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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. What about having both? Slack could by default communicate via their backend, but if the client finds peers on the local network, prefer those. When the connection to the backend dies, only use the local connections.

We can have the best of both worlds.

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While the redundancy would be nice, I can't see it being worth the effort/money for anything but the most critical of systems (which should probably be self-hosted in their entirety to begin with). If the internet (or some major swath thereof) is down, that's going to cripple a lot of businesses these days regardless.

I just don't see it being worth the extra effort of self-hosting a redundant copy of the system, and then keeping that system up to date with the latest software for security patches / features / bugfixes. Especially when the cloud version has n x 9's of uptime.

Just curious - does Slack offer SLAs? To many businesses, especially remote businesses, Slack is becoming more and more integral to day-to-day operations.

Yes, they do on their Plus plan

>If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the period Slack was down.

Source: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-plan...

Except if you check, Slack claims 100% up time over the past 30 days.

I don't get why people think an sla is any benefit whatsoever hosting or software services are generally so cheap, any refunds are completely superfluous compared to the business and productivity loss.

Because SLAs pay more than the subscription cost during the downtime.

I have never seen an SLA pay out anything more than a small multiple of the hosting cost which still of course doesn't amount to a hill of beans for essentially anyone. Have you?

Wait, why should critical systems be self-hosted? Isn't this one of the problems "the cloud" solves for?

Seems like a great idea really.

Maybe an emergency mode in the Slack application. When users cannot reach the Slack servers (when they're down or bad network connectivity) the application exposes a P2P connection and looks for other P2P instances.

It would still need a centralized tracker (like a torrent tracker) to help P2P connections find each other through the internet.

All this is easier said, then done!

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