> But it's hard to overstate the dangers of over-centralisation like this, and I say it as a person who uses Slack professionally. I think you're overstating t

> But it's hard to overstate the dangers of over-centralisation like this, and I say it as a person who uses Slack professionally. I think you're overstating the importance of a chat based application. It's not mission critical to operate a software business or any business for that matter so why is this so "dangerous"? > Maybe running your own Zulip instance isn't as sexy or has the same integrations, but at least you can have a person responsible for fixing it and get status updates, and ultimately: as much as Ops is a dirty word; being able to plan your downtimes can help a _lot_. Let's play the devil's advocate and say it IS mission critical. Now you need to pay full time staff (read -> not cheap) and computing resources and integration development (depending on solution) for it to be useful AND guarantee uptime. I don't understand what the big fuss is about Slack vs IRC. Pretending as if every business in the world has access to competent sys admin folks is not only foolish, but it's dangerous to assume.