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...yeah, or just IRC. There are mobile friendly clients, clients integrated for web browser use, multiple desktop varieties. They could even pre-configure and brand a "Creative Commons chat client" since it's all !floss.
IRC is excellent because it doesn't require a preregistered account, it is a common and well-spread means of communication, it can be integrated with !xmpp chatrooms if you control the server(s) etc. None of this is possible with Slack, at least not in any way that is future proof.
- Roland Häder, lnxw48 (Linux Walt) and clacke and 2 others like this.
- Roland Häder and clacke repeated this.
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@fnadde42 (and since the community was already on IRC it's extremely weird to move _away_ from an open environment and lock the communication in with a proprietary vendor).
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@mmn @fnadde42 It's always the case that if you don't care about freedom or having control over your systems then whenever the latest and trendiest chat app comes out then you'll switch to it in a heartbeat. Possibly the solution here could be Matrix. That way the trendy people can still use their trendy app until they find that the company which makes it never actually believed in openness and decides to turn it into a walled garden.
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@bob They say their IRC channel is linked in with a bot to Slack (I guess just relaying "<SlackUser1> blah blah", eliminating tab completion).
I'm curious however whether that's even allowed by Slack's EULA and - more importantly - what happens when Freenode notices an extremely spammy user (think ~20 Slack users communicating simultaneously, relaying everything to IRC).
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@mmn @fnadde42 Consistent state and complete scrollback across multiple devices is a basic requirement of a multiuser chat system now. I know this is true because all serious IRC users have some complicated technique such as a bouncer, ssh+screen or irccloud to circumvent the problem. I've been playing with Matrix, which @bob mentioned, in the last day or two and I think it has real potential as a Slack killer. Their integration as an actual ircd in Freenode's network works surprisingly well.
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@taknamay If you control the servers, you can create various methods of integrating the channel memberships/rosters.
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@mmn @fnadde42 I'd like to see Riot/Matrix.org used in the wild. Seems like an ideal solution on paper, at least.
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@rozzin Yeah and now they're happy about "wow, we have hundredsomething users, that's awesome" without realising that they will still likely just be idling and never partake in discussion because Slack will simply hide it when people ignore the channel since people now have only rushed in because they saw the notice about a new channel.
Slack can't make people communicate in parallell more than with any other tool. For that we need to rewire our brains.