Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic.
Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it.
As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and over.
Couple this with the fact that channels are not indexed by Google and you get a black box where valuable Q&A content and discussion goes to die.
I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity.
Just use IRC. It's practically impossible to avoid Slack at any startup now, but I'd love to be able to avoid it in FOSS.
I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord.
I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike Slack's. It's fast. The voice quality is superb.
As far as productivity goes, I get far more done with it than I ever did with IRC. The addition of being able to hop on voice very quickly is insanely good. Screensharing and video chat coming this year as well, I'm pretty excited.
It's to the point that I bought Discord Nitro (their premium offering) the day it was released, for no other reason than to give them money.
I hope the question of protocol openness gets resolved; until then, IRC just doesn't cut it for me anymore. IRCCloud.com helps, but their interface is super slow with lots of channels and IRC itself simply has no support for the thousands of improvements that have been made in communications the past 30-something years.
Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.
Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever.
Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/
They're marketed towards casual users but Discord is probably the best chat and collaboration software I've used so far. I definitely prefer it to Slack for professional-type stuff.
You can use Discord any want you want. If you join some popular Discord server, odds are it'll be full of spam and Internet humor, but obviously you can do whatever like on your own server(s).
I like Discord a lot, it's far and away better than TeamSpeak and Vent. It's also better than Slack for private group conversations. But it is still a closed system owned by a for profit company.
I agree with your concerns of open source projects using slack, but:
> I'd be forced to use their awful client
Who forces you ? You can use slack on the web can't you ? You don't need to have yet another browser engine running on you computer.
> Just use IRC.
Please don't … IRC is the opposite of user friendly: it has no good web interface so the casual user won't come in because he doesn't want to install and learn a new software (IRC client). But slack isn't the only option here, it's not even the best open by far, Gitter[1], Mattermost[2] and Discord[3] are alternatives to IRC which aren't Slack.
> Who forces you ? You can use slack on the web can't you
Slack's web client is still slow. Their "native" client is just a Chrome wrapper over their web app, with some glue code to hook up notifications.
> it has no good web interface so the casual user won't come in
https://webchat.freenode.net works fine. If you need or want help with a project and can't be asked to spend a few moments opening up an IRC client (native or web), then I don't know what to tell you.
> Gitter, Mattermost, and Discord
Gitter and Discord are both closed source, proprietary systems made by companies who want to make money. Open source projects shouldn't rely on them if possible.
Mattermost is OK, but requires running your own server. IRC is free, and there are public servers specifically made for open source projects.
The consensus on our team (40% macos/60% linux) that the Slack client is too slow. Usability around search can be improved as well. To the extent that we've started looking at alternatives.
We use Windows and have found that version of the client. to hang sporadically at least once a day. Pretty frustrating, i've just given up on it and solely use the web app
The client might be a legitimate issue, but being an information black-hole is no different than IRC. If you wanted a history, you should have made your client or a bot log that history.
If IRC was as simple and elegant and extensible as some would suggest, there wouldn't be a posse of persistent chat companies worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
IRC is simple enough for developers of and those using open source projects. Slack and their ilk have more of a place handling internal communications where non-technical people need to be involved.
Because codifying, organizing, and keeping up-to-date general knowledge on a wiki is hard work, whereas banging out a quick answer to a specific question on slack is comparatively easy.
Which maybe should be a challenge to anybody looking to build the next generation of knowledge repositories.
Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.
Honestly, I'd expect these "public" Slack groups of FOSS projects to have search-engine-accessible archives, just like Usenet and mailing lists do through Google Groups. Why do I need to know what Slack even is, to be able to find+read the answer someone gave someone else to a question over Slack?
Every chat app I've ever used going back to ICQ keeps permanent logs, except for Slack. (Technically Slack does too, it just keeps them on its own server and won't let you look unless you pay.)
Actually no: you can look all you like without paying, it's just kind of clumsy. If you "export your data from Slack" (yourteam.slack.com/services/export), you get the whole history, even on the free plan.
I've repeatedly considered writing a bot that would—on a regular schedule—poke this page with a headless browser to generate a dump, download said dump, and ingest it into ElasticSearch (which I'd then expose through a web search, or maybe just spit out batched archive pages into a static-site S3 bucket and let Google index them.) Such a bot would be a good companion to https://github.com/rauchg/slackin for FOSS teams.
But I haven't done any of that yet, because I get the feeling that putting enough attention on this little "feature" would get it quickly locked down.
It's also problematic in that it chisels away at what it means for a project to be open source. The focus seems to be purely on the software licence, and increasingly less about the wider project tooling.
GitHub and Slack provide a huge amount of utility. But they also feel hollow to me. It feels harder and harder to opt-out of using closed tools.
The 2 links for UI/UX comparison ... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500046858...https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Searching... ... I think on Discord it is based on the context of what the secondary thing is you are doing outside of chat (gaming - it will show you what game the others are playing - or any app based on file process - which is pretty slick) and on Slack it will be primarily thinking you are at work so it's all about quicker access to files/presentations/etc.
IRC isn't that hard. Just register a channel on freenode (which exists for the purpose of facilitating open source!), there's already a web interface [1]. You can stick a nice link on your project's webpage. It's even less work for users than Slack, you don't have to register, just punch in a nickname.
Someone in your project can manage to setup a logbot that dumps logs onto a webserver, which will be indexed by google. I suspect there are services that will do it for you, so you might not even have to setup the bot yourself. If there isn't one I'd have half a mind to build one, if it gets more projects using IRC.
I have experienced this as well with the Chef Community Slack channel. It is a wonderful resource and it's super convenient to have easy access from my phone, etc but there is so much useful information in there that won't be accessible by others in the future.
Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it.
As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and over.
Couple this with the fact that channels are not indexed by Google and you get a black box where valuable Q&A content and discussion goes to die.