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Comment by Zetobal | Hacker News Reader

I use ripcord for discord and slack bonus it's a native app and uses about 20mb of ram.

I keep trying to use ripcord, but the reality is a workplace expects you to be able to jump on board every new feature that Slack adds within moments of it's release. Whether that be huddles, threads, recordings, etc.

If we could pare our use of Slack down to just text, it would be a great alternative - but until them I'm stuck using the official client.

Is there anything you can't do in slack's web client?

This is a real question: what are Slack huddles supposed to do? I run the native client. While anyone can start a huddle with me, I never see any UI for a huddle. All I get is the audio coming across. To end the huddle I have to force stop Slack and relaunch it.

I really like them. No need to invite people to a meeting; just jump in. E.g. if you have an issue to diagnose as a group you can just stay on the line, and dip in and out where necessary.

In Teams you can just call the first person up and then add more people into the call. "Jane Doe is calling you from a group chat" or whatever it says. I'm surprised this is a new-ish feature in Slack?

Not really the same thing. Huddles are voice for channels.

It's hard to explain. You're in a channel already, e.g. your team's channel, and you hit a toggle and it creates a voice chat and others are notified to join. I think it's really slick.

Teams has that too, you can call groups, or teams, people can pop in and out at will.

Two years ago the multinational company I was working at had a global ransomware attack and we had a teams call for like 7 days straight with check-ins every two hours for everyone but there were on call people in there always if you had specific questions.

It worked really well and made it easy for people to get stuff done and have clear chain of command when everything else was down.

I know what you mean - we had Teams at my past place. Difference is Teams UI is intrusive, which might suit command and control style orgs. Huddles are much less intrusive. You can do regular calls with Slack as well, Teams-style, but huddles are much slicker IMO.

This is not true, Slack has removed support for regular calls. When you attempt to use calls it tells you it has been replaced with huddles.

Oh - actually I hadn't used them in a while. Didn't realise they'd gone. Fair enough.

What should be happening is a small window opens at the bottom of the left sidebar (under your channels/direct messages/apps)

The tiny window is sorta useless except for mute/hangup, but you can undock it from the sidebar and make it much larger for video chat or screensharing.

1st party support is (sadly) usually the best experience you're going to get.

I'd love to see some real focus on open standards and enforcement for those standards at a legislative level (the first to go should be any limits on 3rd parties acting on behalf a user... it's essentially the same as the court case that allowed consumers to install 3rd party equipment at telephone jacks)

But until then (and I'm not holding my breath because the US congress is utterly, woefully, frankly perhaps intentionally, useless for both antitrust and tech regulation at the moment) I'll continue to use the first party software.

We use slack at work for text only. I’ve used the web client for probably 5 years now

wow had no idea there were good native apps for discord. im totally gonna try this once im home :))) thx again :)))

This apparently breaks their TOS, but I don't know if anyone got in trouble over it yet

Can you show where in the TOS third-party clients are disallowed?

(The Discord TOS does not even mention third-party clients.)

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248?lang=...

> All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

That's not the TOS. That's a 3 year old tweet with multiple people in the replies asking to cite where in the TOS it says that, and no further reply from the official account.

Keeping it vague means they can simply shrug and refer to being able to ban accounts at their own discretion

Yeah, that’s already the case with every online service. They don’t need to be vague — they don’t have to give any reason for banning you.

Ah, I didn't really read the ToS, but contemplated a third party client a while ago, and was told I best avoid them due to ToS violations. I guess it must've spread through that tweet.

so just sign up again

like reddit, bans are entirely meaningless

Reddit is one of the most difficult sites online to use as a new user. Virtually no subreddits allow new account to post. There are often waiting periods of a month for new accounts and large karma requirements that are difficult to get, because once again subs won’t let you post.

Reddit is new user hostile.

> Reddit is new user hostile.

indeed it is, because if you're new and don't know about the effective shadowbanning of new users then it just looks like the site is dead

meanwhile anyone actually banned will just go and pay $1 for a 3 month account with 100 karma

Be very careful with third-party discord clients; they are officially against TOS and people have permanently lost their accounts over it.

I would love to use Ripcord but I can't find any information on noise suppression/voice focus and that's a requirement for me as I play without push to talk and on mouse and keyboard so all those key presses get sent through to those in my channel. With the 1st party app, despite other issues, none of my key presses come through for people in my channel.

If you have an Nvida card you could use Nvidia broadcast. It runs as a virtual microphone that other apps can target as the voice input. So Nvidia broadcast will receive the raw input from your real microphone, process it, and feed it to any applications that are targeting the Nvidia broadcast mic as their voice input. It also doesn't appear to add any noticeable latency.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/broadcasting/broadcast-...

is there a way to get it to save deleted messages?

Ripcord will temporarily remember deleted messages for channels in which you're a moderator. You can view the contents by right-clicking on the message. It won't do this if you aren't a moderator in that channel.

This is to help avoid having to use a bot to log all message edits+deletes, usually done to mitigate bad actors saying something bad, getting someone else to report the message or take a screenshot of it, then delete it afterwards.

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