Comment by jacobgold
7 hours ago
The fundamental problem with replacing Slack is network effects. Your coworkers and customers already use Slack. It works well enough.
You can choose to switch your company away, maybe, but what do you do when vendors want to connect over Slack?
Imagine if email was owned by a company?
Edit:
W̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶u̶i̶l̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶.̶
We really need an open protocol to win here.
There is an audience for this, and it's me and my friends.
I have a small group of close friends. We are on discord just about every day, but we really don't bother with anyone outside our group, other than the very occasional invitation to another friend/coworker to join for some games.
We don't care about network effect, social media features, engagement, etc. We just want a well made application for private text, voice, and video that we never have to actually think about.
And no, matrix is not that.
But the point here is that you don't want the network effects. You want a chat server for people you know and explicitly invite, for a specific purpose, under your control. Maybe you want the data to never leave your colocated box and your VPN, and your server to have no public presence at all.
There are things that Slack cannot easily offer.
No, you do want the network effects. Nobody wants to install yet another special snowflake chat client for a single community. Unless they are being forced to (like in a work environment) or are getting significant benefits out of joining that community, most people would just prefer not joining at all over installing an additional client.
Discord is winning because it's a dozen different communities in one single convenient client. Want your new chat platform to win? Convince all those communities to switch.
You want the open protocol to have network effects, not a proprietary company's product.
Email worked out pretty well, while IRC failed for reasons that are probably correctable.
Open protocols are great. The software in question is OSS.
But this software is not for expanding the audience, it's for limiting it, and their exposure. Much like Tailscale is not for extending your network with more nodes that can freely join, but for limiting it to a private subset you trust.
1 reply →
Isn't this irc?
Just need a client app to make it look like something else.
Like slack did.
Like XMPP?
Or, perhaps the asynch chat thing is a distraction and we need something asynchronous that's well proven. Like... email?
Slack should never have been a thing IMHO. I remember first using it at a startup I was CTO of at the behest of the CEO ("everyone is using it"), back in around 2013. Instantly hated it. Just wish we could go back to good old email, TBH.
> Or, perhaps the asynch chat thing is a distraction and we need something asynchronous that's well proven. Like... email?
Real-time chat is, in fact, useful, and a separate product from email. The fact that you don't want to use it does not change the fact that others do.
I use Zulip and Signal extensively, and I use email occasionally, and none of them fully replace the use cases of the others.
> We really need an open protocol to build on.
I’d bet making a slack-compatible client or bridge isn’t hard, we all just instinctively know whoever develops it is going to get sued or taken down.
It feels like we quietly gave up on adversarial interoperability awhile ago, and act like we need a whole separate “open walled garden” when what we actually need are legal protections that prevent companies from suing/banning people who call their APIs. Slack, Facebook, etc, are walled gardens only because they can ban/sue people who compete with their client experience.
I figure that will probably never happen in the US (maybe if someone rich starts it), but eventually someone outside of it will make such an adversarial integration and host it from some region that doesn’t care about US laws. Then, when they get away with it, we’ll all praise them as a genius and wonder how Slack could exist at all. The US has many international agreements keeping this illusion alive, but my guess is that even formerly stable markets like Europe could spawn such work if they decide to stop caring about ~1990s-2010s era contempt-of-business-model US laws.
Matrix exists. I wrote this for my own notes: https://docs.zeropolis.net/doku.php/tech:tuwunel
Self hosted voice/video/chatroom server with RBAC, federation capabilities and encryption.
Different topic, who uses federated slack?
I don't think network effects affect the vast majority of Slack usage. Slack and Teams are mostly used as internal company communication and that is dictated from above. If a company wants to switch to Chatto their IT department will just tell all employees to do that, and job done.
Matrix seems like a decent enough open protocol for a Slack replacement, with XMPP/IRC/IRCv3 being more useful for bare-bones chat transport.
This Chatto thing unfortunately uses a Protobuf custom API and is explicitly anti-compatibility with other systems. The lack of interoperability may end up killing it, unless the experience is much better than everything else.
I think time will tell, but one of the main things I like about Chatto is just how fast everything feels, and the protocol design is a good part of that I think. Data on the wire is just very small and optimized (last I checked, I didn't look at the latest protocol iteration yet). It was already very fast with the older GraphQL based API but now it's even quicker. With Slack and Discord, every channel switch and scrolls take visible time.
Oh, and the protobuf based realtime endpoint should make it very easy to build bridges, too.
XMPP exists…