<story><title>Slack is down</title><url>https://status.slack.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diggan</author><text>When things like this happen, I start thinking how much we got some things wrong, especially things like chat.&lt;p&gt;Here I sit, with my colleagues, connected to the same network, with the same application open, but we cannot write to each other, because some backend server in the US have a problem.&lt;p&gt;How in the world could this not have been fixed yet? Our internet backbone addiction is seriously crippling us when things go sour. Not thinking specifically about Slack, but other more mission-critical tools that just... stops working because they cannot ask the time from their backend server.&lt;p&gt;We seriously need P2P systems (without blockchains please) that can be used by normal applications to solve issues like this. Offline and local network communication should be obligatory today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cortesoft</author><text>There are P2P systems already, plus you can run an IRC server locally. But you don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Using a service like slack has downsides, as you are seeing now, but running your own service or using P2P has other downsides that we have deemed are even worse.&lt;p&gt;Maintenance, lack of client support, network access requirements, lack of features, etc.&lt;p&gt;Obviously right now the downsides of a central service is front and center, but we can&amp;#x27;t ignore the downsides of the alternatives.</text></comment>
<story><title>Slack is down</title><url>https://status.slack.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diggan</author><text>When things like this happen, I start thinking how much we got some things wrong, especially things like chat.&lt;p&gt;Here I sit, with my colleagues, connected to the same network, with the same application open, but we cannot write to each other, because some backend server in the US have a problem.&lt;p&gt;How in the world could this not have been fixed yet? Our internet backbone addiction is seriously crippling us when things go sour. Not thinking specifically about Slack, but other more mission-critical tools that just... stops working because they cannot ask the time from their backend server.&lt;p&gt;We seriously need P2P systems (without blockchains please) that can be used by normal applications to solve issues like this. Offline and local network communication should be obligatory today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sodman</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll still take a cloud service with rare outages over an on-premise solution that I need to manage, host, and maintain myself any day.</text></comment>