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Saying Goodbye to Slack’s IRC and XMPP Gateways
44 points by _em6m on March 7, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments
As Slack has evolved over the years, we’ve built features and capabilities — like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) — that the IRC and XMPP gateways aren’t able to handle. Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways.

We know this may affect your workflow in ways that are frustrating or disruptive, and we’re here to help and answer questions. Thank you in advance for making this transition with us.

Please note that the gateways will be closed according to the following schedule:

* March 6, 2018: No longer available to newly-created workspaces

* April 3, 2018: Removed from workspaces where they’re not in use

* May 15, 2018: Closed for all remaining workspaces

If your workspace currently uses gateways, your experience won’t change until May 15th. But we encourage you to prepare for the transition soon. Feel free to contact our support team for help.




> Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways.

The IRC gateway was the only way I was interacting with Slack. If it's gone, I'll just stop using Slack. That's ok, but is not exactly providing me a "high-quality" experience. (Meanwhile: IRC clients are capable of connecting to servers with TLS and authenticating certificates in the same manner as web browsers. So I'm not sure about the "secure" criticism either.)

Is there an API that will continue to be available going forward that 3rd party software can interact with?


weechat has a slack api based plugin https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack


It looks like Slack’s page about this shut down is only available when logged in: https://my.slack.com/account/gateways (linked to from https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...).

At least as of this comment, Slack’s blog and status site don’t say anything. It seems like this warrants at least a post on the blog, but maybe that’s coming later today.


I'm very disappointed in this change. Having communication centralized in one place is important to me, and this means I cannot centralize on open, federated protocols.


> XMPP gateways aren’t able to handle

Yeah, sure. Though I only do bets in chocolate or beer, I do bet XMPP has some kind of extension built for it already, you just don't want to support it.

We so needed another walled garden of communication platforms.


It does (though these particular three I don't know how common they are); Probably in IRCv3 too for all I know.

UPDATE: changed because I read this wrong; but the answer is still "yes, this would have been relatively easy for them to do".


I couldn't find any news about this, and I'm not really sure when they announced it, but I just noticed it so I'm posting it here.


WeeChat with the wee-slack plugin is pretty good (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack). That doesn't help folks that don't use WeeChat though.

I have been investigating Riot/Matrix lately. One of the things that really bothers me about the Slack desktop client is its lack of multiple windows. Participating in more than one conversation at a time is a flurry of clicks/keystrokes to keep up. Unfortunately the Riot client doesn't appear to have multiple windows either and the status of the Slack gateway is somewhat unclear.


Is anyone aware of a self-hosted alternative?


You mean something like mattermost.com ?


I meant more of a direct replacement of the Slack IRC gateway rather than a replacement of Slack itself.


I've heard that using Slack with biboumi as a gateway is better than their gateway ever was, but can't say myself. I'd be curious to get your experience if you try it.


Does that help if they're also turning off the XMPP gateway?


I thought biboumi also supported Slack natively, but I might have been mixing it up with one of the others. Spectrum maybe? "I've always heard that using a third party gateway which uses the Slack API to communicate with slack is a better experience" is probably what I should have said.


No. What SamWhited probably meant is “It’s better to use XMPP-client -> biboumi -> slack’s irc gateway -> slack than XMPP-client -> slack’s XMPP gateway -> slack”. Because otherwise, the comment makes no sense, since biboumi is not a native Slack gateway.

So, since both XMPP and IRC gateway will disappear, it does not help.


Matrix/Riot.


The full news (shown above) is tucked behind a your Slack login and linked from this page: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...


Another vote for WeeChat an the Slack plugin. Which utilizes the Slack API (so you are kind of out on your butt if one of your slack's won't allow you to get a token) Weechat is a bit of work to get it working/looking the way you want, but it's worth it.


This could be an alternative solution: https://github.com/ekmartin/slack-irc


RIP Slack. You followed the Microsoft strategy all the way to the end. Embrace, extend... but this extinguish will only be of Slack itself.


This is what you get for using Slack. Meanwhile, IRC still works fine.


Whelp, goodbye Slack, hello Mattermost.


The MOTD I got in my IRC client:

https://ae7.st/pb/?6cb6e86dc5d27158#SKb8x+tKyazabJWuFaGjURqe...




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