...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, y

...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, your communications are often legally not your own property (though it is arguable, at least in the US). If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them. A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed. You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many. You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.