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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that Slack has been so successful, considering how so many other alternatives exist.

I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.

It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.

I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.

I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

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> I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client

IRC isn't a credible alternative for most users in 2017. It stagnated ages ago, which is obvious from problems like the fact that you can't even write a multi-line message.

My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.

Personally, I'm trying to solve the problem of open source projects increasingly moving to Slack by working on Zulip, the leading open source alternative to Slack by contributor activity. Here's our story for why one should prefer Zulip to Slack for fellow open source projects (written a few days ago; feedback welcome!): https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/

> My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.

I disagree about the decent competitors -- there is e.g. Flowdock which in many ways (such as proper threading) is still better than Slack, and was doubly so back then. I think it's more about access to VC money and network effects, and indeed the successful marketing you mentioned.

It's funny, we were early (?) adopters of Flowdock, back in about 2012, on one particular project. We used it fairly happily for a year or so, and then just sort of forgot all about it and drifted back to Skype (I think with a brief flirtation with Hipchat whilst we were doing something Atlassian-centric), probably because Skype was free and Flowdock wasn't. In around 2014 suddenly everybody started using Slack, and I found myself wondering how, really, it was much of an improvement over Flowdock and why it gained massive traction. (I suspect marketing and the fact that Slack is effectively free for many types of teams.)

Now that you mentioned it, Slack being free was probably a huge factor indeed. Flowdock should have adopted some kind of a free tier for tiny teams too to stay competitive.

Slack being free plus ease of use for non technical folks is why we adopted slack.

Flowdock is free for teams of 5 of less, and for teams comprised of students.

Flowdock was a more opinionated service and that was IMO to it's detriment. It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication around social media.

Slack took the simplicity of IRC and gave it a modern interface with things like showing a preview when you link. easily share files etc.

> It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication around social media.

What makes you think that? I don't see any connection between Flowdock and social media. As far as I can see, it's purely an internal communication tool with easy file sharing, hooks for external services as GitHub, and so on.

As far as I remember it started as that. But maybe that's not accurate. I just remember them pushing how twitter could be monitored and then important tweets could be send around the organization to deal with them.

That feature is a flow (or channel) specific "inbox". You can add different sources such as e-mail, GitHub pushes, CI results, or the Twitter you mentioned. Basically looks like an in-channel RSS feed of different sources. Personally I love the feature.

A neat thing is that you can start a discussion thread from any of these items, so the context of the discussion is clear.

Oh I like FlowDock a lot was just trying to explain how I believe Slack won over it by being less opinionated about how it approaches conversation. It's IRC core functionality and then apps on top for specific needs.

Flowdock went a little further ahead when it came to how they constructed the base communication.

Flowdock has great ambitions, but it was hard to wrap your head around it. Slack came in with an unapologetic focus on chat, which helped anchor it in people's minds. They certainly want to be and do more than chat, but using that frame of reference really helped them.

A little marketing feedback: could a screenshot or two be put on the main home page? Or is it still just early days on the project?

Leading is a stretch, I've seen way more Mattermost and Rocket.Chat installations these past few months.

Mattermost is OSish, but Rocket.Chat seems to be a much more modern/UX friendly version compared to Zulip and fits the bill with FOSS.

This is interesting to me. I've used it at the last three companies ranging from 15 people to 1700 people. No issues really. Considering how often HipChat went down prior to Slack, Slack is a welcomed replacement.

As for alternatives, I don't really know if many do exist. Slack offers their free version, which allows teams to use it pretty much without any strings to see if they like it. It provides great functionality in a simple UI (you may disagree, that's totally fine), and solves a problem - Office Communication.

It has been a productivity increase for the teams I've been on as it is much, much better than email chains, easier to add code snippets, images, and the fairly rich ecosystem of plugins/bots is icing on the cake for me.

The other day it took me an hour to wire up a couple endpoints in Node, add them as slack slash commands and boom, I was able to add three commands for QA department that resolved some heartburn for them.

I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.

> I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.

I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high.

I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.

One of the companies I used HipChat at before they switched to Slack and the only reason they ended up switching was there was a 4 week period where HipChat kept going down so one of the engineers setup a free slack room. It got used often in lieu of HipChat as it never went down.

I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.

I've used Mattermost in the past and found it worked quite well. I don't know if it has the same number of integrations Slack does, but as a chat-room/text-communication tool it works well enough. It's also open-source and self-hosted. Perhaps I don't understand enough about how Slack works, but it seems like a huge security risk to me to couple (potentially) sensitive content (chat, e-mails, etc) with a hosted service.

https://about.mattermost.com/

Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention! Yes, we see many enterprises moving to open source, private cloud solutions. One recent example: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to...

> I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens.

Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road.

[1]: http://matrix.org/

[2]: https://about.riot.im/

There is also Mattermost. An open source Slack.

And rocket.chat

We recently did a test run for Mattermost to see if it's a better fit for us than Slack.

This is a note to others who may be considering the same. Specific needs will vary greatly across teams/companies.

We found Mattermost web client to be ok, however phone apps and integration coverage are both poor by comparison to Slack. We also found running, securing, and maintaining our own server to be roughly as or more expensive than using Slack.

I'm hopeful the Mattermost project keeps momentum to improve. Currently though it doesn't quite seem in the same league.

Might still be a good alternative to companies that want Slack, but cannot afford to pay for it? (Assuming they're not finding what they need in the free version.)

Or that don't want third parties to have access to their internal communications.

This is an important point. It surprises me that many non-US companies use slack for their internal and secret communication.

We found Mattermost to be more expensive than a paid version of Slack for our team of 16 after factoring in the costs of hosting, maintaining, and securing our own servers. It shifts the engineering cost burden onto your team.

As others point out, Mattermost vs. Slack is more a discussion of self-hosted vs. 3rd party cloud-hosted.

I found the same. However the newest version (4.0) has proper mobiles apps done with React Native I think, which are a league above the older ones.

This will likely always be the case with open source chat solutions.

Developing clients is hard. Especially good UIx and complex feature sets across a zillion platforms like Slack does. A lot of their day I bet these days is simply tracking down obscure bugs on certain platform combinations and trying to keep feature parity between everything working properly. I think most of us can stipulate Slack does a decent job there - or at minimum is far better than the competing (open) solutions.

I really wish there was a Slack alternative where I could purchase a really nice unified frontend and simply connect to an open protocol backend such as IRC or Jabber or whatever. This was the original intent behind IRC as well - back in the 90's there were a number of shareware style IRC clients developed for Windows - and you saw some interesting protocol hackery to make some more graphical features work.

I have yet to see open source really truly compete in the "client" arena, save for an exceedingly few notable exceptions. However, it excels at the backend where you will have developer interest and competence - and the long tail of possible bugs (and user competence) is a much more sane problem to tackle.

No, I do not expect this to ever exist for obvious reasons :)

Mattermost team here,

There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)

Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).

Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/

Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.

That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.

Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention, the feedback and the well wishes!

Yes, we needed better mobile apps, and new ones are here (React Native in iOS and Android with full source code): http://bit.ly/2w33V3D

Huge thanks to over 2000 beta testers that helped vet the apps along with all the community contributors.

We've also recently added a directory for making it easier to find integrations: https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/

Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.

Matrix is really wonderful and I hope it will continue to grow. It's federated, like IRC and unlike Slack. Also there's good support for bridges to other chat protocols / services, so matrix may be the solution to _reducing_ the number of chat clients you need to interact with.

"Just works" is a relative term - I use both slack and irc at work, and it took about 2 minutes to get slack running and start using it intuitively on day one. Getting into irc was a much longer process that involved researching different clients, trying to figure out why my server credentials weren't working, and realizing that they were correct the whole time after doing a reboot, then learning how to join and discover channels, filter out noise, etc etc and I still get very little use out of it. It's just for server alerts now, mostly. Every other conversation has moved to slack.

> Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

Slack has an IRC gateway. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

We tried using that, and quite frankly it's horrible.

Its horribleness is the horribleness of IRC itself though. The gateway preserves all the parts of Slack that you can do on IRC - it just turns out that's not actually so much of it.

Can you elaborate why/whats horrible?

Slack (and clones) allows multiline messages with some light markdown formatting, bold, italic, monospace inline, monospace block, quote block. Technical and non technical people can use it. Some non technical people may even learn some basic formatting.

IRC doesn't do all that, especially multiline messages.

Also, Slack has an IRC gateway.

I don't understand how a multiline message in the Slack interface is any different from two single line messages. If the issue is you just want to type them at once and have them sent in one go, I agree with you, but clients for IRC definitely have had that feature. IRC also supports formatting like bold and italic: if you want the interface for that to be markdown, that sounds like a trivial addition to any standard IRC client.

But everyone in the team would have to set up their client. Not everyone would want to setup their client the same way (understandably). And not everyone is interested enough in setting up an IRC client, especially the "not technical enough people".

IRC –the protocol– isn't made for that. IRC clients can, but don't.

IRC has never been very usable, and some combination of its userbase or its very nature resists all efforts to make it more usable. You can't get history in any kind of standardised way (the workaround, such as it is, is to run a bouncer program somewhere you have a unix shell account and hope that host stays up), the multi-client experience is dreadful, rich-text support is barely there and forget about links, embedded images, or file uploads, authentication is not at all standardised and differs a lot from server to server.

> IRC has never been very usable

Despite all the problems you mentioned, it is still extremely usable. There are tens of thousands of users using it for decades.

IRC offered a unique featureset for many years - nothing else offered the same global scale and large-group-oriented chats. People will put up with very poor usability if it's the only product with a feature they need.

Yes, large distributed groups where people can drop in/drop out is IRC's niche, and why it will never die. I prefer IRC for large open-source projects to Slack, but the usability is awful for a company environment. At my school, we use Slack for research groups, study groups, and student project teams, and it's excellent for that.

I'm not convinced IRC will never die; for a while it was the only thing that covered that use case, but these days there are other options (e.g. Discord).

> I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works

I agree that Slack is pretty painful - the Linux client may as well be unsupported.

But it's still a hell of a lot better than when everyone in my office had to run their own ZNC bouncer.

I've been using the Linux client pretty much since its initial release and it's been nothing short of perfect for me. No problems with updates either. What problems do you have?

I used to get random crashes when I ran it on Ubuntu. This was over a year ago, so things might have changed.

Unfortunately they haven't. We recently moved away from slack because it's just too buggy using the desktop clients and nobody wants to have to keep it open in a browser the whole time.

My two specific problems: I have an unresolved bug report open with them regarding failing to clear notifications, and the Linux client is the only of the 3 desktop clients that doesn't allow you to switch off the notifications dot, which is a super basic feature.

> I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client

Yep, and IRC and its plethora of clients are totally bug-free /s

IRC netsplits alone are far more annoying than any slack bug I've encountered.

> It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created.

You definitely can log out of a team in the OS X app (e.g. right click the team icon, click "remove" or go to the team dropdown and sign out). Or if you want to actually deactivate your account, there's a link (somewhere) in the app that opens your browser where you deactivate your account.

> the password reset procedure is quite clunky.

Not in my experience. You don't even have to reset your password. You can have slack email you a magic link as a method of logging in. Open your email, click the magic link, and you're logged in.

> Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC

How? Slack has an IRC gateway, but IRC doesn't have standardized ways of even sharing files (everything I'm aware of is client based). So how do you implement Slack's feature-set (even ignoring video/voice calls) over IRC without requiring everyone to use a special client?

The thing is though is that it would be quite difficult to run Slack over IRC with feature parity. The basics are easy like channels and users, but venturing into private channels, group-DMs, custom emojis, (video) calling/screen sharing, status emoji/message, would all require so much custom work on top that the service wouldn't be fully usable over an IRC client apart from Slack's.

IRC had a lot of these but they required clients to agree on the direct connect protocol. But the core statements you're making still hold. It's a lot of work and Slack had done a solid job. It also acts as a repository in the way no IRC server ever did. The closest that irc came was irc bouncers that maintained persistence and logging.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-to-client_protocol

And

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client

It also acts as a repository in the way no IRC server ever did. The closest that irc came was irc bouncers that maintained persistence and logging.

Yep. Some people at work are super resistant to using slack and prefer IRC, even though slack will make their lives easier. And I get that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, but I can't help but shake my head at the people managing these IRC bouncers at work. Like they'd rather die managing these cloud VMs running ZNC than ever use slack. Those bouncers are likely to be poorly-secured. They can see nothing when ZNC dies and the external servers don't play well with the corporate firewall (literally, people send IRC traffic through ports 80 or 443 because they can't get through the firewall otherwise).

And don't get me started on teams running bots in order to get github/jira/ci/etc integration with IRC. It's just insanity. Just use slack and its dead simple, no-bots-required webhooks/apps. Quit wasting the company's time standing up all this additional infrastructure because you're too stubborn to switch to a better chat client.

>but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC

I wish popular Slack alternatives would support each others protocols, even if the support was not perfect.

It feels that alternatives like Rocket.chat and Mattermost are still way too closed. I'm not sure if the dev teams are interested in supporting multiple protocols though, as it might be too much work for something that will keep breaking.

I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

They do have an IRC gateway, although it has to be enabled by your team: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

A year later and the iOS app for HipChat still fucks up notifications. With competition like that, how hard do you have to try?

>> "popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works"

I used to use IRC a lot when I was working on the Openstack project and do not agree with this part.

You can definitely log out of a team from the OS X app (disconnect it from your OS X app).

Sorry you had so many problems with the OSX app. I can't really say the same. We've been mainly working with slack in our company and most of us use it on a MacBook Air, everything working absolutely fine.

exactly what went through my head before the page loaded. yea how..

> I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC

No offense, but the IRC user interface is REALLY lousy. I've been around the block, and I hate going into IRC.

In addition, I wish people would bring back mailing lists. No, Google Groups is not a good substitute.

IRC doesn't have a user interface, it's a protocol. The interface varies based on which client you are using. One can make an IRC client that looks like slack.

No, it can't. No multiline messages, no threading (a lot of people want it, though personally I think it's a terrible idea), no embedding images.

IRC is Not Good.

Image embedding depends on the client you use really. For example The Lounge [1] can display information about links and show image previews like Slack does.

[1] https://thelounge.github.io/

That's very different. In Slack, I, as the poster, can decide whether to show a preview (it might be pointless and take up space), and add metadata to it. It's also searchable by _anyone_ in the chat history. The uniformity of these features matters, and you need protocol support for that.

>I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.

That's strange, cause we have been heavily using it for 2 years at a team of 100+ and have yet to find any bug to write home about, and basically nothing affecting day to day use (mostly OS X clients).

>It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.

While no doubt there are bugs, those all seem like corner cases.

"un-join" a team works fine when the admins un-join you, for example, which is more likely in a business use case.

I also don't think "updates frequently force a logout" even qualifies as a bug. Heck, OS X and Windows updates force a full reboot.

And how often does one "partially creates" a team they have to remove? Even if that's a bona fide bug, it's still quite a corner case. I've seen worse bugs in XCode or Photoshop, and those are on their nth decade of existence...

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