Slack is Down

[dsr_]

It's harder (but not impossible) to have complete service lossage like this in a federated protocol.

That's why you didn't hear about the great email collapse of 2006.

[api]

The great e-mail collapse occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s when spam made it prohibitively difficult for most users to actually run federated e-mail endpoints. At this point it's an amazing pain to the point that very few attempt it. The rest is moot.

That's the problem with federated protocols. Without someone who owns the system and who has the resources and central authority to police it, if it becomes popular it will be destroyed by spam and other abuse. (Effectively a sybil attack.) Self-policing protocols (without costly proof of work) are an "AI-hard" problem since your adversary is the human intelligence of the protocol's exploiters.

Niche federated protocols avoid this fate by never becoming popular. The other way to avoid this fate is to impose a severe work function like Bitcoin and other block chains, but this is too expensive (figuratively and literally) for most applications. Could you imagine a forum software that requires a minimum of several hundred watts of power to participate in the network?

All others fall to the tragedy of the commons.

[gizmo686]

Of course, if my email goes down, it does not help me that other's is still up.

In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap.

[ajross]

And relevant to the market: why Freenode netsplits are more of a joke than a problem.

[cuspycode]

I wonder where the sweet spot is between a centralized service like Slack, and extremely decentralized scenarios where people just try to cope with a multitude of one-to-one channels?

Federation is a given for this hypothetical sweet spot of course, but how do you find the spot? Are there any HN readers who can point me to research in this area?

[MaulingMonkey]

You mean the USDoHS email storm of 2007?

[dqv]

>That's why you didn't hear about the great email collapse of 2006.

Wait, is this a joke or was there really a great email collapse in 2006?

[ptrptr]

Slack is down, productivity goes up... after using it for a while I find it does communications within a team well but does almost nothing to increase collaboration, so I guess slack is in area which apps like Discord will disrupt.

[RussianCow]

I don't disagree with you, but in what way do you think Discord will "disrupt" Slack with regards to collaboration?

[Operyl]

Err, I find myself wasting much more time in Discord, music bots etc, hah.

[mcrittenden]

Seems to be up for me again. I wonder if 8 minutes of downtime is enough to warrant a post-mortem blog post.

[hayleox]

Eh, I don't think a post-mortem is really necessary. They said it was a broken code change on the status page. If they wrote a post-mortem, it'd probably just say "A team member forgot to foobar the bazqux when deploying an update. We immediately followed our playbook for rolling back a failed deployment and restored service within 9 minutes."

[gooseus]

Given the increasing dependence on messaging platforms, I think any widespread downtime deserves a public post-mortem.

And that's not to speak to the amazing amount of curiosity and interest that any downtime in a large public system generates. From the PR side, I would think that some kind of post-mortem is almost necessary to prevent that curiosity and interest from turning to distrust and negative perception.

[muglug]

For a product as widely-used as Slack is, it might at least be interesting.

[fiatjaf]

Of course not.

[bernardlunn]

I stopped using Slack. It is a productivity drain.

[seattle_spring]

I feel like this is about as relevant to this discussion as someone arrogantly interjecting, "Oh I don't own a TV," when talking about Netflix shows.

[tapvt]

I've been tempted to stop using it, but instead just shut off notifications. I really like being able to pull it up quickly to see when code has been pushed up, pull requests created / merged, or whatever automated CI action is going on for a particular project.

The chatter can burn a lot of time though. You're absolutely right there.

[mfringel]

Your show of virtue has been noted by the Ministry of Statistics. Thank you for the data point.

[avenoir]

Using MS Teams at the office and I couldn't agree more. It's useful about 30% of the time. The other 70% is sharing giphies and news links.

[dtech]

Do you only call / talk to people in person at your job? In my experience that is much more disruptive than an instant message.

[legohead]

Working as a publisher and having channels to talk to each of our clients is amazing and increases productivity and communication way beyond just email and phone. But that's just my particular use-case :)

[SippinLean]

I have two jobs, the one without Slack is much harder to stay on top of.

I just mute the gif-sharing channel.

[mcrittenden]

https://status.slack.com/2017-03/c0923f37c54988ec - basically just said that there was a broken code change which they reverted.

[rudolf0]

>The status.slack.com was also overloaded during this time and it may have been inaccessible.

This is starting to become a common theme...

[dang]

Please keep pointless generation wars off HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13812246 and marked it off-topic.

[jon-wood]

I assume you also don't talk with coworkers about what you did at the weekend, or discuss where to get lunch. You wouldn't want to waste any of your employers precious time.