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Comment by hultner | Hacker News Reader

Neat idea for a minimal slack experience.

However if all you want is a low bandwidth text only slack alternative to use with slow and glitchy cellular I’ve got an excellent alternative:

wee-slack + mosh

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

wee-slack gives you a minimal terminal based slack client within weechat and mosh handles ssh connections over low bandwidth, high latency connections.

Using this set up I’ve been able to reply to messages at times a ping to 8.8.8.8 resulted in >90% package loss.

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Nice, you've got a great option for low bandwidth. With lots of functionality! Your project name wins a lot of points with me.

We wanted Stop Slacking in email for two reasons beyond bandwidth: + I find group chat distracting + I already need to use email (as a freelancer with multiple clients) so this streamlined comms into one medium

Thanks for sharing wee-slack!

Just a question, since you appear to be using email as your primary communication medium, what software/workflows do you use? On my side I always use Slack, and while I understand its drawbacks it seems to be the best for me so curious to know about other approaches.

That's a big question. I mainly use email as one of my todo lists. I get notifications from tools like Jira, Trello, and Basecamp, depending on my client. Basecamp introduced me to reply-by-email notifications. :)

The experience of a Slack workspace varies greatly between teams. Slack itself is just a tool. If it works for you, keep rolling with it.

It is because of projects like these that I hope Slack won't disable API access the way other big social network companies are doing.

Slack is going the platform route. They have a huge amount to lose disabling API access. Add-ons and interconnectivity are what make Slack so popular. Without all the integration Slack becomes much less attractive.

Other big social networks have a very different business model. Because they ask users to pay directly for the service, as opposed to ads on UI, using Slack via API or UI shouldn't really matter to them.

Didn't stop them from disabling the official IRC gateway they had.

yes, you're right. However, the slack RTM API can still support IRC clients (with a little more work - need to setup the IRC server, like [1]). The API is like a superset that way.

[1] https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack

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