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> 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 (aft

> 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). In so doing, they have closed off their discussions from search engines and they prevent people from accessing their past archives. Additionally the traditional mailing lists are full of "please can I have an invite to the Slack workspace" spam

BuildTheRobots 9y ago
It's not even that discussions have been lost from search engines, actual slack users are loosing massive amounts of history. If you a free/OSS project then you likely have little budget so you're stuck using hte free tier of Slack, which means users can only see the last 10,000 messages. We're loosing vast swathes of our history/discussion/media.
- RyJones 9y ago
  The history isn't searchable, but the owners of the Slack can export the complete public history at any time. Here is an export that I did when we moved Hyperledger to Rocket.Chat: https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive I see the hosted version is down, though.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Key word: public history. Most of my interesting history is in private chats.
- richthegeek 9y ago
  So would there be a use-case for a combined bot+app that you can connect some storage to (S3, FTP) which archives all channel message history in a searchable form? It could make it visible to search engines, searchable by humans, linkable to people outside of slack, and shouldn't take up very much storage space. Should be quite trivial to build also, and cheap enough to run as a bit of charity if projects pay for their own storage.
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    For open source developers logs of private 1:1 discussions are also highly valuable, so this would only be a bandaid.
    - herbst 9y ago
      The last company I worked for used small channels for this issue instead of going 1:1, which was more or less reserved for private talk
      - Mithaldu 9y ago
        Gotta admit, as a workaround for the deficiency of "doesn't have local client logging", that one's really funny.
        BuildTheRobots 9y ago
        Local client logging doesn't solve all problems (though yes, i still want to be able to grep text files if I choose). The two I regularly encounter (which shared storage fixes) is either moving to a different device (or trying to remember which ones have which bits of history on) and also integrating new team members. The latter is especially important if you're doing anything technical/support related; if you've had 2 days of discussions and want to add someone else in, they need the history, not for you to try and cherry pick the important bits of the last few hours to then fail to get them upto speed.
  - raffomania 9y ago
    This would be quite the workaround though, completely evading the root of the problem (slack).
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    Several slack groups already do this.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
- PakG1 9y ago
  This is the main reason why my team switched to use self-hosted Mattermost. Unlimited message history is important for us, but not worth what Slack would cost when something like Mattermost is available. If you're a tech team with people who know Linux, I don't understand why you would choose Slack over something like Mattermost. If you're a small business without a tech team, more understandable.
  - omginternets 9y ago
    How did the transition go? We're seriously considering on our end, and trying to anticipate any friction points that might occur. Any caveats, gotchas or hidden complexities to be aware of?
    - PakG1 9y ago
      Honestly, it was so smooth. Deleting old unnecessary channels seems impossible, but whatever. Have all of our chat history migrated over, no complaints. One team member missed the old Slack colour scheme, but he found a Slack skin for Mattermost that makes it look the same for him.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    Have you tried their Zoom voice / screensharing plugin? If so, how well does it work?
    - PakG1 9y ago
      Have not. We don't do much screen sharing among our own team, and external screen sharing is done using other tools. Interested in other people's opinions about it though.
    - praneshp 9y ago
      If you are asking about Slack's Zoom plugin, I used it at a previous job, and it's pretty good. (We were a small team in Sunnyvale, CA, the bulk of the team was in Phoenix, some in Seattle)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The one slack I am in has had some discussion of limiting history further than the free limits. It turns out that people don't necessarily want lots of records of everything everywhere.
- freefal 9y ago
  If you're a free/OSS project and have set up a non-profit, Slack will upgrade you to unlimited messages for free. I know because I'm in such a slack channel (lichess.org).
- akoncius 9y ago
  you can use https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ , it's free for OSS/free communities
- p0nce 9y ago
  That's why I use Discord, the free tier has _unlimited_ history. The client itself is lightweight, and it's an incremental improvement on IRC in many other areas, as you would expect. Still using IRC of course :)
  - snvzz 9y ago
    >the free tier has _unlimited_ history. I sure do hope this is sarcasm. Surely you do know this can go away at any time.
    - p0nce 9y ago
      Sorry it was not sarcasm. You are right tho, when that happen I'll probably go back to IRC. The problem with better chat is that it's better, so you spend more time on it.
  - Crespyl 9y ago
    Discord is an Electron app, so while it's not as bad as Slack, it's still hardly what I'd call lightweight, especially in comparison to IRC/XMPP clients. There's a lot to like in Discord, and it rapidly became the go to client for all my gaming related friends and activities, but it suffers from the same root pitfalls that Slack always has. It will inevitably run out of VC money (or whatever they're spending now) at some point and start wanting to actually turn a profit.
    - indigodaddy 9y ago
      I imagine this problem would be remedied by an acquisition.. or at least masked... Twitch (Amazon) seems a likely candidate, considering it's usage by Twitch users, and also the fact that Amazon doesn't really have skin in the game currently in the chat market (do they?), and could use a product like Discord in their ecosystem.
      - Uristqwerty 9y ago
        Some time ago, Twitch bought Curse, probably for the Curse App that already does voice and text chat. Also viewing streams and mod management for a handful of games.
- toss1 9y ago
  Exactly! As pointed out in the article: "Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations." Slack recognizes, unfortunately before most of it's customers, that the history is one of the most important assets of a company -- it is the shared institutional knowledge, the thousands of hard-won lessons of all the things that can go wrong that are now fixed, and how they were fixed. This institutional knowledge is not only in the heads of the workers, but also in the papers, and many would need, or at least benefit from, a lookup of the details to re-use that knowledge. This institutional knowledge is a key competitive advantage of almost every company. This business model of capturing it and rent-seeking on selling it back to them is a devil's bargain. "Here's this really slick UI for free, only costs a bit later... nevermind that we'll own the soul of your company and you'll need to pay us tribute in perpetuity..."
zaarn 9y ago
I believe one of the problems there is an inaccessibility problem. Atleast for the mailing list. Most mailing list archives lack fulltext search and a modern looking design (I'm not even asking for an SPA or anything JS, just a tiny bit of CSS could make a lot of difference). It's also not as easy to onboard, integrate and host mailing lists. Ideally a mailing list could be hosted with a few button clicks, people could join a mailing list like they join newsletters (instead of having to send an email to the mailing list application with some command in it) and people should be able to anonymously send emails. Plus points if you can, optionally, manage emails like github issues and properly keep track of bug reports.
- djhworld 9y ago
  I'm not a big fan of mailing lists either, for the reasons you describe What I do dislike though is, as Slack is invite only (the software is designed for "Teams" in workplaces, not public forums) you have to explicitly request access from the admins and this is often via the mailing lists.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    The invite-only nature of slack is probably why I never spend any serious amount of time in any slack, though some other factors may play a role too considering I quite enjoy Discord (OSS discords never seem to replace any discussion board, only supplement it, plus discord has unlimited search)
- u801e 9y ago
  Services like gmane actually provide a email list to NNTP gateway that allow for searches and easy browsing.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I rarely see a big textbox on the top of the main page of any mailing list archive that says "Fulltext search" (and isn't totally crap). "NNTP Gateway" doesn't sound encouraging in that it is explained and available for the layperson to easily employ as search tool.
unicornporn 9y ago
Just a heads up. If you suddenly feel that IRC is too feature free or outdated for your needs, have some courtesy and consider a modern, federated and open solution instead. https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Also, for those still using IRC, and needing an easy way to get others on it: IrcCloud is an excellent service with a mobile client lightyears beyond any other.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  Let's imagine I'm on a small open source project using slack. We don't want to host anything. Which of the slack alternatives is the easiest dropping?
  - nileshtrivedi 9y ago
    http://open.relay-chat.com http://open.relay-chat.com is hosted MatterMost offered for free to open-source projects.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ was acquired by GitLab and thus likely to remain for quite a while. Also, it might even suit the needs of such a project better than Slack, as apparently it's aimed more at communities rather than teams, but I'm not sure what that means in practice.
    - Arkanosis 9y ago
      … and it's open-source (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/).
  - unicornporn 9y ago
    https://riot.im/app/#/register https://riot.im/app/#/register Register matrix.org accounts there. There's a web client, desktop clients and mobile clients (called Riot.im). It's open source and federated. And, there are IRC bridges!
subpixel 9y ago
This. A thousand times this.

BuildTheRobots 9y ago

It's not even that discussions have been lost from search engines, actual slack users are loosing massive amounts of history. If you a free/OSS project then you likely have little budget so you're stuck using hte free tier of Slack, which means users can only see the last 10,000 messages. We're loosing vast swathes of our history/discussion/media.

RyJones 9y ago
The history isn't searchable, but the owners of the Slack can export the complete public history at any time. Here is an export that I did when we moved Hyperledger to Rocket.Chat: https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive https://github.com/hyperledger/slack-archive I see the hosted version is down, though.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Key word: public history. Most of my interesting history is in private chats.
richthegeek 9y ago
So would there be a use-case for a combined bot+app that you can connect some storage to (S3, FTP) which archives all channel message history in a searchable form? It could make it visible to search engines, searchable by humans, linkable to people outside of slack, and shouldn't take up very much storage space. Should be quite trivial to build also, and cheap enough to run as a bit of charity if projects pay for their own storage.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  For open source developers logs of private 1:1 discussions are also highly valuable, so this would only be a bandaid.
  - herbst 9y ago
    The last company I worked for used small channels for this issue instead of going 1:1, which was more or less reserved for private talk
    - Mithaldu 9y ago
      Gotta admit, as a workaround for the deficiency of "doesn't have local client logging", that one's really funny.
      - BuildTheRobots 9y ago
        Local client logging doesn't solve all problems (though yes, i still want to be able to grep text files if I choose). The two I regularly encounter (which shared storage fixes) is either moving to a different device (or trying to remember which ones have which bits of history on) and also integrating new team members. The latter is especially important if you're doing anything technical/support related; if you've had 2 days of discussions and want to add someone else in, they need the history, not for you to try and cherry pick the important bits of the last few hours to then fail to get them upto speed.
- raffomania 9y ago
  This would be quite the workaround though, completely evading the root of the problem (slack).
- Can_Not 9y ago
  Several slack groups already do this.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
PakG1 9y ago
This is the main reason why my team switched to use self-hosted Mattermost. Unlimited message history is important for us, but not worth what Slack would cost when something like Mattermost is available. If you're a tech team with people who know Linux, I don't understand why you would choose Slack over something like Mattermost. If you're a small business without a tech team, more understandable.
- omginternets 9y ago
  How did the transition go? We're seriously considering on our end, and trying to anticipate any friction points that might occur. Any caveats, gotchas or hidden complexities to be aware of?
  - PakG1 9y ago
    Honestly, it was so smooth. Deleting old unnecessary channels seems impossible, but whatever. Have all of our chat history migrated over, no complaints. One team member missed the old Slack colour scheme, but he found a Slack skin for Mattermost that makes it look the same for him.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Have you tried their Zoom voice / screensharing plugin? If so, how well does it work?
  - PakG1 9y ago
    Have not. We don't do much screen sharing among our own team, and external screen sharing is done using other tools. Interested in other people's opinions about it though.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    If you are asking about Slack's Zoom plugin, I used it at a previous job, and it's pretty good. (We were a small team in Sunnyvale, CA, the bulk of the team was in Phoenix, some in Seattle)
maxerickson 9y ago
The one slack I am in has had some discussion of limiting history further than the free limits. It turns out that people don't necessarily want lots of records of everything everywhere.
freefal 9y ago
If you're a free/OSS project and have set up a non-profit, Slack will upgrade you to unlimited messages for free. I know because I'm in such a slack channel (lichess.org).
akoncius 9y ago
you can use https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ , it's free for OSS/free communities
p0nce 9y ago
That's why I use Discord, the free tier has _unlimited_ history. The client itself is lightweight, and it's an incremental improvement on IRC in many other areas, as you would expect. Still using IRC of course :)
- snvzz 9y ago
  >the free tier has _unlimited_ history. I sure do hope this is sarcasm. Surely you do know this can go away at any time.
  - p0nce 9y ago
    Sorry it was not sarcasm. You are right tho, when that happen I'll probably go back to IRC. The problem with better chat is that it's better, so you spend more time on it.
- Crespyl 9y ago
  Discord is an Electron app, so while it's not as bad as Slack, it's still hardly what I'd call lightweight, especially in comparison to IRC/XMPP clients. There's a lot to like in Discord, and it rapidly became the go to client for all my gaming related friends and activities, but it suffers from the same root pitfalls that Slack always has. It will inevitably run out of VC money (or whatever they're spending now) at some point and start wanting to actually turn a profit.
  - indigodaddy 9y ago
    I imagine this problem would be remedied by an acquisition.. or at least masked... Twitch (Amazon) seems a likely candidate, considering it's usage by Twitch users, and also the fact that Amazon doesn't really have skin in the game currently in the chat market (do they?), and could use a product like Discord in their ecosystem.
    - Uristqwerty 9y ago
      Some time ago, Twitch bought Curse, probably for the Curse App that already does voice and text chat. Also viewing streams and mod management for a handful of games.
toss1 9y ago
Exactly! As pointed out in the article: "Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations." Slack recognizes, unfortunately before most of it's customers, that the history is one of the most important assets of a company -- it is the shared institutional knowledge, the thousands of hard-won lessons of all the things that can go wrong that are now fixed, and how they were fixed. This institutional knowledge is not only in the heads of the workers, but also in the papers, and many would need, or at least benefit from, a lookup of the details to re-use that knowledge. This institutional knowledge is a key competitive advantage of almost every company. This business model of capturing it and rent-seeking on selling it back to them is a devil's bargain. "Here's this really slick UI for free, only costs a bit later... nevermind that we'll own the soul of your company and you'll need to pay us tribute in perpetuity..."

zaarn 9y ago

I believe one of the problems there is an inaccessibility problem. Atleast for the mailing list. Most mailing list archives lack fulltext search and a modern looking design (I'm not even asking for an SPA or anything JS, just a tiny bit of CSS could make a lot of difference). It's also not as easy to onboard, integrate and host mailing lists. Ideally a mailing list could be hosted with a few button clicks, people could join a mailing list like they join newsletters (instead of having to send an email to the mailing list application with some command in it) and people should be able to anonymously send emails. Plus points if you can, optionally, manage emails like github issues and properly keep track of bug reports.

djhworld 9y ago
I'm not a big fan of mailing lists either, for the reasons you describe What I do dislike though is, as Slack is invite only (the software is designed for "Teams" in workplaces, not public forums) you have to explicitly request access from the admins and this is often via the mailing lists.
- zaarn 9y ago
  The invite-only nature of slack is probably why I never spend any serious amount of time in any slack, though some other factors may play a role too considering I quite enjoy Discord (OSS discords never seem to replace any discussion board, only supplement it, plus discord has unlimited search)
u801e 9y ago
Services like gmane actually provide a email list to NNTP gateway that allow for searches and easy browsing.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I rarely see a big textbox on the top of the main page of any mailing list archive that says "Fulltext search" (and isn't totally crap). "NNTP Gateway" doesn't sound encouraging in that it is explained and available for the layperson to easily employ as search tool.

unicornporn 9y ago

Just a heads up. If you suddenly feel that IRC is too feature free or outdated for your needs, have some courtesy and consider a modern, federated and open solution instead. https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/

Mithaldu 9y ago
Also, for those still using IRC, and needing an easy way to get others on it: IrcCloud is an excellent service with a mobile client lightyears beyond any other.
CJefferson 9y ago
Let's imagine I'm on a small open source project using slack. We don't want to host anything. Which of the slack alternatives is the easiest dropping?
- nileshtrivedi 9y ago
  http://open.relay-chat.com http://open.relay-chat.com is hosted MatterMost offered for free to open-source projects.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ was acquired by GitLab and thus likely to remain for quite a while. Also, it might even suit the needs of such a project better than Slack, as apparently it's aimed more at communities rather than teams, but I'm not sure what that means in practice.
  - Arkanosis 9y ago
    … and it's open-source (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/).
- unicornporn 9y ago
  https://riot.im/app/#/register https://riot.im/app/#/register Register matrix.org accounts there. There's a web client, desktop clients and mobile clients (called Riot.im). It's open source and federated. And, there are IRC bridges!

subpixel 9y ago

This. A thousand times this.