> One of the sad things that has come out of Slack's meteoric rise to success, has been how many free and open source projects have jumped over to using it (after previously using IRC or XMPP).
He's definitely honing in on a group of people who should support federated solutions and instead evangelized the opposite. Ironically there's a similar frustration with using the proprietary GitHub service rather than open source git sites like GitLab
Apples to oranges, GitHub provides Git as a service and Git is open source, so you can take your repo any time and host it yourself in number of different ways. It just happens that GitHub is most popular (for now) Git As A Service, probably due to the fact that GitLab had few horrible outages regularly every few months for past 2-3 years and hosting it yourself is/was also a bit of nightmare. Anyway, it's not like that. ;)
The problem with GitHub silo is not the repo hosting per se but the ancillary services. Issues are not easily exported. The milestones and related metadata are not easily exported. Even the identities are not easily exported since you can use noreply email addresses in git actions if you turn off public email
There are many different reasons to choose a service provider. Being FOSS should factor in, but it should hardly be the major factor. Currently, Slack and Github are better choices (Slack is far easier to get started using than IRC, and Github currently has more of a network effect than anything out there). While yes, it would be nice for open source projects to use open source solutions, they should be choosing the best tools for the job. If those aren't open source solutions, so be it.
My argument is that IRC is better because it doesn't do a lot of things. I really don't feel my day would be enhanced by people pasting images or animated emojis into my IRC channels.
I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.