wee-slack VS Synapse

I replaced the Slack client with wee-slack [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack]. It brings a much more "zen" experience to using Slack and better compliments my keyboard-centric desktop/workflow (e.g. clear all unread channel notifications? keybind! Jump between all the high priority/@mentioned notifications? keybind!) It also helps if you're expected to be available via Slack, since it can keep you showing "green" while you've actually been ignoring it.

Fwiw, last time I looked, wee-slack was a decent improvement for slack text chat. These days maybe a matrix bridge?

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

> - My company uses Slack's enterprise auth, and all the CLI slack clients I could find haven't been updated in years and no longer work.

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack is decent.

> - The web is using more javascript than in the past.

cli browsers are probably the only truly unrealistic thing. An idea that I've been kicking around for a while is to build a simple CLI "browser" that uses PhantomJS or similar under the hood to request, load, and render the page into an image, convert the image to sixel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel) and display it that way (or use any of the various terminal emulator-specific features (KiTTY has https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ for example)). Probably pretty clunky, but it's doable if you're in the mood to write something purely for fun.

> - Mutt doesn't handle multiple email accounts natively for work/personal. The solutions are hacks at best. Email servers are starting to use more complete auth mechanisms that don't work well with mutt.

I don't think they're hacks. You can define exactly how you want it to work. That's a feature, not a bug. Sure, it takes a little bit of work to set up but you can use https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/tree/master/.config/mut... as a starting point if you'd like.

It has been unable to log in for the last year: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/844

When the IRC gateway stopped working, I found https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack worked pretty well. But I switched employers months ago and no longer have to use Slack, which is even better! (So, I don't know how well it works today.)

The weechat plugin unfortunately cannot coexist with wee-slack (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/812, https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/issues/248), so if one wants to participate in the Haskell Foundation Slack, or any other Slack (e.g. for work), then Matrix is off limits. Yeah, it's just a bug that will eventually get fixed, but it does make things unnecessarily complicated. :-/

Not really Vim but there is a plugin for WeeChat: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

NB. On integrating slack & other webby things. Terminal applications might be a big help here (the Windows terminal now has excellent compatibility if you’re using Windows). For instance, there’s a slack plugin for weechat (a terminal IRC / chat client) which by all accounts works pretty well. Or there’s this client that runs directly in a terminal.

Wee-Slack is a WeeChat plugin that is based on python WebSockets and delivers most of the basic functionality of the Slack client. To use this, you need to receive a Slack API token. One way is - after installing - to run on WeeChat: /slack register This command prints a link you should open in your browser to authorize WeeChat with Slack. Once you’ve accomplished this, you should run:

What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.

Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages. (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).

If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

some context re the Matrix isses, long history apparently: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481#issuecomm...

Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.

This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481

> That doesn't make this situation any less bad to the rest of the community.

How is the community suffering here? Let's say Element adds a bunch of baller stuff to their versions over the next few months and then closes the source. Can't the community just fork the last AGPL version? You might say, "well then no one can take the AGPL fork and make their own closed-source business", but do you want them to? Even if you do, they still can with the existing Apache-licensed version, just like Element is doing right now.

You're arguing that Element will lose a lot of contributions, but TFA points out that despite being super open, the vast majority of contributions are still made by Element employees (which seems to be true [0]). It's not the case that Element is looking to monetize the (small) contributions of others, it is the case that others are looking to monetize the (huge) contributions of Element.

And besides, aren't the MSCs the core of Matrix? It's already super possible to build your own compliant client and server.

The situation is that Element needs money to keep developing the ecosystem. It would be cool if there were a big network of donors and contributions, but there isn't. You're essentially saying, "that's fine, go out of business then, and the community will keep developing the ecosystem", but that's not happening now, and it can still happen anyway with the Apache-licensed versions, which again people can still contribute to.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/graphs/contributors