It harkens to a yesteryear of decentralised everything and a spirit that wanted to keep it as such: an island for every man...

Now it's more of a huge resort super island filled with lots of other people where everyone perpetually rents everything.

Too cynical?

> Too cynical?

No, too romantic. E-mail was never good enough to be decentralized, much less at the "every man" level.

Too real.

GitHub is really useful for issue tracking on open source projects. It's annoying to have to hunt through whatever 90's era mailing list archive website to see if someone else has had the same issue on projects that don't use it.

Good point. Email is great when you are part of the conversation and it's in your history. Maybe not so much for digging around later on otherwise.

It would be nice if discussions were done on a newsgroup instead. At least you don't have to be part of the conversation and you can read through discussions as far back as the retention policy on the NNTP server allows.

Man, your Github notifications are mixed into Chat?

We have a #{{projcet}}-dev channel for talk and #{{project}}-admin for JIRA/Github/etc. Also, in Slack you can have it auto-close all expansions. You choose the Gifs you wanna see.

Unfortunately, slack doesn't allow you to block users - not even bots or webhooks. And even if you have expansions turned off, they're still there in collapsed form.

So if you're not an administrator, and some genius has set up a bot that posts a cute puppy every time a message includes /pup, and it triggers practically every line in a discussion about puppet, slack doesn't give you the option to do anything.

Well, apart from "complain to your boss and ask him to stop your co-workers' fun". As a professional, I don't want to be wasting my boss's time with trivial shit I ought to be able to fix myself.

This is what greasemonkey and similar is for. It shouldn't be necessary, but sometimes it is.

You might even be able to do it with some custom user-side CSS.

I don't get how your pup situation doesn't get solved with a conversation with a co-worker.

I do. Do you want to really be "that guy" who hates puppies (and is ribbed about it all the time)? Software development teams often have all the maturity of a clique of middle schoolers; and exclusion can be just as harsh.

I'd say that people that don't have the maturity to raise a legimitimate work issue with their coworkers are more likely the immature ones.

I have been and continue to be "that guy" who says "this is interfering with work, let's fix it", instead of that guy who doesn't say anything and instead just complains anonymously on social media. It works better this way.

"Your bot is broken, fix it so we can talk about our tools."

Yeah Slack makes it really easy for things to get out of hand. One of my informal roles at our company is being the Grim Reaper of Slack. I periodically go through and delete slackbot responses and emojis that have proven to be very annoying. People get salty at first, but if you don't stay on top of it, your shop will eventually be overrun by parrots.

Some parts of the US military have standardized on http://psi-im.org/

There are private networks with hundreds of active users.

Slack now have IRC gateway support so you can do that now.

I really like Slack, I think it is the team/company responsability to maintain a controlled focus. The same issue can apply with email.

When a customer adds one member of my team to Slack and the flow of information is insane I charge the customer for a manager to follow the loop and leave developers focused.

Fortunately, Slack does provide an XMPP and IRC gateways. Assuming they're enabled, using them is a much better experience (no animated gifs and all the power your chosen irc/xmpp client can provide you).