[Festival] Slack alternatives (and why IRC is butts)

[azul]

Hi,

Griffin Boyce:
> Hi all,
> 
>   What strikes me is that all the options out there are all very
> slightly broken in some way.
> 
>   Slack is really nice, but there are definitely barriers for most
> netfreedom peeps.  On the one hand, the interface is very intuitive, you
> can create private discussion rooms for individual teams/topics.  On the
> other hand, it's a walled garden, JavaScript is required to use the
> site, the code isn't open-source, and they don't support content
> encryption-at-rest by default [1].
It also has a high barrier to entry for people who are not using it yet.
It took me a whole day to join a channel as described on the pad[0]

>   I agree with Meejah that Slack is likely not an ideal spot for the
> IFF, because we'll blow through the free tier's 10k message limit pretty
> fast.  There's a similar FOSS project called Mattermost which could be a
> reasonable Slack alternative for a project like this.  However, the IFF
> is *not* a "large open-source project".  That really implies that most
> people using this 1) know enough about IRC to protect themselves (more
> on that below) and 2) that they want something that is basically just
> text [3].
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to point out. Are you
still talking about Mattermost?

It looks like it is feasible to bridge slack and irc channels[1] as well
as mattermost and irc channels[2].
So for a few main channels we could bridge the three together. However
the bridges need to be configured per channel. This removes the ability
of creating private rooms for subgroups if people are using different tools.

My impression is that people who are already using slack would like to
use it for the IFF as well so they do not have to look at a different
tool. But this is just what using slack would mean for everyone who does
not use it yet.

I have not heard any critique of the mattermost user experience yet. In
contrast to slack it also seems to allow for public channels which is a
huge plus in terms of lower entrance barriers. I think hardly anyone of
us is using it yet - so it would mean trying out sth. new for almost
everyone.

Mattermost has been developed because the team had just been burned by
being locked into a different messaging SaaS[3]. So we should probably
learn from that and try something we control to begin with.

If people care about being able to access certain mattermost channels
through irc we can setup bridges. And if people want to use slack only
we can bridge slack and those irc channels.
If people care about irc a lot we could also extend mattermost to setup
irc channels to bridge new mattermost channels to. Something one could
probably not do with slack due to its closed nature.

So is there anyone against greenhost setting up mattermost for all of us
to play with?

Azul



[0] https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IFF16
[1] https://ekmartin.com/2015/slack-irc/
[2] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
[3]
http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/