Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see anything conductive to actual work that slack has but IRC lacks. the software industries and choices of tools such as chat clients are fashion-driven and most people will be hard pressed to provide a reason why they prefer slack or discord or whatever the newest shiny toy is other than "it's popular". They're popular, in turn, because their owners have marketing budgets, and decentralized, superior alternatives don't, because they are not commercial products. Just accept that any choice of tools or technologies is typically at least 95% irrational and dictated by marketing, not by rational reasons or calculations of risks and benefits. It used to be that companies would never risk third parties getting hold of confidential internal communications, nobody cares anymore though.

“Sync’d read-state across multiple devices” is what sold me on Slack years ago. I had been trying to simulate it for a long time in IRC using various bouncers, but it never worked very well and was hard to set up for non-technical people at work.

I use irccloud for persistence in IRC, but it's not as good as slack overall.

Work had a private irc server that required all sorts of client certificates to join, forget non-technical people -- it wasn't very good for technical people either!

Try IRCCloud.

Which is a centralized, proprietary, web-based client. All three of which HN loves to hate Slack for.

It does have a really easy way to extract your conversations as a log file though. An OSS version of irccloud you could just "apt-get install blahblah" with may have stemmed the rise of slack, at least in companies.

I expect this niche will be filled by Matrix in the near future. Host a Matrix homeserver + Riot.im web UI, then employees can use Riot mobile apps and any Matrix-supporting client.

For the record, I don't like Slack very much. I just disagree that IRC or IRCCloud are acceptable alternatives.

IRCCloud was is its infancy when Slack came on the scene. If it had existed back then, maybe we wouldn’t have switched? I don’t know, but it’s way too late now. (I have never used it, and am just assuming the read state sync works as well as Slack, which may be a big assumption.)

Ease of use is a very important feature, extremely conductive to actual work. Do not downplay that.

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