[est31]

> I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad.

The difference between IRC and Slack is that IRC is seen as a standard protocol while for Slack the network protocol is an inofficial implementation detail and any use other than of the official client is unsupported. I'm not very familiar with Slack, but I've heard about Whatsapp users being banned just for the crime of using an alternative client. That's the difference between an open protocol and a proprietary one.

[Spivak]

Huh? The network protocol for Slack is JSON over WebSockets and is completely documented and supported [1]. You don't need a Slack SDK to speak to Slack and can do it with any plain WebSocket library.

Obviously Slack doesn't provide support for 3rd party clients; how could they? But they do provide support to the developers of those clients using their API.

[1] https://api.slack.com/rtm

[Sir_Cmpwn]

I'm going to remind you of this comment in 5 years.

[Spivak]

I mean if Slack didn't end up ruining their API in the name of greater development flexibility I'm not sure I could even comprehend it.

But that's the thing, I think Slack is a fundamentally inappropriate tool for FOSS work or public communications. Anyone who stakes their long-term community on a single company's proprietary product is asking to be hurt down the road. But I don't think IRC is the right alternative because the UX is so newcomer unfriendly and requires so many disparate 3rd party services to be useful. I would much rather see communities standardize on something like Riot or Mattermost with OpenID.

Simultaneously, I think that Slack (and its contemporaries) are a breath of fresh air for internal team/office chat. Sure it's expensive, and like all corporate-y things you have to keep a little distance so you can migrate when they get shitty, but we can at least acknowledge that it's a damn slick product.