creativecommons.org
4 votes c/freepost Posted by zPlus — 4 votes, 6 commentsSource

…this really disappoints me. All these projects moving to Slack, a non-free platform is a concern to me. I get that IRC might not fit the needs, but there is work to improve it (read: IRCv3).. it just takes time, and moving to a non-free platform isn’t the most ideal solution in my humble opinion, especially as it does not respect the four essential freedoms.

Something like Rocketchat might be a better solution, but I’m unsure as to how well that has progressed- I haven’t used it in ages, and the host I use doesn’t seem to update regularly either.

Viva la IRC; Long live IRC :-)

Very interesting, I didn’t know of IRCv3

Hey- yeah, it seems to be progressing, which is good :-)

If you’re interested (and any others too!), I’d recommend joining the #ircv3 channel on Freenode- lots of good discussion there when I’ve dropped in, and the people in there seem to be pretty friendly, too!

Thanks for adding a link to that as well mate, I totally forgot ^-^

Can confirm that RocketChat is a better solution. My team is using it and it’s fucking fantastic. Why would anyone use Slack over this?! It has 10x the power, the Docker image helps you deploy in like 2 minutes, and it’s totally free.

Aside from the freedom issues, on the technical side, Slack doesn’t scale for this. Because it is made for companies, there are no shared accounts. Sure, you can talk about how IRC is “harder to get into” but once you have IRC set up you just join an extra channel. On Slack, you need to go through account setup for everything you want to follow, which is much more time consuming in the end. I’m in over 40 IRC channels. Can you imagine having to make 40 Slack accounts and keeping 40 browser tabs open to keep up? It doesn’t scale.

Slack replacements like Rocket.Chat and MatterMost have the same problem.