Comment by tbingmann
11 years ago
Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.
Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.
Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company.
I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.
Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, but we don't want to use a public server), where I can get commercial support, if there's a nice client (like irccloud is) for mobiles - there's a long list, unfortunately.
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That sounds like a problem with the company. I can understand Slack and Hangouts (at least until Slack adds voice chat), but all that other stuff sounds like poor organization on the company's part.
What I posted in another thread still stands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256943. Things were better when everything was brought under one client. I know iMessage is almost impossible to reverse-engineer (due to Apple kicking non-iClients off) but I wish there was more effort going into reversing Hangouts. Someone's emulated the JS client from GMail but that's about as far as it's got
IRC's lack of scrollback alone kills it for these considerations, unfortunately. If there's an incident or discussion in progress and you only join the room partway through you have no way of catching up to speed.
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you wish everyone would use the worse option?
They were on their way out as some services were federating via XMPP. Then some stopped supporting it.
Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support.
All these problems are fixable but I don't see the tide ever actually changing direction and "hey suddenly XMPP is cool again, we should all use it".
One thing is for certain... humanity needs standard, open and widely-used protocols for communication. And there's a lot of ground to cover: Text, audio, video; single and multiuser; topical (IRC-like); social (invite-based/people I know); Synchronous (IM) and asynchronous (email/offline messaging)...
XMPP tried to do a lot of that. Maybe it tried to do too much. Maybe you just can't do all that in one protocol. I don't know, I just hope we'll get there soon - if nothing else, I'm tired of maintaining those "best way to reach me" charts JoshM33k is talking about.
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I did some research on XMPP interop and its demise (ignore the title) - https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...
At some point it did fade a bit. About 2-3 years ago enough people were using XMPP/Gtalk so that I could reach about 80% of my acquaintances thought it.
Now, there's no single network that holds over 25% of them. Except facebook, but most of them don't actively use facebook every day, nor pay attention to it's IM.
Best ask them first via email.
I don't even know my girlfriend's email address. I'm 30, and she's only a few years younger. The world is strange now.
I miss Google Wave. Not the messy implementation, but the promise of a big influential company throwing its weight behind a modern, open communication protocol.
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It would be nice if the iOS and Android built-in Contacts apps had better support/integration for all the various messaging apps that work on their respective platforms. Rather than trying to remember who uses which services, their contact card could simply contain the entire roster of their services and usernames, and you could initiate a conversation in that service from within the contact card. I know you can do this with the baked in messaging services for each platform (SMS/MMS and iMessage for iOS, SMS/MMS and Hangouts for Android), but I'm talking about a one-stop-contacts-shop for every major messaging platform. Maybe that would require too much cooperation between messaging app authors and the big OS vendors, but I think it would be possible.
An alternative solution would be a cross platform third party Contacts app that offers that kind of integration. I've seen multi-messenger apps (Trillian, IM+) for both platforms, but that's not quite the same thing and it inevitably leaves out important functionality from the official apps.
That they don't on Android is due to the app, not the platform - if the client adds contact integration, it gets listed in the contact's card. Lync, of all things, is a good example of this. I'm pretty sure Skype does too.
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>more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers
utter nonsense.
Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.
This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.
What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015.
[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...
>This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC
There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do.
>and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.
Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).
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The problem is not just the open vs closed source. Even if Google, Yahoo, Slack all open source their products. You'd still not be able to send messages from one to another unless they also federate at the protocol level.
So you can be connected with a universal "messaging" client to any of the available servers then send messages to someone on Google, or Slack etc.
As noted in the OP, Zulip is not a closed-source product anymore. But I'm not sure that really helps so much with the immediate problem, since it's more the proliferation of protocols rather than the scarcity of source that causes issues.
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We have cross-organization Slack users in our company slack channels and I also have multiple 'organizations', so fragmentation is sometimes an issue.
Yep, we have a channel for developers that integrate with our product instead of having them email us. It's pretty efficient, but the fragmentation risk is there.
Strangeloop (the programming conference) is using a slack, as we speak. it's more than teams :)
What annoys me about stuff like Slack is that it's misused. It's made for small teams but I've been 10k people open source projects use it instead of IRC. Of course, it was laggy and they eventually couldn't afford it.
Obfuscating usernames with real names and no ignore are also massive downsides.
Fyi, you can fix the usernames issue in Preferences > Message Display > Message Options.
That was the biggest annoyance I experienced at companies that based their communications around IM clients like AIM or Gtalk. My previous company switched to HipChat at some point and everyone showing up as their real name instead of some stupid username was a surprisingly huge improvement.
And none of them manage to replicate even the most basic of IRC's network solutions in regards to user count scaling and server network combination.
And backlog/offline message functionality is available by turning on logging and using a ZNC proxy. My "buddy list" is just a bunch of direct message channels that I keep open.
But this is about social norms, not technology. Hear the phrase "remote workers...tap lightly on the shoulder".
We have had thousands of years to work out our nuances over interruptions and social signals when around the same campfire.
But suddenly (and from the past 20-30 years suddenly) we have phone conferences where half the conversation is "no, sorry, you go ahead" and email going from killer app to no longer being a way to get a reply in ten minutes but two days because the signal to noise ratio hit a tipping point somewhere around 2006. (No it's not spam, that's mostly a done problem. It's co-worker spam that's clogging our minds of not our inboxes)
So the differences between Zulip and Twitter and Slack and IRC and Microsoft bloody communicator why does it not know about tabs ffs! (Sorry). The difference with all of these is not their technology - it's pretty much the same all the time - but their social utility.
One day some comms package will get it all together (I think there is too little context to get it right yet) and we will all go"of course".
Until then we will try each different social choices baked into the code - rooms or tags or whatever. Maybe the next step is to have rooms for something, open cry for others.
Who knows - maybe we should look at pubs bars, libraries and streets for inspiration.
Whatever it is - Zulip is not the right solution nor is it the best - it is one more random mutation in the evolution of remote communication.
We (https://actor.im) are actually working on this, but not trying to connect slack, but building telegram, skype, whatsapp, social networks to one, slack like interface that will help you easily manage communications from many networks.
This is not our main feature, just something like side project.
I also really dislike the idea of having to register with a phone number. I reminds me of ICQ, where I had to dig up some obscure number to log in. Except, I also lose my account permanently the moment I lose my phone.
"Mobile First"
This is the regrettable de-facto standard. I'd like to see the opposite: a network that provides native desktop clients. Telegram seems to be the only one taking this seriously up to now.
This looks cool.
FYI notifications is misspelled as "notificaitons" in the paragraph under "I don't believe in messaging. Email is better".
that would be great. what would be greater though is ensuring that actor.im cannot read the data as it transits (or easy to setup on our own local machines)
I'd pay a good bit for that!
We had e2e encryption in the past, but we decided to make one click install of your own server or may be just key infrastructure to make everything cool.
This is precisely the problem we're working on with Matrix.org - providing a standard API that can be used to bridge together all of these different protocols in one decentralised model. It's better than Trillian in that the defragmentation happens serverside and you can use any compatible client with it (or one of the existing services if you prefer). For instance, we turned on our first Matrix<->Slack bridge this week - see https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/... for how easy it was.
There have been and always will be competing products and communities that serve similar purposes. We use what we think is the best one. Is this a bad thing?
(Not to mention the fact that Slack is for internal teams, not for IRC-like discussions, though our open newsroom (http://newsroom.grasswire.com) and some other communities (http://fpchat.com) have repurposed it for that.
I think that "best tool for the job" attitude is a straw man. It seems to presuppose that "the job" is per-organisation, or even that there is one job.
In truth many of us believe that the goal is enabling everyone - universally - to communicate without a single body holding centralised control of message history, reachability and access.
Quick review of the globally federated protocols:
You forgot h.323. On the surface, it looks to me like a "saner SIP", or XMPP with working, standard audio/video support -- but I might be wrong.
I'm not sure why people claim IRC lacks archiving support. Isn't a bit like saying SMTP lacks archiving support? And doesn't basic IRC always go through a server? So there shouldn't be any technical barrier against a server archiving all chats (private and in channels)?
As for NNTP, I'm not sure if NNTP over TLS, peering with only trusted sites (aka for internal use) would make sense or not. I never did use Usenet much. At least the D language forums have made an effort to bring NNTP into the www era[d].
It's interesting that no one seems to do a decent job of (server side) archiving for XMPP -- partly I think it's because as you state, the XEPs have gotten out of hand -- and partly XMPP appears to be especially popular for users that want privacy -- and treat ephemeral chat as a feature.
[d] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
(format note, you probably should've just listed the protocols in separate paragraphs, as indented blocks with lines longer than ~50 characters doesn't format very well on hn).
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No, it presupposes that there is a defined task.
I suppose the difference between our points of view is that I would much rather have a better tool than a publicly accessible archive of message history.
Yup, it's a big shame. XMPP promised for quite a while, but then stagnated and failed to deliver what most users were expecting (mostly due to implementations, not lack of protocol features).
I've recently given up on IM, and written about it recently:
https://hugo.barrera.io/journal/2015/09/21/giving-up-on-im/
If only zulip were federated. :(
> If only zulip were federated. :(
Now that it's open source, could it be made to be federated?
It would require changes to the core of the protocol itself, and that all deployments update to a version of the app that implements those changes. Pretty hard, yet possible.
Wow, out of all the things that may have occurred to me over the last couple years of using Slack, "this feels like 1999" is definitely not one of them.
One could say that OS-level notifications could be considered a crude replacement of an aggregation tool like Trillian. We didn't have these back in the ICQ days and today it's easier (read: less painful) to listen on multiple messaging apps. Especially on mobile devices.
Amazon for a long time (maybe even today) used IRC for 1:N communication. I personally like IRC over anything else, but I am probably just too old... :)
<shameless plug>
We at sameroom.io do this in sort of backend-only way.
</shameless plug>
IRC+ZNC = backlog support, and WAY more. I don't know why you'd want anything else.
> I don't know why you'd want anything else.
Voice+video just to begin with. The ability to work on poor networks (mobile?), read notifications, delivery notifications.
+300.
You forgot Glip too.