This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service like Slack. Your options include:<p>* Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol)<p>* Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature)<p>* MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license)<p>* Zulip.org (all about threads!)<p>* ...or indeed IRC or XMPP.<p>(disclaimer; I work on Matrix).
I've switched to using TwistApp (<a href="https://www.twistapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.twistapp.com</a>) with my team. Unlike Slack where you have channels where everyone talks about everything, TwistApp bases conversations around threads. Every problem that's being worked on has its own thread. Once it's completed, I close and archive the threads. Very effective for getting things done as every task is isolated in a separate thread and discussions don't overlap.<p>Also read this post by Amir, the founder of TwistApp, "Why we're betting against real time messaging" - <a href="https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09" rel="nofollow">https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...</a>
You could use this time to read The Slack threat <a href="https://carlchenet.com/the-slack-threat/" rel="nofollow">https://carlchenet.com/the-slack-threat/</a>
I'm hoping they publish a public post-mortem. Learning from this kind of outage is the best kind experience for engineering - though it's far better when only staging goes down and not prod.
And of course today's the first day we're using Slack for audience Q&A at a conference. 360 folks in a room now have to...raise their hands! So barbaric.
Slack is currently down and I've realized, for better or worse, what Slack has really done.. It's created an expectation for immediacy. I thought about sending my question to someone via email but then just thought, "I'll wait for Slack to be back up, it'll be faster anyhow".
I worked for BlackBerry when outages started to become a thing.<p>When your business motto is 'always on' - it's really, really bad to be 'off' - it's a deep transgression of the brand promise.<p>BB was structured poorly for this - they didn't grasp the concept of multiple nodes of redundancy very well. (Easy in hindsight).<p>But - we should all be impressed at how highly available Google, FB and some other brands are. That's impressive.
I just realized that being a remote team. I can't join any of my teammates. Neither see live changes to the infrastructure and the repositories.<p>The things we take for granted.
Reminder why your status page should be hosted in a very different way than your regular infrastructure... so you're way less likely to end up with issues on both at the same time.<p>I like how statuspage.io even has metastatuspage.com in case their primary domain/DNS/TLD has issues.
This page seems to not be throwing 500s: <a href="https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f" rel="nofollow">https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f</a>
Wow, talk about realising how much we rely on Slack.. suddenly I feel so disconnected and alone.<p><a href="https://www.customd.com/articles/65/slack-is-down" rel="nofollow">https://www.customd.com/articles/65/slack-is-down</a>
<p><pre><code> We are aware of connectivity issues and are actively lnvestigating.
3:58 PM PDT・See in your timezone
</code></pre>
They spelled investigating with a lower-case 'l' :\
Does that bug anyone other than me?
Why CPU goes like crazy every time slack loses connectivity?<p>You can easily test this by disconnecting from wifi. As soon as you're offline the fan starts spinning until you get your connection back.
Slack has a nice market share, but also many competitors, many of them 100% ripoffs with the same features (to name a few, Attlassian HipChat and MS Teams... not to mention open source products).<p>Slack has been experiencing service degradation often lately, so I would not be surprised if people start switching.<p>In our team we already started looking for an alternative.