Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.
Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke.
Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCCloud, but (a) it costs money for individuals (b) it's frankly not as good, UX-wise. Hence not as popular.
Why is that so hard for people to understand?
This happens over and over again.
- Google wasn't the first search engine. - Facebook wasn't the first social network. - Microsoft didn't build the first operating system.
They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts of users.
Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works.
To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in beautiful, easy to use package. Slack is the iPhone in its area.
No, Netscape/Mozilla didn't need to "own" HTTP and HTML completely, and turn the Web into a giant App Store in order to innovate in the Browser client, neither did Google, Apple, or MS. At various points, proprietary extensions were tried, and either failed, or got standardized when they became popular or proven their need.
All Praise to Slack's UI, I love all the flourishes, like auto-detection of paste of code bits and offering to create snippets. I get it, I really do.
I just don't think we need another messaging platform owned by a single company.
Unfortunately it's not in the best interest of anyone capable of engineering open/distributed platforms to actually do so. Why would they? It's way easier and more profitable to create something on your own terms, something you can control. I would risk that it's better for the customer.
People are flocking from WordPress to SquareSpace, from self hosted SMTP servers to Google, from private hosting to cloud hosting.
Is this a good thing in the long term? I don't think so either, but doing it any other way would be heroism and we are short on heroes.
For example if it was a rich client based on IRC, I could join in on a chat without being a slack customer. I could also be a customer of a competitor that would offer something similar, but more tailored to my usage. Now that would move the chat ecosystem further.
But that is not happening, because Slack's business model is hegemonic: they want everyone to use Slack to maximize profits.
If the protocol were to be upgraded then one would have to wait for all of the vendors to support the new features or we would end up working with the common denominator. Real world examples are hardly scarce, we see this thing in the open web with myriad (semi-) proprietary extensions. Samsung has also hard time getting developer support for their unique features.
In the end, the end users would suffer because of inconsistencies. Open platforms are good, but in my opinion they will always lag in user experience behind well executed proprietary solutions.
Once Slack is installed and the norm, you lose some choice. You're prisoner of the way they want chat to be.
I'm sure glad Firefox exists, because otherwise I'd have to hop in the Chrome bandgwagon and sell my data and habits to Google without a choice. The competition there goes further of course, as Mozilla upholds different values, and competing teams try to make their products faster and better.
And then, they fall. Look how Microsoft used to sell a product but now capitalizes on users' data. What will happen when Slack falls? What if I don't want my chat data hosted by some company, but in house, and my business partners use Slack? Where will the choices go?
If Slack falls then, well, we'll pay the price of migration, but seeing as it is a tool for ephemeral conversations I see it as less of a problem as migrating e.g. my e-mail.
UI is absolutely important to getting users on to a platform It's also a totally distinct issue from the network used for communication. There's no reason we can't have a good UX with an open protocol too, and that's what was being talked about.
We could have a rich ecosystem of competing chat clients over a distributed messaging bus, it's just that there's no economic viability in it.
If SMTP were re-invented today, it would never be open and federated.
Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.
What's sad is that's so true. I overheard the other day my 13 year old niece saying she didn't like a certain girl hanging out with them anymore, because she's the only one "with green chat bubble".
Yes. They excluded a girl from their group, because she didn't have a blue chat bubble. (Essentially an iPhone).
Slack could still have an awesome UX and be open, people would use it out of choice because it has the best UX.
We hope that a Matrix-enabled client (https://vector.im is looking promising) will get the UI/UX right - and thus actually offer an open and free solution where you can run your own server (should you choose) and own and control your own data!
My biggest issue with Matrix still has to do with its privacy properties though. Homeservers simply know too much about their users. End to end encryption from clients to homeservers appears to be optional in Matrix (and even with e2e encryption, metadata will still be fully exposed to homeservers), and message histories are stored in plaintext at rest.
Now, this probably won't be a huge problem in the ideal scenario where the Matrix network would be composed of a large number of small independent homeservers, but history has shown that decentralized systems that aren't fully decentralized tend to eventually converge towards centralization as it becomes more popular (just look at what happened to email). And in a world where Google, Facebook and Microsoft's homeservers might eventually have a combined market share of over 90%, the privacy aspects of Matrix leave a lot to be desired.
As the surveillance engine grows, those of us who have gone through the pains of open-sourcing our workflows will be way ahead of everyone else... but I fear we aren't addressing this main issue which is ease of use/adoption for general user cases.
And no, giving me an API does not make it open.
Short story; we need better FOSS UI/UX.
There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples.
And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere.
AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes.
You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.
My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous".
Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy?
It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)
Where is this unicorn proprietary platform that is run by trustworthy company?
The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time.
If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots.
I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
ps. your https://actor.im/platform page 404s
Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.
> but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable.
No it is not. Look at the top right and type your words. If you use free plan, only 10k message will be archived, other than that it will be deleted.[1]
> Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.
Its a tool for direct communication for group, not for documentation. I think you miss a hammer for screwdriver.
How do I find the answer to a question that was posted two months ago, for an open source project that is not paying to keep more than 10K messages?
History vanishes with Slack. I get why this is very cool for internal communication. I just question the use of Slack for open source community driven projects.
Don't say "it'll never happen"...
Chat and ChatOps aren't going anywhere, and Slack already has a gaggle of nascent competitors, both commercial and OSS.
If you build on Facebook or Twitter and they tell you to pound sand, it's game over. If Slack does the same, you can add support for everyone else - if you haven't already.
You aren't building a "Slack app," you're building a chat app which happens to support the Slack API. Huge difference.
As a startup founder – chatlio.com – betting on the Slack "platform" I have to say that it feels pretty great to know that they are not planning on cutting us off tomorrow morning... :) Might happen anyway of course, but this announcement means we can work somewhat more serenely for a while longer. I see this as a kind of "stability pledge" to third party dev shops.
This is an "apples and battleships" comparison.
Nope, it has value because it can be used by people who aren't massive nerds.