Slack is really nice and is at least usable for large projects and teams.
Comment on FLOSS communities right now
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 9 months ago
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
jelloeater85@lemmy.world 9 months ago
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 9 months ago
Ugh. Electron which can’t keep more than 5 pages in memory before having to load backwards in the chat.
goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Unless they use the free version and you want to search for old questions/answers/issues.
looking at you puppet labs slack
flames5123@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How the heck slack better or even have any more features than discord? Discord saves all history. Discord has threads that are easier to find than slack threads. Discord voice channels let you just hop in. Discord lets you direct reply.
I use slack for work, but Discord is great for what it is. The search is amazing.
Fudoshin@feddit.uk 9 months ago
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me “boomer”. I’m only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn’t a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it’s funny. :/
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
The age is represented?
Fudoshin@feddit.uk 9 months ago
I dunno why but they wanted you to comment your name, age and location in a welcome channel. I did and they screenshot and shared it in the main channel. Most of the people are around 16-19 with a few 20-25yo.
I was very weird to be there apparently.
crispy_kilt@feddit.de 9 months ago
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans.
Please do, I enjoy banter, especially when it comes from the colonies
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
That is truly weird…
Thanks for answering!
Norgur@kbin.social 9 months ago
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
wrekone@lemmyf.uk 9 months ago
A bunch of the servers I’m on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I’m on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Are we confusing threaded chat conversations with Threads, the FB/Snap Twitter with dreams of usurping federation to reach new ad contacts; or is it just me?
ripcord@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Nope, just threaded conversations.
sep@lemmy.world 9 months ago
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Matrix works great, I am in multiple rooms including some with 1983, 1356 or 1120 people
jayrodtheoldbod@midwest.social 9 months ago
I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.
Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.
Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.
The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.
Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.
But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.
Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.
We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.
I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.
loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
You need some kind of help or something?
Fudoshin@feddit.uk 9 months ago
The greatest fucking year in the universe. Do you know what happened in that year?
Planets configured. Temperatures happened. Volcanoes contemplated. Wind occurred.
Yours truly was BORN!
Bow before me worms of conscience!
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
I found IRC loses chat flow more easily, as actual chat gets lost in the stream of blabber.
I am intrigued to see how threaded conversations in slack etc al work, but haven’t been at a shop where slack was allowed as a tool due to data sovereignty and the CLOUD act.
But IRC was always something I approached reluctantly, and that’s been 31 years now.
technom@programming.dev 9 months ago
The gold standard of threaded conversations is Zulip.