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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Folks, use IRC, XMPP, Matrix, etc. Using proprietary protocols is dumb.

I worked at a medium-sized company during the transition from IRC to Slack. The problem the company had was a split in comms networks. There was a lack of will on the part of engineers to move to GChat, and non-engineers were unwilling to respond/engage on IRC. Marketing, Sales, and Admin were using GChat, while engineering used IRC. Getting everyone on the same comms platform was a major improvement. I'm not saying it's ideal, but it wasn't dumb.

lol... it rings a bell

I worked at Cisco, who had their own awful IM client. Our team used Hangouts instead with great success.

Company-wide conferences were a ball-ache. The corporate solution didn't mute by default, so with 40000 people in a conf it devolved into a "TURN YOUR MIC OFF" shouting match for the first 10 minutes.

The more frightening thing is that Cisco (presumably as developer of the client?) couldn't change the defaults to solve one of their own problems.

Can't remember, it was a while ago. I will say that anybody who knows what Blizzard is will know how bad their IM was.

> I worked at Cisco, who had their own awful IM client.

Which one? Webex, Jabber or whatever they use for their 50k€+ videoconferencing systems? I have only had the honor with the first two and, jeez, it's a nightmare...

No, it was dumb, and I didn't stutter. It's an extraordinarily short-sighted move to switch to Slack. IRC may not be for everyone, but clients like The Lounge and alternatives like Matrix are quite friendly to non-engineers.

I've been contemplating putting The Lounge in front of my IRC servers. How well does it scale? i.e. how many web users can you support with {n} amount of memory/cpu?

I've used cgiirc, but it isn't pretty and some people want pretty and client-less.

I'm not sure, to be honest. I would be interested in hearing what you discover if you investigate this yourself.

Certainly! I will keep notes on my setup and performance.

>The problem the company had was a split in comms networks.

My new team is going through this. For comms, my machine came equipped with Skype for Business, Slack, Stride and Bria. It's a fun game rolling the dice when you need to ask someone a question figuring out which comms tool that person uses.

A game I've avoided playing altogether by just sending an email.

I thought chat was going to eliminate the need for email. ;-)

So say we all, so say we all.

I confess that, overall, that's been my experience with a few customers and that getting everyone on the same platform was ace.

But as somebody who's got gchat gatewayed to IRC, replacing two things I can use from irssi with one thing I can't has always annoyed me.

Agreed

This is largely the same rational that was used at the company I work at to transition to Slack. From an engineer and developer point of view, I rarely, if ever, directly communicate with non-engineers over instant messaging.

For people who deal with different groups of people in the company, shouldn't it be up to them to handle communicating with different groups using different methods rather than compelling everyone to use the same communication platform for instant messaging?

I was responsible for getting several development teams on Slack.

You see, nowadays few people outside of us hardcore geeks will want to use IRC (my first option). And there are things that "modern" chat clients do better. For instance, our monitoring system can post messages to slack with links to images to allow us to display graphs inline, links to runbooks, and even buttons to take actions. IRC won't do that.

Second option was Matrix with its (rather cool) open protocol, but the immaturity of clients and lack of integrations was a problem. Almost everything supports Slack, but good luck finding Matrix support. For our own systems this is manageable, but not all are under our control. Also, we would have to host and manage the infrastructure ourselves.

XMPP would be great on the integration front (surprisingly, Slack still wins), but once again it's something we would have to manage.

There were other options. Rocket.Chat, Hipchat, Mattermost, you name it. Each one with their own drawbacks.

So when asked by my manager what should we use, I could just answer "use slack" immediately, no ifs or buts, and most people would be happy with it.Assuming you have nothing against the company, the biggest technical con is the memory hungry client. The other issues are way harder to justify – big companies rarely care about proprietary protocols as long as they have a vendor to yell at.

>links to images to allow us to display graphs inline, links to runbooks, and even buttons to take actions. IRC won't do that.

Depends on the client. The Lounge does this.

I wish it was so easy... I don't get to decide what tools my company uses unfortunately

I would like to. What is a good video conference solution? To replace zoom (which works great for us so far) for example. Thanks.

I like Jitsi. Zero setup, just push go and share the link:

https://meet.jit.si/

Open source software based on standardized browser technologies.

Thank you.

I believe stride's video conference was based on it too, we tried it and wasn't that good. But I will try it separately too.

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