[nate]

One fun thing we discovered an outage or two ago: Zoom, which is likely already on your computer too, has a very Slack-like Chat feature. Open up the Zoom app, then click the Chat icon in the top header. You probably missed it this entire time. You can make rooms, DMs, animated gifs, the works :)

[KingMachiavelli]

It's strange but Zoom as chat was actually how I first used it. A whole year prior to the pandemic the place I worked (fairly large) they purchased Zoom as their internal chat tool.

[Cerium]

I find zoom chat to be reminiscent of AIM, it does not have the afforances that make slack a good business communication tool.

[nate]

Definitely. But super helpful in a pinch when we all begin these very large email threads as soon as slack is down. :)

[selestify]

What are Slack's affordances?

[Cerium]

Slack does a good job with threading. The side panel allows you to watch a thread while you continue another conversation. It also puts together an above average notification system, where at a glance you can see if there is no new content, new content, or your name mentioned. It allows you to ignore slack without risk of missing somebody shouting for you.

[treesknees]

On the contrary, I find Slack threads to be very annoying for discovering/stumbling upon conversations.

Your whole team could be having a new discussion within a thread and you'd never know unless you participated in the thread previously or somebody @'s you. Compare that to more IRC-like discussion where each message is posted to the channel. Sure, you may end up with contextual issues reminiscent of the IRC days, but at least everything is discoverable.

[bmhin]

I've used Slack competitor Flowdock in the past which did the more "elevated" approach to threads. Rather than "hide" them from the main branch of a channel, the main branch had every message in the top level and you could collapse to a thread view if you wanted to read it in isolation.

In my experience, the main problem here was that people regularly lost sight that a conversation even was in a thread. So they'd post their response unthreaded right in line. Now the people in the thread view can't see it, but if you were in the main channel it still looked just fine (after all they were one after the other). If it was a nascent threaded conversation (like 2 or so posts only), often the thread was just abandoned and everything was done top level. For bigger threads where you caught after the fact it was a threaded, people would either delete and repost or would just duplicate their post over into the thread again (which means it appears twice in the main channel). The worst offenders were people who refused to thread so even if it was humming along fine they'd just post their response inline always (and repeatedly).

Don't know if I have a particular point there other than both had tradeoffs. I do find that the Slack thread updates disappearing seems to be less frequent of an issue and the threading problems in the alternative were near constant. I think Slack's issue would be largely a nonissue if viewing a thread "subscribed" you to it so you could see updates without needing to post. Maybe reactions are a workaround too. It's fairly easy to unsubscribe if one's blowing you up. Subscribing to all threads regardless seems to reduce some of their usefulness and that's the current solution I believe.

[kawsper]

The issue you mention with Flowdock, in my experience, only happened for newcomers to the product, they added a button to add an unthreaded comment to a thread in later versions.

I prefer Flowdocks threading model, it's too bad what happened to the product after being bought/sold, but I think it was a superior product.

[duderific]

> Your whole team could be having a new discussion within a thread and you'd never know unless you participated in the thread previously or somebody @'s you.

That's kind of the point? You shouldn't be bothered unless you want to be. To me, a thread isn't necessarily supposed to be geared toward discoverability. You'll see the main topic hit the channel, and then you can choose to follow the thread if you like.

[abletonlive]

>Open up the Zoom app

no thanks. I would never install zoom on any of my computers voluntarily.

[legofr]

That spyware thankfully isn't no mine, and if you're forced to use it (if you for whatever reason can't use Jitsi/Teams) then I strongly encourage you not to install the app and instead use the web version.

[Forbo]

Why is Slack considered spyware but not Teams?

[rythmshifter03]

Please don't encourage the use of Zoom, they already have enough market share they don't deserve after lying through their teeth to the public on multiple occasions.

[bitexploder]

What alternatives do you recommend? As far as I can tell none of the major video conferencing solutions are made by companies I think are any more trustworthy than Zoom at this point. Plus Google and others ran a focused assassination campaign against Zoom at the start of the pandemic to claw some of their market share.

[cure]

There is Matrix (https://matrix.org) which now integrates nicely with Jitsi (https://jitsi.org). There's also BigBlueButton (https://bigbluebutton.org).

[bun_at_work]

Google is certainly more secure than Zoom to outside attacks.

Regardless of what Google chooses to do with your data, they do want to protect that data from everyone else, on your behalf. At least as much as any company can (government subpoena affects all companies).

[edgyquant]

I don’t understand why zoom is so much more popular than Google meet. I never used zoom before my current company who uses Google meets for daily meetings and then zoom meeting for the biweekly review. No idea what advantages zoom is supposed to have.

[pkulak]

I think Zoom just had a better sales team and went after corporate clients earlier. Now that no one is in the office, it seems silly, because Meet is just straight up a nicer experience on all fronts, but in the Old Days, no one ever got fired for putting Zoom hardware in a conference room.

[bun_at_work]

It seems like the popularity of Zoom is related to the singularity of the product's purpose. Zoom is a video conferencing service. Google is everything and the kitchen sink. So when the pandemic started, that worked in Zoom's favor, sadly.

[bitexploder]

Thick clients perform better than Google Meet in the browser in my experience.

[MattRix]

I know it’s not seen as a professional service, but Discord has great quality video chat (better than Zoom, for example). I don’t know if its privacy/security would hold up for larger companies but we use it in my tiny company with no issues at all.

[philote]

Any recommendations on getting Discord notifications to reliably show up in a reasonable time on mobile? That's the one big issue I have with Discord. Otherwise I find it very useful.

[dmonitor]

If you have the desktop client up, you don't get mobile notifications. They've always worked fine for me so long as I don't set my status as do not disturb

[djbusby]

Mattermost has replaced Slack here and I don't miss it at all. Jitsi Meet is pretty good for a/v

[aftbit]

My team uses Slack for text and voice chat (huddles) and Jitsi Meet for free, in-browser video chat without signup required.

[12ian34]

Jitsi[0] is excellent.

[0]: https://meet.jit.si/

[jrm4]

Discord is easily best quality for now, Matrix/Jitsi is easily best future vision. Everything else can go away.

[eurasiantiger]

Self-hosted Matrix

[swyx]

what do you mean lying through their teeth? citation needed.

[btown]

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/11/ftc-r...

> In its complaint, the FTC alleged that, since at least 2016, Zoom misled users by touting that it offered “end-to-end, 256-bit encryption” to secure users’ communications, when in fact it provided a lower level of security... In reality, the FTC alleges, Zoom maintained the cryptographic keys that could allow Zoom to access the content of its customers’ meetings, and secured its Zoom Meetings, in part, with a lower level of encryption than promised.

See also: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes

[suprfsat]

"end to end encryption" means "it's encrypted at both ends"

[mirntyfirty]

Wikipedia has a few paragraphs dedicated to their lack of privacy, security, and other unethical telemetry practices. I believe it was a couple years ago when these stories maintained headline positions for a few weeks.

[Arch-TK]

Lol what?

https://techtalk.pcmatic.com/2021/08/03/zoom-settlement/

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21242421/zoom-300-million...

[throwaway984393]

They can tell me they're the second coming of Christ as long as they make televideo work better than all the crap alternatives.