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Comment by PebblesHD | Hacker News Reader

My only issue with IRC as the alternative to Slack is that its really user hostile. Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool, and as discussed, persistence and sharing files and things are extensions or hacks on top of the protocol. Without addressing these, IRC is going to remain the ‘underground’ tool it is at the moment, with little support from enterprise tools and other integration providers.

Personally, I’m a big fan of MatterMost[0] as its also open source but provides a much more Slack-like experience which new users will be immediately familiar with. You can host it yourself and it works with lots of existing integrations.

[0] - https://mattermost.com/

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> Clients largely look like some 90s programmer’s idea of a chat tool,

If by that you mean that it doesn't require a machine with 32GB of RAM to run smoothly, then I'm all for such 90s chat tools!

Sharing files is trivial with Gist; and you get a fully proper history, ability to fork, plus works much faster than the clumsiness and memory waste that comes with Slack.

I have a warm place in my heart for Pidgin. For a long, long time I had to deal with IM clients that wouldn't let you sign in more than one account per instance, and some of them used mutexes to prevent running multiple instances.

It looked like hot dog vomit, but it worked wonderfully.

> Sharing files is trivial with Gist

Apparently not all files that need to be shared are text files. Developers have a million ways to share text files, thank you.

(I know how to use gists to share images and other files. It's not pretty.)

There are several richer IRC clients; the author of this article suggests https://thelounge.chat/ in a later article about IRC.

"There are several richer IRC clients; the author of this article suggests https://thelounge.chat/ in a later article about IRC."

I have no dog in this fight as I do not use slack nor do I use irc anymore ...

However, reading this comment thread makes me think that what you all really need is neither a slack alternative nor an irc alternative ... what you all really need is a very well written irc bot.

The downside to that is that even with a well written bot, there is no source of truth for history, as the bot can become disconnected from the server, which implies we should move history logging and archival to the server, which is a bridge to far for many people; in particular Drew (the author of TFA) believes chat should be ephemeral rather than persistent and he is not alone in this camp.

Mattermost is open core, please avoid.

Do you have a like for a more detailed/specific reasoning against mattermost in particular? I might want to throw it at some grassroots instance in an attempt to get rid of it/user's acceptance of it.

That makes IRC sound like a good tool for open source projects though. None of the negatives seem to apply to this scenario.

The lack of threading and image support is a pretty big issue to open source projects though. The lack of threading has always been annoying in IRC, and posting screenshots is very convenient and useful in Slack.

For all of the points made towards Slack here, let’s remind everyone here that none of the open source projects actually use Slack.

The only useful software to get any sorts of real-time support from the community is Matrix. Nobody uses Slack in open-source simply because you can’t allow unregistered users to ask questions on public channels.

There are a dozen of cloud-based web apps that interface with IRC.

There is also Slack.

The article enumerates reasons why Slack is not designed or suited for the role in question.

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