Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.

In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.

I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).

Also, I think Slack's threads are useful. You can have channels where you just post a single message for your question/issue and then have people reply in a thread, so that messages are naturally grouped together by topic instead of being a firehose of interleaved messages. Combined with good search, this makes Slack more of a valuable knowledge store than just an ephemeral chat tool.

I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American.

It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things.

A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.

Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.

This was 4 or 5 years ago. Now in my current company we also use Slack. It’s good, but not great either. Mostly because the UI is super slow when running in my desktop browser (Cliqz, Firefox-based). But it’s still better than Teams in my experience (I did not try the other alternatives).

One other advantage of HipChat was that it‘s native Android client would run without requiring Play Services; Slack purposefully won't run without it.

In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.

Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.

It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all.

Will we ever learn?

Asking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and...yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio.

I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through.

I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.

Yet here we are.

Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services.

(When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh)

To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."

"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"

"Those are expensive. No."

So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.

Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?

Okay. I’ll do it: it was Sprint wasn’t it? ;)

Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.

The sad part is, Slack was better in the past. It's the "digging moats" part GP mentioned that makes software shit. Corporate or otherwise. Consider: once upon a time, they supported an IRC gateway. But that was just a lure to get techies on-board, and predictably (like e.g. Google before with XMPP), once they've reached critical mass, they've shut it off.

(And I'm part of the problem too. I don't complain much, because as long as Ripcord - the not shit third-party desktop client - works, I don't have to deal with Slack's web and Electron crap.)

And if your corporate IT wasn’t completely nightmarish about locking it down you had multiple client options on almost every platform.

Besides, there were tons of integrations, scripts already available, and it is super easy to write your own irrespective of what scripting language you know.

Technically it sucked in that it could, when used terribly, clog up an entire network (such as the infamous NHS mail chain reply fiasco from a few years ago), but I have no clue who decided Slack was better than emails for what emails did.

Slack is better than Lync and similar corporate messaging platform. But that’s not what people tried to sell it as, or for that matter, Slack advertising sells it as. They sell it as an alternative to email.

It’s weird how difficult to use their slack competitor is. Hard to search within teams and across channels. There’s a weird interaction between itself and OneDrive/SharePoint that I don’t get the mental model.

I used to hate Slack’s UX a lot until I started to use Teams.

This. I was told MSFT has switched to Teams. They don't use Skype. Both my current and soon to be new employer (company bought) use Skype for business.

Skype is terrible in many ways.

Teams has a slicker UI. But it brings the horror to a whole new level. Someone mentions you passing in a group. You get a notification in email. But hey, if you aren't signed into that group, you can't see it. And you can only see like 4-5 groups at a time. So you really can't track conversations in real time.

The whole multi-teams experience ... is not well thought out. I have to switch between at least two different company teams multiple times per day, to do my work over the last 4 months.

Slack, for all its annoying mis-features, handles this workflow quite well. The UI, while somewhat simplistic, just works. Search and threading are terrible, but at least search works. Still have not figured out how to download conversations for transfer into tickets/etc.

I just want something that is simple, works well, allows me to search, to reliably enter code/screen caps/etc. Right now, though I don't like it, Slack comes close to working with some annoying misfeatures. Teams ... does not. Skype is best forgotten about.

The main failure of IT or computer science is the lack of open standards and federation. 40 year old Email was the last somewhat succesful one. You can use various clients like Emacs, Thunderbird, mutt, Gmail web UI and there is no need that sender and recipient share either provider or client.

In communism it was the central planning commission that decided what products consumers want to buy. Today it's Slack that decides how people do IM at work. And Google or Apple how people use mobile apps. Facebook how you interact with your friends. I hope that these monpolies/duopolies would share the fate of communism. How do we get there?

- Message threads

- Ability to share screens when multiple people are in audio conference

- ability to "draw" over the screen while sharing

One thing I wish slack or others had that discord has is ability to select FPS for screen share: when I'm sharing the screen or camera (showing a whiteboard) I usually care more that the image looks with better detail even if it refreshes once every 20 seconds. Almost all screen sharing always introduce compression artifacts.

100% agree on the other two, though. Encouraging people to make channels as needed helps the first, but for ephemeral discussions you wind up deciding between deleting the chat log, or living with a lot of "retired" channels. And being default opt-in for notifications makes Discord _way_ more noisy than Slack could ever be.

* Can't leave a channel (without custom bot shenanigans, which doesn't scale well to having a lot of channels).

* No control of notification sounds on mobile. All notifications get the same sound and there's no option to deliver quietly.

* No threading.

* Can't collapse embeds.

* No back/forward navigation. The closest it gets is in the quickswitcher it offers the last channel you were in, but that's it.

* Their support is awful. Everything except extremely obvious bugs get the response "please vote it up at feedback.discordapp.com", and even bugs often get that response.

* No "do not disturb" settings. If notifications are on, they're on 24 hours a day.

TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)

- Have a bot invite everyone in the group to every room and kicks them out if they leave (noisy, not everyone needs to be in every room)

- Have everyone in the group use the same homeserver, make rooms public and non-federated (defeats much of the purpose of Matrix, doesn't let you invite people from outside the org as one-offs)

I think some of the future plans for communities would solve this?

Anyway, Matrix right now is great for both small private chats and FOSS projects; in the former case you can just handle access ad-hoc, and in the latter case the rooms are public anyway. It just seems a bit lacking at the moment for organizations that need private rooms.

Assuming it goes dormant and unused (which it may not, but often does), do you have a policy for stale / unused username deletion or reclamation?

We're looking at fixing this in future via https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/rav/proposal/r....

Meanwhile, if you want echelon as a username, go register a domain name, run a matrix server on it, and you can have @echelon:echelon.xyz or wherever. Try not to get sued by five eyes though ;P

1) your "hey nice strong password" tooltip parks itself directly over the confirm password field so you (I) don't get to see it at all.

2) google captcha? ...really?

Yeah, that's not how it works, and you know it.

You are also implying that something changing and adding new features fast is good, and that's not true, either.

>If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack.

Jabber was also going to obsolete many things, and look at it.

It's not ideal, but shipping a mobile and desktop client that are literally incapable of displaying the same channels in the same order is also not ideal.

It was very strange because they had no idea what Teams was used for. They shared some literature that says the features are the same, but when asked to do simple tasks like use teams to coordinate the rollout, they didn’t know how to do it.

Kind of weird. My hope is that Microsoft eventually makes it usable since it’s basically free with other purchases. But then, Microsoft killed yammer and Skype.

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client)

https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)

The deal breaker ultimately was that I didn't receive all of my notifications which was a problem for work. But I would love to try it again if they solve that problem.

Edit: The hotkeys and the lightweight feel to it was also amazing BTW.

But if you have any lead on a way to show that notifications aren't being displayed, that would be really useful information.

I've heard of some people using Ripcord on Windows 10 having some kind of automatic suppression of notifications occur at the the OS level. Probably some automated anti-user-spam thing. In which case, the notifications would only be listed internally within Ripcord, but not in the OS notifications list. Is that the case, or were they also not visible within Ripcord's own notifications list? (This one isn't relevant if you're using Mac or Linux.)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/wind...

I'm guessing this is what needs to be handled. I wonder if Qt is already interacting with this system, and I'm handling it improperly on Win32. Does scrolling with touch gestures work for you in other types of scrollable views, such as the sidebar, or the workspace files list?

There's also this, an open 5 year old bug report. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461

Oh, and since I have you here: would it be possible for you to look into the group DM handling? We run plenty of group DMs at work, and I have two problems with them: one, they tend to randomly disappear from the sidebar, and two, there seems to be no way to start a group DM from Ripcord.

Also, again, thank you for your hard work.

I didn’t know about ripcord until it was mentioned here and I’m about to pull out my credit card to buy a license just so that I might have an option for a slack client that’s not slack.

Closed source is a bit of a downer, but FWIW, I did some preliminary inspection with GlassWire; Ripcord seems to stay true to its word: no telemetry.

Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.

Lets' talk about search and history. How about synchronised history and search across devices? Mobile? Available to new clients that just connected?

At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).

> Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.

You can't judge a protocol by the subset of UI features supported by all of its clients. That's unfair to all open protocols.

If you want to talk about UI, you should evaluate each client independently.

> At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).

Except IRCCloud still uses the open protocol, so it's easier for users to switch to a different client. (Which, hopefully, is also an insentive for IRCCloud to not fuck up things too much in the future.)

That's the main reason IRC and XMPP more-or-less lost the chat wars (and they lost the mobile specifically due to protocols).

1. If you are logged out you miss the history of conversations

2. Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.

I communicated via IRC with a lot of non-technical people in the '90s and 2000s. Most people just used mIRC and connected to the default IRC server and went from there.

It's not just non-technical people who expect good UX.

Some photos, docs, code snippets? Most companies do use those features to some extent, but it should be fairly ephemeral. If you're using pinned messages as a WIKI, then you are really using the tool incorrectly.

Channels and memberships? If you made all of my company's channels disappear tomorrow, you'd be doing us a favor. We'd re-create the ones that matter within a few hours, and the other 90% didn't really need to exist anyway.

The only really true "sticky" part of Slack are webhook integrations. Some companies really do setup some degree of workflow automation around those things. But most of the time, it's just bot-spam. The CEO wants everyone to belong to a #wins channel, which gets a spam alert whenever a sales guy qualifies a lead, etc.

In many cases, all of it.

Data retention laws require many companies retain copies of certain types of internal company communications for extended time periods. This is why some companies have policies that discussions about topics such as company finances or government contracts have to be done via more easily archived channels. But if your company doesn't have those policies and you just use Slack for everything, then everything in Slack has to be retained on the off chance that someone discussed an upcoming earnings report in your company Slack.

... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.