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tbingmann | 10 years ago

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

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JoshM33k|10 years ago

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

shanemhansen|10 years ago

Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company.

I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.

rdtsc|10 years ago

They were on their way out as some services were federating via XMPP. Then some stopped supporting it.

hobarrera|10 years ago

At some point it did fade a bit. About 2-3 years ago enough people were using XMPP/Gtalk so that I could reach about 80% of my acquaintances thought it.

Now, there's no single network that holds over 25% of them. Except facebook, but most of them don't actively use facebook every day, nor pay attention to it's IM.

tbingmann|10 years ago

Best ask them first via email.

morganvachon|10 years ago

It would be nice if the iOS and Android built-in Contacts apps had better support/integration for all the various messaging apps that work on their respective platforms. Rather than trying to remember who uses which services, their contact card could simply contain the entire roster of their services and usernames, and you could initiate a conversation in that service from within the contact card. I know you can do this with the baked in messaging services for each platform (SMS/MMS and iMessage for iOS, SMS/MMS and Hangouts for Android), but I'm talking about a one-stop-contacts-shop for every major messaging platform. Maybe that would require too much cooperation between messaging app authors and the big OS vendors, but I think it would be possible.

An alternative solution would be a cross platform third party Contacts app that offers that kind of integration. I've seen multi-messenger apps (Trillian, IM+) for both platforms, but that's not quite the same thing and it inevitably leaves out important functionality from the official apps.

coldtea|10 years ago

Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.

scrollaway|10 years ago

This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.

What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015.

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...

joesmo|10 years ago

We have cross-organization Slack users in our company slack channels and I also have multiple 'organizations', so fragmentation is sometimes an issue.

danielhlockard|10 years ago

Strangeloop (the programming conference) is using a slack, as we speak. it's more than teams :)

peruvian|10 years ago

What annoys me about stuff like Slack is that it's misused. It's made for small teams but I've been 10k people open source projects use it instead of IRC. Of course, it was laggy and they eventually couldn't afford it.

jedrek|10 years ago

Obfuscating usernames with real names and no ignore are also massive downsides.

Mithaldu|10 years ago

And none of them manage to replicate even the most basic of IRC's network solutions in regards to user count scaling and server network combination.

hughes|10 years ago

And backlog/offline message functionality is available by turning on logging and using a ZNC proxy. My "buddy list" is just a bunch of direct message channels that I keep open.

lifeisstillgood|10 years ago

But this is about social norms, not technology. Hear the phrase "remote workers...tap lightly on the shoulder".

We have had thousands of years to work out our nuances over interruptions and social signals when around the same campfire.

But suddenly (and from the past 20-30 years suddenly) we have phone conferences where half the conversation is "no, sorry, you go ahead" and email going from killer app to no longer being a way to get a reply in ten minutes but two days because the signal to noise ratio hit a tipping point somewhere around 2006. (No it's not spam, that's mostly a done problem. It's co-worker spam that's clogging our minds of not our inboxes)

So the differences between Zulip and Twitter and Slack and IRC and Microsoft bloody communicator why does it not know about tabs ffs! (Sorry). The difference with all of these is not their technology - it's pretty much the same all the time - but their social utility.

One day some comms package will get it all together (I think there is too little context to get it right yet) and we will all go"of course".

Until then we will try each different social choices baked into the code - rooms or tags or whatever. Maybe the next step is to have rooms for something, open cry for others.

Who knows - maybe we should look at pubs bars, libraries and streets for inspiration.

Whatever it is - Zulip is not the right solution nor is it the best - it is one more random mutation in the evolution of remote communication.

ex3ndr|10 years ago

We (https://actor.im) are actually working on this, but not trying to connect slack, but building telegram, skype, whatsapp, social networks to one, slack like interface that will help you easily manage communications from many networks.

This is not our main feature, just something like side project.

hobarrera|10 years ago

I also really dislike the idea of having to register with a phone number. I reminds me of ICQ, where I had to dig up some obscure number to log in. Except, I also lose my account permanently the moment I lose my phone.

hobarrera|10 years ago

"Mobile First"

This is the regrettable de-facto standard. I'd like to see the opposite: a network that provides native desktop clients. Telegram seems to be the only one taking this seriously up to now.

stevemartingale|10 years ago

This looks cool.

FYI notifications is misspelled as "notificaitons" in the paragraph under "I don't believe in messaging. Email is better".

zobzu|10 years ago

that would be great. what would be greater though is ensuring that actor.im cannot read the data as it transits (or easy to setup on our own local machines)

I'd pay a good bit for that!

ara4n|10 years ago

This is precisely the problem we're working on with Matrix.org - providing a standard API that can be used to bridge together all of these different protocols in one decentralised model. It's better than Trillian in that the defragmentation happens serverside and you can use any compatible client with it (or one of the existing services if you prefer). For instance, we turned on our first Matrix<->Slack bridge this week - see https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/... for how easy it was.

austenallred|10 years ago

There have been and always will be competing products and communities that serve similar purposes. We use what we think is the best one. Is this a bad thing?

(Not to mention the fact that Slack is for internal teams, not for IRC-like discussions, though our open newsroom (http://newsroom.grasswire.com) and some other communities (http://fpchat.com) have repurposed it for that.

inopinatus|10 years ago

I think that "best tool for the job" attitude is a straw man. It seems to presuppose that "the job" is per-organisation, or even that there is one job.

In truth many of us believe that the goal is enabling everyone - universally - to communicate without a single body holding centralised control of message history, reachability and access.

Quick review of the globally federated protocols:

  Email is too slow and bulky and lacks "group" capability
  IRC is deeply unreliable and lacks identity, archiving, and media management
  NNTP is too amorphous, slow, and lacks any privacy or security controls
  Everyone thinks SIP is just for telephony (it isn't)
  XMPP is phenomenally complicated yet held great promise
    - if only everyone could agree on the extensions and semantics.
    - but was murdered by Google.

hobarrera|10 years ago

Yup, it's a big shame. XMPP promised for quite a while, but then stagnated and failed to deliver what most users were expecting (mostly due to implementations, not lack of protocol features).

I've recently given up on IM, and written about it recently:

https://hugo.barrera.io/journal/2015/09/21/giving-up-on-im/

If only zulip were federated. :(

kybernetikos|10 years ago

> If only zulip were federated. :(

Now that it's open source, could it be made to be federated?

draw_down|10 years ago

Wow, out of all the things that may have occurred to me over the last couple years of using Slack, "this feels like 1999" is definitely not one of them.

tmslnz|10 years ago

One could say that OS-level notifications could be considered a crude replacement of an aggregation tool like Trillian. We didn't have these back in the ICQ days and today it's easier (read: less painful) to listen on multiple messaging apps. Especially on mobile devices.

istvan__|10 years ago

Amazon for a long time (maybe even today) used IRC for 1:N communication. I personally like IRC over anything else, but I am probably just too old... :)

petrohi|10 years ago

<shameless plug>

We at sameroom.io do this in sort of backend-only way.

</shameless plug>

fallat|10 years ago

IRC+ZNC = backlog support, and WAY more. I don't know why you'd want anything else.

hobarrera|10 years ago

> I don't know why you'd want anything else.

Voice+video just to begin with. The ability to work on poor networks (mobile?), read notifications, delivery notifications.

zobzu|10 years ago

+300.

noobie|10 years ago

You forgot Glip too.