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We have a small team, and chose Quill over Slack because it seemed like the client felt more lightweight, and the product team would actually solicit feedback f

We have a small team, and chose Quill over Slack because it seemed like the client felt more lightweight, and the product team would actually solicit feedback from us in DMs. It very much sucks that I have to drop everything to move to an alternative. We'll probably go with Slack. I'm hoping you can still sideload their iPad app on an M1 Mac. In the end, I don't think Quill was significantly better. Search in chat history was nearly useless, and a reason we were already reconsidering alternatives. But those issues aside, it was never better enough that I'd go out and tell people, "You need to try Quill! It's so much better than Slack!" It's a shame that people will draw the wrong lesson from this. They'll think that Slack and Teams have deeply entrenched network effects, which might be true at large enterprises, but small teams like mine will gladly use a competitor that provides a significantly better experience. There might not be enough of us to justify raising $14.5 Million, but I suspect you could bootstrap something quite nice.

cyberpunk 5y ago
Why would you use the iPad version? I’m using the desktop one on a m1 and it’s fine..
- sandofsky 5y ago
  Maybe something has changed in the last few years, but the last time I used it, I found their Electron app to be a resource hogging pile of garbage. But that's just my opinion.
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    It was. They made improvements with their election app. Few years ago, it is resource hog and eat up batteries like it is candy while idling. It went from 100% to 30% within two hours. Now, it barely used up much resource and very light on battery. I recommend trying it out again, it is much better now than it was before.
    - IMcD23 5y ago
      It's still extremely heavy compared to any native Mac app. On my M1 machine, Slack (plus it's 4 separate helper processes) is currently using a total of 679MB of RAM. The Mail app, in comparison, is using 147MB.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
        It is not fair to make that comparison. Mail app is first-party app made by Apple. They will optimize it as much as possible and it only for macOS. Slack is a third-party app, run inside Electron which is cross-platform. A cross-platform that have to ensure that every platform that Slack have to account for OSes quirks. Mail app (email application) and Slack (instant messaging application) are entirely different beasts, they are not the same thing. I'm glad that Slack only uses 600± MB of memory. Few years ago, it usually uses more than that, about 1.5 - 2 GB in my experience. Now I checked my Slack (and its services) combined memory usage is 400± MB.
        smcleod 5y ago
        From an end user perspective I think it's absolutely fair to make that comparison. Electron is a bag of garbage for the end user / machine. Native apps (mail or otherwise) perform, feel, look better than electron apps while using far less resources including power with less crashes in my and my coworkers experience.
    - smcleod 5y ago
      It's not as heavy as MS Teams (which is possibly the worst software I've ever used) but it's still heavy, it "fixes" some of its memory leaks by reloading on a timer...
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    M1 itself is the biggest thing that changed. Being an energy hog isn't as big a deal when the CPU is so efficient that the battery lasts more than a workday almost no matter what. Age old case of increasingly inefficient software relying on better hardware to cover for it.
nowherebeen 5y ago
$14.5 million raised for a 10 month old app with no product market fit…
- newalexandria 5y ago
  It was a great fit for us. The thread management was what slack was missing. We loved the promise that the system was going to develop even-better features for suggesting message groups using ML. The groups-of-channels was also a relief to the complexity of so many channels through the org. We were willing to put up with the incomplete look/feel compared to Slack. We struggled to get the whole team to switch, and now the product is closing. Sad
anotherevan 5y ago
Our small company when with a hosted[1] Matrix Synapse server with federation turned off. Have been quite happy with it. We use the Element client, which is yet another Electron application, but there are several other clients out there, so you would have some options to explore. [1] https://element.io/matrix-services https://element.io/matrix-services
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

cyberpunk 5y ago

Why would you use the iPad version? I’m using the desktop one on a m1 and it’s fine..

sandofsky 5y ago
Maybe something has changed in the last few years, but the last time I used it, I found their Electron app to be a resource hogging pile of garbage. But that's just my opinion.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  It was. They made improvements with their election app. Few years ago, it is resource hog and eat up batteries like it is candy while idling. It went from 100% to 30% within two hours. Now, it barely used up much resource and very light on battery. I recommend trying it out again, it is much better now than it was before.
  - IMcD23 5y ago
    It's still extremely heavy compared to any native Mac app. On my M1 machine, Slack (plus it's 4 separate helper processes) is currently using a total of 679MB of RAM. The Mail app, in comparison, is using 147MB.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
      It is not fair to make that comparison. Mail app is first-party app made by Apple. They will optimize it as much as possible and it only for macOS. Slack is a third-party app, run inside Electron which is cross-platform. A cross-platform that have to ensure that every platform that Slack have to account for OSes quirks. Mail app (email application) and Slack (instant messaging application) are entirely different beasts, they are not the same thing. I'm glad that Slack only uses 600± MB of memory. Few years ago, it usually uses more than that, about 1.5 - 2 GB in my experience. Now I checked my Slack (and its services) combined memory usage is 400± MB.
      - smcleod 5y ago
        From an end user perspective I think it's absolutely fair to make that comparison. Electron is a bag of garbage for the end user / machine. Native apps (mail or otherwise) perform, feel, look better than electron apps while using far less resources including power with less crashes in my and my coworkers experience.
  - smcleod 5y ago
    It's not as heavy as MS Teams (which is possibly the worst software I've ever used) but it's still heavy, it "fixes" some of its memory leaks by reloading on a timer...
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  M1 itself is the biggest thing that changed. Being an energy hog isn't as big a deal when the CPU is so efficient that the battery lasts more than a workday almost no matter what. Age old case of increasingly inefficient software relying on better hardware to cover for it.

nowherebeen 5y ago

$14.5 million raised for a 10 month old app with no product market fit…

newalexandria 5y ago
It was a great fit for us. The thread management was what slack was missing. We loved the promise that the system was going to develop even-better features for suggesting message groups using ML. The groups-of-channels was also a relief to the complexity of so many channels through the org. We were willing to put up with the incomplete look/feel compared to Slack. We struggled to get the whole team to switch, and now the product is closing. Sad

anotherevan 5y ago

Our small company when with a hosted[1] Matrix Synapse server with federation turned off. Have been quite happy with it. We use the Element client, which is yet another Electron application, but there are several other clients out there, so you would have some options to explore. [1] https://element.io/matrix-services https://element.io/matrix-services

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]