Re: [tlug] Corona and schools in Japan

["Curt J. Sampson" <cjs@example.com>]

On 2020-04-30 11:40 -0400 (Thu), Scott Robbins wrote:

> For me it's Slack. When they started, it was easy to use irssi and weechat
> with them. Then they took the irc gateway off....
>
> Anyway, point being that Slack started being able to work with everything
> and is gradually pushing them all out--seems like they're using the old
> embrace, engulf, and extinguish (or whatever it is).

Well, that seems to me a natural effect of Slack being what it is. In
terms of features and usability, Slack is one of the best chat systems
out there. (With the odd exception: why they insist that link text
must be the raw URL, even if it's a 250 character unreadable
monstrosity, is beyond me.) In other chat systems I really miss
threads and embedded shared editable documents, for example.

But as such features get added, gatewaying becomes harder. (A good bit
of the difficulty is probably invisible unless you're familiar with
the corporate Slack features, such how it deals with auditing,
federation and guest accounts, and so on.)

Also, keep in mind Slack's target audience: relatively small, closed
groups. In most cases the organization is not just paying Slack for
the service, but paying _you_ to be using that service, and not
infrequently has even has provided you with the system running the
chat client. They're generally not interested in supporting other
clients because there's really no gain there.

(I am here talking not about idiot organziations who don't understand
productivity and would make a vim user use Emacs or vice versa, but
organizations that are effective at making their workers productive by
letting them use good tools.)

So as commercial services go, Slack looks to me to be one of the most
innocuous. Their model is clearly to make money by directly charging
the organizations that want the service, and they have no interest in
anybody who's not willing to pay for that. They're nothing at all like
the truly insidious examples of exploitative services, such as Line.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch