It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.
So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins.
That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.
IRC was designed, mostly, for two types of users: A) Large institution users who had a fixed link to the internet and ran in their shell on a mainframe. B) Dial-in users, who's devices mostly stayed connected, and when they disconnected, usually required manual intervention to get back on.
Anyone, and I mean ANYONE using a mobile phone SHOULD be using a 'bouncer' or other gateway to access a live communications environment. This would be more like use case A where someone has a small agent on a slice of a server they 'trust' and that maintains state (for their client) and stateful connection (for links to other servers and users).
IIRC, Quassel IRC has such a client/server model for the client, there are probably others too.
That's what SASL has been for for over a decade nowadays :)
The goal is to get rid of the historic interfaces which required a lot of RTFM, and instead to allow users to discover functionality through the UI easily.
If you have any suggestions on what to improve regarding UX of Quasseldroid (my main project), I'd love to hear suggestions, as I'm always interested in improving its UX and learning more about UX design. After all, I, as quasseldroid maintainer, am just one student, not a team of highly paid UX designers.
(And personally, I'm a huge fan of tools like Zulip, Mattermost and Matrix as well — we're all fighting on the same side, after all :)
https://rocket.chat/
https://zulipchat.com/
https://matrix.org/
https://mattermost.com/And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable.
If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)
I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack is light years beyond in terms of the UX of even the nicest IRC clients. I think Discord is probably even better than Slack though.
If you think that you can't do free software development without relying on all the capabilities of Slack, then the honest thing to do is to quit and spend the rest of your days just working on proprietary stuff. You obviously prefer the solution which has features over any other concern, so why would you waste your time having anything to do with free software?
Richard Stallman obviously used proprietary software. But not past the point when he had replace it, even imperfectly: "I began work on GNU Emacs in September 1984, and in early 1985 it was beginning to be usable. This enabled me to begin using Unix systems to do editing; having no interest in learning to use vi or ed, I had done my editing on other kinds of machines until then." [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf] This tells us that Stallman used Unix. Well, why wouldn't he have; what other practical way was there to code anything? (One supposes he could have started from the bootloader on up, like the Unix guys before him.)
Stallman wouldn't use Unix today, since it has been replaced by free software, and he wouldn't use arguments like, well, such and such proprietary Unix has better memory management or faster I/O, so I will still use that.
If you're using things like Slack or Github without the slightest intent of working toward replacing them, yet using them for free software activities, then that is a comically conflicted position.
And personally I consider the slack UI, especially due to the different workspaces, relatively unintuitive.
I don't see a big difference between sending the message :rose: in Slack and having the client display it as a picture of a rose, vs sending the message :rose: in IRC and having the client display it as a picture of a rose. Emoji don't enter into it.
Reactions, maybe.