On the demise of Slack's IRC / XMPP gateways
I have grudgingly joined three Slack workspaces , due to me being part of proejects that use it as a communications center for their participants. Why grudgingly? Because there is very little that it adds to well-established communications standards that we have had for long years decades.
On this topic, I must refer you to the talk and article presented by Megan Squire, one of the clear highlights of my participation last year at the 13th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS2017): «Considering the Use of Walled Gardens for FLOSS Project Communication». Please do have a good read of this article.
Thing is, after several years of playing open with probably the best integration gateway I have seen, Slack is joining the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish-minded companies. Of course, I strongly doubt they will manage to extinguish XMPP or IRC, but they want to strengthen the walls around their walled garden…
So, once they have established their presence among companies and developer groups alike, Slack is shutting down their gateways to XMPP and IRC, arguing it’s impossible to achieve feature-parity via the gateway.
Of course, I guess all of us recognize and understand there has long not been feature parity. But that’s a feature, not a bug! I expressly dislike the abuse of emojis and images inside what’s supposed to be a work-enabling medium. Of course, connecting to Slack via IRC, I just don’t see the content not meant for me.
The real motivation is they want to control the full user experience.
Well, they have lost me as a user. The day my IRC client fails to connect to Slack, I will delete my user account. They already had record of all of my interactions using their system. Maybe I won’t be able to move any of the groups I am part of away from Slack – But many of us can help create a flood.
Say no to predatory tactics. Say no to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. Say no to Slack.
Comments
Alberto 2018-03-10 00:34:00
Wait for Google’s next move on email
Talking about EEE: https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/ Now that they own most of the email endpoints, they will fix how email works.
Anonymous 2018-03-10 15:12:00
They are just scared of
They are just scared of Matrix.
Anonymous 2018-04-11 07:34:49
amp for email
Oy, “fix” email, in the veterinary sense, it seems. Can’t have open communications channels they aren’t pipelines for phone home ads, can we? Admittedly, email had been broken by the flood that is spam: and rather than fix that with protocol changes (solving the key management problem, so we can all put our mail in envelopes, among other things) Google had provided really very good filtering, on their client only. Giving them access to all those lovely signals, and now, enable even more invasive spam. Yikes.