got a much superior model;
it's as much a real-time forum as chat. It makes threads first class citizens
rather than the ugly hack they added in slack.

And it's open source, so it's decentralized in that many people host their
own. It's not federated though.

~~~
m0rose
I think this is a matter of preference. Microsoft Teams does threads as first
class citizens, and to me it's overly busy. I'd much rather a chat tool work
like IRC, and in my mind Slack is simply IRC with more features.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Creating a subject for a thread is optional in Microsoft Teams rather than
required as it is in Zulip. This very minor difference makes a HUGE difference
in how the UI works.

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taprun
What about IRC?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat)

~~~
okso
IRC is by designed centralized: A chat room is hosted by exactly one service
provider, and that service provider also manages identities and
authentication.

The fact that most IRC clients integrate the connection to different servers
in the interface does not really make it decentralized.

~~~
tapoxi
An IRC channel is hosted by a network of federated servers (such as Freenode
or EFNet). This is why netsplits happen when communication is disrupted
between servers.

Some networks have bolted-on authentication to prevent people from riding
netsplits and commandeering channels, but that's not a part of IRC itself.

~~~
claudiawerner
I'm interested in knowing more about this. Accessing #xyz on Freenode won't
let me access the #xyz on EFNet, I don't understand how the servers are linked
or to what effect. Surely I have to be connected to Freenode to talk in a
Freenode channel? Similarly if Freenode goes down, is the channel I was using
still accessible somehow else?

~~~
tjoff
Freenode and efnet are completely separate. But both freenode and efnet have
lots of servers (typically spread out geographically) that are synchronized
and it's between those that a split can occur.

People in channel #xyz on efnet doesn't have to be connected to the same
server to talk to each other (during normal operation).

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harlanji
I’ll eternally plug XMPP.

Openfire is good to explore features with/PoC, and there are lighter daemons
to go forward with.

Plenty of negativity around XMPP, I think it’s fundamentally a legacy hate for
XML but we’re all good at DOM and namespaces and schemas now if we use JS or
Golang anyway. XEP database is worth a browse.

~~~
corebit
The fact that the core of XMPP is across at least 4 different RFC's means its
too complicated. That's the source of the hate.

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brd529
Mattermost is a self hosted slack clone. 95% feature parity in my experience -
we use it as our primary chat tool where I work, no issues.

~~~
crtasm
I've been testing out the self hosted community edition, it works well enough
but you'll most likely want to run an image proxy server (it only seems to
support camo) and mobile notifications are supported but sent plaintext
(unless you compile your own apps).

You also can't prevent users from 'archiving' (deleting) any channel they have
access to.

Overall it feels like I was being firmly nudged towards the paid hosted
version.

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Riseed
Last time I looked, Riot, Mattermost, Friends, and Rocket were good options.
This post compares five alternatives:
[https://blog.okturtles.org/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-
al...](https://blog.okturtles.org/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-
alternatives/)

(Disclosure: I work with okTurtles)

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chrisswanda
What about [https://keybase.io](https://keybase.io)

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flqn
We've been using Rocketchat at my work for some months now after moving from
Slack and it's served us well. It's self-hosted and even feels a bit like
Slack to use.

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wppick
I remember reading about XMPP several years ago and how it was going to be a
universal chat protocol that was also decentralized. I think Facebook and
Google chat implemented the protocol at one point

~~~
Jtsummers
XMPP is a federated protocol. Google supported federation for a time, but
dropped federation in 2013 which cut off a lot of people from being reached if
you didn't use Google Talk yourself. I'm not sure any of the other big players
in messaging support XMPP federation.

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nik736
I was using Mattermost for quite some time and really enjoyed using it.

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notemaker
Cabal [1] might be of interest.

[1]: [https://github.com/cabal-club/cabal](https://github.com/cabal-
club/cabal)

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colanderman
Haven't used any of these, but this is what a quick Google turns up:

[http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/](http://sdelements.github.io/lets-
chat/)

[https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

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

[https://zulipchat.com/](https://zulipchat.com/)

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beat
For "what's with these tech companies and closing accounts?", blame spammers
and scammers. They're generally cleaning up fake accounts, and no filter is
perfect - real accounts will get caught in the net. Blaming conspiracy and
oppression is shortsighted. The best protection is to make sure there is no
way anyone will confuse your account with spam or scam, and the best way for
that is to be a paying customer, rather than a free user.

~~~
babygoat
The people whose accounts they've closed by mistake are essentially fucked
over because the company provides no information and no recourse. Stop making
excuses.

~~~
chrismeller
> because the company provides no information and no recourse

From what I've seen on Twitter it looks like Slack is asking people to email
them so they can figure out what is going on and if they did in fact err in
closing accounts. We'll see what comes of that, but it feels a bit premature
to say that they've just cut people off and that's the end of the story.

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vongomben
Rocket.chat is offering both hosting and guidelines to selfhost

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hkt
IRC! IRC! IRC!

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awaywopassd
Discord

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auton1
Email?

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davismwfl
I wouldn't worry about this seriously. Do companies shut down accounts, yes.
Do they do it poorly sometimes, yes. Should you always make sure your business
is protected against ANY third party service you use, yes. Does that mean you
should avoid using these services, no.

You don't know the full story to these cases, you don't know what the person
was doing/sending for fact. All we have is a shaming event posted on HN or
reddit etc. Not saying the companies are right here, but you are considering
things to be fact based on one side of the story and generally no actual facts
beyond someone's statements. Someone stating something doesn't make it a fact,
it is an opinion, proof is much different.

I have heard this about Stripe many times saying they shut down accounts, or
Square as another example. I had my own situation where Square held up a
little more than 20k in payments until I proved some details about my
business. I did what they asked and had my money released in 24 hrs because I
was within the terms of service and I had facts. 9 out of 10 times when people
have these issues they are outside the terms of service or are playing loose
with facts.

There are exceptions of course too, myself and many others have posted
proof/facts around Paypal's deceitful practices of holding money even when you
are within the terms of service and have called them ahead of time as required
for certain events/transactions.

Also, just as a note, sometimes companies must act based upon legal situations
and do something that they normally wouldn't. This happens more often in the
U.S. when a company is dealing with foreign individuals or companies and not
its own citizens. This is similar to any other Country and their governments
enforcing their laws/rules, except at least in the U.S. there generally is
some court involvement which provides some checks and balances.

~~~
lwhi
In my opinion it's probably worth discussing.

I'm generally concerned if someone tells me not to worry.

~~~
davismwfl
I do agree with you it is worth openly discussing. And I never said it is
something to not worry about or discuss, my overall point is knee jerk
reactions over opinions and not facts are useless and you should always be
protecting your business from 3rd party services you use, regardless of what
you read.

But dismissing using quality tools because you read on some forum that a few
people had their accounts disabled can just create chaos for your own teams.
You have no clue what the facts are, and if you base doing business solely off
subjection and hearsay you won't be in business long. Although, somewhat
ironically, I do feel a healthy level of paranoia can be positive because it
makes you ask more questions.

~~~
davismwfl
Technically I said not to worry seriously. There are reasons to question
things but not worry seriously over it, at this point.

