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Comment by linschn | Hacker News Reader

This is a very astute way to look at it. I'd say then that the value of Slack is to be user friendly, which suc definitely is not for muggles.

But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? - Same question, but taking into account that Slack captures your data and won't give it back to you ? How expensive is it to leave Slack ?

Sure, suc sucks, but we probably could converge on something less bloated and proprietary than Slack ?

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> But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ?

I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server.

You could perhaps even make a local GUI application that spawns ssh once and reads+writes to it, and have your 90% slack functionality done in a weekend.

Yes and this GUI application should be cross platform so make it Electron.

Wait, there has been a leak from the company so we need some security staff on it and maybe mandated TFA.

And it's nice to have a way to call people and not only chat.

I wonder if there is already an app that does that, even if it's bloated it would be more convenient...

> Yes and this GUI application should be cross platform so make it Electron.

Why? What's wrong with Qt? or any of the other x-platform UI toolkits I already use to target Windows, Linux and Mac?

(Your other points are irrelevant. I never claimed that suc will match slack 100%, feature for feature).

I'm not sure where to post this reply but I have a hot take cooking up for about a week now: Is it too crazy to just leave a clustered SQL DB open to the Internet, static asset on S3, and call it THE backend of a social-* (-networking, -game) app? It's mostly SQL anyway. Maybe a message signing system like IPsec auth header can be set up with a client cert, and TLS packet encryption can be dropped, if it's going to be public data or data is to be advertised as "e2e encrypted". Isn't that going to cut a lot of backend cost?

That can be done just with an ssh:// URL handler. It already works on macOS, you can open terminals with an ssh session direct from web pages.

TIL :-)

I did not know that. Can confirm that it works in FF on Linux.

Is suc scaleable? I didn’t see any discussion of managing conversations across a cluster of ssh-capable hosts and you’re not going to support more than a few thousand with a single ssh server.

This is something I would like to explore. If I had to guess now, I would think that the management of many open handles on a single file by the kernel is going to be more limiting than ssh.

But I'd also wager we can go quite far with a single cheap VPS. A few thousands user does not seem impossible at all.

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