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Comment by kzisme | Hacker News Reader

Should have just stuck with IRC :(

Except many companies (presumably including Jeff Harris') use Slack. This allows him to Slack on his machine and not create some new mandate at his work or with his clients just to message people.

I think this is fabulous ingenuity, useful fun, and the eccentricity doesn't rock any boats along the way.

Slack IS IRC... just with new clothes on. :)

Not even close. Slack regularly screws up text, harfs on things, and does generally not-IRC things. Overall Slack's interface is terrible and does not seem to have been tested by anyone who has regularly used chat interfaces in the past.

And it's a close-walled garden, not anything like what the internet elders envisaged. IRC is a protocol. Slack is a product. AFAIK, you can't spin up your own slack service and run your own private slack (happy to be corrected)

You're right. We were looking for an internal chat solution for our company. Currently we use IRC, but it would be nice to have an offline mechanism so we don't need to run IRC bouncers or CLI clients on our servers to receive messages when we're not in the office. We considered Slack, but decided it was too risky to host our internal communications on someone else's service. I'm waiting for the day Slack has a huge data breach.

We're currently considering adding some sort of backscroll support to IRC (maybe automatically setting up proxies for users), or installing Rocket Chat or HipChat on a local server.

Mattermost might fit the bill. I haven't used it, personally.

https://www.mattermost.org/features/

For those who haven't tried it, here's a video of how Eclipse Foundation uses Mattermost as an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfeNFJnCfcg

While there's not yet C64 support, Mattermost connects to IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord, Telegram and HipChat using Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge).

In terms of features, the Mattermost community has added quite a few that aren't available in Slack--markdown support, multi-team accounts, threaded messaging, etc.: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...

Mattermost deploys as a single Linux binary with MySQL or Postgres and you control everything.

One issue we had with Mattermost is that some authentication modules (e.g. OAuth) are not part of the free core. Rocket Chat does not have this issue, though the mobile app is a bit less polished.

Hi, we agree, and that's why we are about to launch brand new native apps for iOS and Android. Let me know if you'd like to join the beta testers.

Yes, with pleasure!

I haven't setup a matrix.org server (yet), but it's looking like a good next gen IRC with good bridges into IRC and other chat services.

Slack is a program created 13 years into the 21st century that does not understand either hyperlinks or WYSIWYG.

It's boggling.

The web doesn't handle WYSIWYG formatting.

Of course it does, if a programmer bothers to take the time to add it.

Slack is a glorified instant message service, and instant message clients have been handling WYSIWYG for a couple of decades now.

So you think it's fine for me to type out a nicely formatted wall of text on a desktop that mobile users have to scroll to read?

I'm thinking of the handful of formatting that Slack already supports, but only via weird markup. Text entry apps have been using Ctrl-I for italics for at least 25 years. I shouldn't have to remember whether this retrograde webapp expects me to wrap italicized text in underscores, asterisks, or slashes.

This kind of thing can also be annoying in sites like Hacker News--e.g. when I try to use an actual asterisk a couple of times and the damn thing italicizes a big random chunk of my post instead--but HN at least has the excuse of a consciously minimal interface. Slack coats itself in slick, modern UI but makes you type emphasis like it was Usenet. It shoves giant obtrusive thumbnails into the chat every time someone posts a URL, but doesn't let you make an actual hyperlink. It's minimal where it should be complex, and complex where it should be minimal.

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