Slack

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Slack is a closed-source team communication tool similar to IRC but with expanding support for various types of content such as emoji polls, inline images, and attachments.

Until 2018, Slack offered the ability to connect to their proprietary system using the open standards IRC and XMPP, but it was announced on March 6 2018 that this support would be phased out, starting immediately and completing on May 15, 2018.

IndieWeb Slack

We have an IndieWebCamp Slack team. It has channels for each of our IRC channels so there is still one "chat room" per subject area whether you use Slack or IRC.

Create an account on the IndieWeb Slack:

• https://chat.indieweb.org/slack

Join the IndieWeb Slack rooms using your web browser:

• https://indiewebcamp.slack.com/

FAQ

What is Slackbot

Slackbot is the bot that appears in Slack.

Experience

People love Slack HQ. They make it clear to see who’s speaking with avatars and whitespace, offset the speaker from the text, make it clear what the person said, and de-emphasize the timestamp and room actions. They also support emoji. Caveat: I’ve never used it, I just know they’re doing something right because people are fanatical about it. — User:Chloeweil.com

Brainstorming

POSSE to

It may be possible to POSSE posts to slack, e.g. even photo posts.

No known IndieWeb Examples of people POSSEing to Slack.

References

• Slack HQ
• Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

History

The makers of Slack previously made:

• Glitch is a now-defunct game created by the founders of Slack.

This has nothing to do with current Glitch thing(s).

IRC Gateway

Slack operated an IRC gateway enabling connecting to a Slack instance from an IRC client. In March 2018 they announced it will be shut down in 2 months.

Note that this does not affect the IndieWeb IRC/Slack bridge, since that uses the Slack API directly to connect our IRC and Slack channels.

See Also

• IRC
• 2018-04-02 John O'Nolan: After 4 years of running a 11,000 member public Slack community ... we’ve decided to shut the whole thing down for good. - thread unrolled. Criticism: scaling limits.
• https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/980873578764697600
  • "There’s evidence for this in declining usage numbers across most large Slack communities, and just a general fatigue for the format.
    https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/980697983296552960" @JohnONolan April 2, 2018
• 2017-06-22 Fast Company: My Company Tried Slack For Two Years. This Is Why We Quit.

  This remote company decided real-time communication was holding it back. So it built a new tool [[[Twist]]] from the ground up.

• Downtime: ~1 hour, 2018-08-28 most of 10:30-11:30 for apparently all workspaces / users. https://twitter.com/jonmark93/status/1034501570472235008 and https://status.slack.com/2018-08/389f96c3886d7d56
  • "Slack is down. PANIC" @jonmark93 August 28, 2018
• ^^^ PDT (UTC-07:00)
• https://twitter.com/jonmark93/status/1034501570472235008
  • "Slack is down. PANIC" @jonmark93 August 28, 2018
• https://twitter.com/jwebbstevens/status/1034501195333885953
  • "What a surprise Slack is down again...." @jwebbstevens August 28, 2018
• Criticism: https://twitter.com/aaomidi/status/1075621119028314112
  • "So @SlackHQ decided to send me this email. No way to appeal this decision. No way to prove that I'm not living in Iran and not working with Iranians on slack. Nope. Just hello we're banning your account." @aaomidi December 20, 2018
• 2019-01-16 Logo Criticism: Daring Fireball: Slack Gets a Bland New Identity From Pentagram
• How to make a "slack:" link: https://api.slack.com/docs/deep-linking#open_a_direct_message
• How to find your TEAM_ID and USER_ID: View Source on the desktop web slack client ( https://indiewebcamp.slack.com/ ) and search for "team_id" in the source. The after it starting with "T" is your team_id, and just before it the value starting with "U" is your USER_ID
• Criticism: 2019-05-01 Vox Media: The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work / Job software like Teams, Slack, and Workplace were supposed to make us more productive. They haven’t.
• 2019-06-28 outage: https://status.slack.com/2019-06/9f63d8e30ee85f46
• 2020-03-13 You can't block someone on Slack — here's what you can do instead[1]
• Outage 2020-10-05 https://twitter.com/SlackStatus/status/1313141953735745536
  • "Some users may be unable to connect to Slack, while others are seeing general performance issues. Our team continues to investigate and we will keep you posted as we know more. https://status.slack.com/2020-10/e8c094cc99aabf64" @SlackStatus October 5, 2020
• Criticism of longevity of private / corporate-internal Slacks: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109922098970400267
  • "I cannot tell you how much it would please me if Slack isn't renewed and everything I ever said at Twitter was wiped from the face of the universe https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-more-twitter-drama-after-slack-shutdown-employees-play-hooky/" @rodhilton February 24, 2023
• bridged via the [IRC Gateway]