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"Interactive email" is basically Slack.

We should make Slack a new internet protocol and application standard, and use that going forward to replace e-mail, texting, and the various isolated islands of "secure chat" solutions (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc). Allow us to retain and control our own data, while also enabling all of the features and functionality we've come to want from modern tools, and be compatible with other solutions.

IRC and e-mail are both old and busted. 99% of the world wants to communicate and share information with more interactive tooling than ASCII text in a console or static HTML in a mail reader. There are alternatives to Slack, but like every networked application created in the last 10 years, none of them define an interoperable standard. They are all their own vendor-lock-in islands.

Even Mattermost, the most polished "open-source" alternative, is not a standard, it's an application. Applications change all the time. Standards don't. Applications lose backwards compatibility, change their licenses, have closed ecosystems of servers. Standards don't. There's a reason that actual standard network protocols continue to work for 40 years, while applications made just a few years ago are dead and buried. Standards last. They enable interoperability in an ecosystem of supported technology. They give us flexibility, choice, competition, portability. The world is better when we have solid standards to build on.

Replace it all with a standard. Let anyone implement the standard, implement a client, a server, etc. And let people choose the tooling they want - but while being interoperable with everyone else's.

(Note that I'm not talking about federated social networks. E-mail and IRC are not social networks, they are communication tools, private by default, and have to be directed at specific individuals or groups)

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watermelon0 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think that you just described XMPP and Matrix, which are both standards.

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0xbadcafebee 4 days ago | parent [-]

Comparing XMPP/Matrix to Slack is like comparing Telnet to Chrome. Yes, they both display text, they're both interactive. But the latter has about 5,000x more features, which is why we all use it.

Yet with Slack, it doesn't use a standard. Could you build an app like Slack that includes XMPP/Matrix along with a whole lot of other stuff? Sure. But without the whole kitchen sink, you still don't have a standard other apps will follow. You have a proprietary app plus XMPP. Other apps won't be compatible with it. Which is the case with Slack's competitors.

Think of a web browser. It's larger than a kernel. It's probably the biggest, fattest, meatiest, most feature-rich application in the world. (And it should be, because it's a freakin' application platform at this point.) But it all runs on.... standards! Every part of it. I'm saying, do that, but for the massively feature-rich, complex, large, almost unwieldy, but insanely productive, communications platform that is Slack.

I get that a lot of people don't really understand what the big deal about Slack is. A lot of people thought the same thing about web browsers back in the day. But once they started using them a lot, they got it. It's not just a document viewer, just like Slack isn't just chat.

	▲	kuschku 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		So what features does Slack have that Matrix doesn't? Maybe huddles? But Matrix has persistent Voice/Video Rooms for that, which work just as well. Everything else, from bots and embeds over threads and spaces to reactions and emoji works the same.

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lern_too_spel 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

XMPP exists as a standard, and Google Chat was built on it. Then Google+ came along and needed more features, and instead of adding these features to a standard that supports federation (like XMPP or now Matrix), Vic Gundotra (I assume) did the expedient and stupid thing of building Hangouts Chat like Facebook Messenger, commencing the parade of throwaway Google communications products to come.

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nottorp 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Slack is basically irc with some bells and whistles, sorry :)

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nightpool 4 days ago | parent [-]

It really, really isn't.

	▲	Spivak 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		And anyone who claims that it is misunderstands both IRC and Slack.

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layer8 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Slack is chat, and chat is not email. Email has important properties that are lost in a chat protocol/UI.

	▲	Spivak 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Email and chat are identical in the modern age. The only difference is the coat of paint. Once chat could send attachments, do replies, persist history, have group chats, it supplanted email and has continued to do so for more than a decade. Chat even ate email's lunch in the one area it had a cultural advantage, conducting business.

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zzo38computer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think IRC and plain text email (especially if it does not use Unicode) are not so bad. NNTP is not so bad either.

And, standards should not be made excessively complicated or badly designed; even if there is some complexity they should be optional when possible.

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iaabtpbtpnn 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You want THE communication standard to be owned by Salesforce?

	▲	marcellus23 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Replace it all with a standard. Let anyone implement the standard, implement a client, a server, etc. And let people choose the tooling they want - but while being interoperable with everyone else's.