<story><title>Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways</title><text>11:14 -!- Message of the day&lt;p&gt;Hello! We have news to share — we&amp;#x27;ve decided it&amp;#x27;s       
time to close down the IRC and XMPP gateways to Slack.&lt;p&gt;After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where      
the gateways can no longer handle all of our features     
or security needs.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;ve been using the gateways for accessibility       
reasons, we&amp;#x27;re glad to let you know that it&amp;#x27;s now         
possible to navigate Slack by keyboard and with a         
screen reader — and we&amp;#x27;re making more improvements      
on a continual basis.&lt;p&gt;Still, we know this is a disruptive change, and we        
want to help with this transition in any way we can.      
Please follow this link to learn more about the           
upcoming changes:&lt;p&gt;slack.com&amp;#x2F;account&amp;#x2F;gateways&lt;p&gt;11:14 -!- End of MOTD command</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>saagarjha</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we&amp;#x27;ve made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of the accessibility features you need directly into Slack.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bramd</author><text>&amp;gt; Here&amp;#x27;s a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.&lt;p&gt;Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I take this promise with some skepticism.&lt;p&gt;So either this is a lack of priority and disrespect to a part of their users or some level of incompetence.&lt;p&gt;I might sound harsh about this, but imagine being a blind software dev that&amp;#x27;s supposed to work with Slack to participate in teams. Every day you sign on to your team it&amp;#x27;s possible that the Slack devs break something and you can&amp;#x27;t function. And now they closed the escape hatch.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways</title><text>11:14 -!- Message of the day&lt;p&gt;Hello! We have news to share — we&amp;#x27;ve decided it&amp;#x27;s       
time to close down the IRC and XMPP gateways to Slack.&lt;p&gt;After years of evolving, Slack is at the point where      
the gateways can no longer handle all of our features     
or security needs.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;ve been using the gateways for accessibility       
reasons, we&amp;#x27;re glad to let you know that it&amp;#x27;s now         
possible to navigate Slack by keyboard and with a         
screen reader — and we&amp;#x27;re making more improvements      
on a continual basis.&lt;p&gt;Still, we know this is a disruptive change, and we        
want to help with this transition in any way we can.      
Please follow this link to learn more about the           
upcoming changes:&lt;p&gt;slack.com&amp;#x2F;account&amp;#x2F;gateways&lt;p&gt;11:14 -!- End of MOTD command</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>saagarjha</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we&amp;#x27;ve made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of the accessibility features you need directly into Slack.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oconnor663</author><text>Moxie Marlinspike has a blog post about why protocols like XMPP aren&amp;#x27;t good enough to support modern messaging apps. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;signal.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;signal.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>