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Comment by agluszak | Hacker News Reader

Huddles, Clips, probably some kind of TikTok-like stories next... for me Slack has never become anything more than a good and reliable, but still a simple chat app (one of ~10 I have installed on my phone) dedicated for work.

> "In a true digital HQ, you can move all communications—even those with external partners and customers—from siloed email inboxes to channels and direct messages in Slack." Siloed email inboxes? Slack's solution is precisely putting everyone into THEIR silo/walled garden.

I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce at least some degree of inter-compatibility between chat apps. I'm tired of switching between FB Messenger, Instagram, Discord, Slack, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix and whatnot.

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> I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce at least some degree of inter-compatibility between chat apps. I'm tired of switching between FB Messenger, Instagram, Discord, Slack, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix and whatnot.

Well, it's happening. The final phase of the legislation passed today: https://twitter.com/SamuelStolton/status/1548955978166575104

We have an internet standard for interoperable instant messaging since 2004.

Companies really don't like you can escaping their walled gardens and users/customers never made compliance with internet standards a requirement for the services they use.

If slack polled all their paying customers if inter-compatibility was important, do you think any of them would agree it was? As a slack customer I never had any need to have cross app support for my internal chat tool. That would be a headache for my IT team supporting multiple apps.

> If slack polled all their paying customers if inter-compatibility was important, do you think any of them would agree it was?

Being able to use slack to talk with their clients / suppliers who don't use slack (and who often have their own preferred chat system) would definitely be important/valuable to many of them. Hell, I've worked at more than one place where you couldn't use slack to talk to a different department and this was an issue recognised by management.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Not sure if there's a name for it but I would consider Slack a productivity hack that actually hurts productivity in the long run. Chat apps are like a quick fix for poor management, which leads to everyone interrupting everyone else due to lack of documentation or escalation paths. The P2P model works but it is wildly inefficient and no one ends up being held accountable.

If Slack didn't exist, leaders would have to come up with documentation, rules and processes to shuffle work around, probably much more efficiently.

To be fair huddles are really useful, simple and low impact to have a quick verbal chat and maybe screen share without having a formal meeting.

RIP, XMPP + federation

(fb messenger, slack, whatsapp, hangouts/gchat, and more used to be accessible through a single client. That said, I recall federation was mostly unsupported by the various hosts, so you still needed to be logged in to each service.)

I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce a ban on chat apps.

Facebook uses a variant of Facebook to have employees promote their work internally. I think it makes sense for larger organizations - person to person chat and all hands are missing an element in the middle where teams may want to promote the outcome of a particular project to their larger org, but not to everyone. Right now I've seen Slack channels used for that purpose, so it makes sense to help augment that with some additional features. Medium bandwidth, medium reach.

You might argue this sort of communication is unnecessary but it's very hard to get big orgs consistently on the same page. An all-hands is just not the right tool for that.

Matrix supports bridges to most of these apps: https://matrix.org/bridges/

See https://www.beeper.com/ or https://element.io/element-one for a hosted product, or use https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy to self host.

Silo as in only-for-the-email-recipients

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