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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

• dsr_ 4y ago
  Every multi-user communication system invented after Usenet tries to fix some shortcoming in Usenet while (sometimes intentionally) throwing out some part of the essential usefulness of Usenet. Zulip comes pretty close, though.
• major505 4y ago
  I mean, where are we gonna go? Microsoft Teams? Damn thing is terrible. I guess Discord can be a option.
  • smabie 4y ago
    Telegram is pretty good
  • hcurtiss 4y ago
    Maybe our needs aren't terribly great, but Teams works pretty well in our enterprise. ~3000 users.
    • major505 4y ago
      I work for 4 different companies. Each one have Teams. I can't even put the 4 accounts in the desktop app. I can do in the mobile, but not in the desktop. I had to install containers in firefox, and open 4 tabs to be able to use the 4 accounts at the same time. And of course, because Im using firefox, I can't use the camera in video calls because microsoft allows only chromium browsers to do so. And the linux client is bug as hell.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      If teams works great for you I don’t think I want to work there. Some idiot higher up thought it was a great idea to switch from Slack to Teams, presumably because they have a vendetta against it, and our communication experience and effectiveness (especially cross-border) absolutely crumpled. My biggest problem with Teams is the same as Jira. It gives you so much rope to hang yourself with. Everybody and their mother wants to create a whole Team for their pet project, and then invites the whole organisation, because there is no way to discover existing teams.
      • icelancer 4y ago
        MS Teams is garbage. When I did some consulting for Microsoft recently I was added to a Slack channel. Even the engineers at Microsoft I work with don't use it. One developer at my company uses Teams for video meetings instead of our corporate Zoom account. I don't know why. So like 5-10% of the meetings I go to I have to suffer through Teams' inferior audio and interactive experience.
  • kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
    ...Zulip, the author of this blog post?
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    A new one will pop up. It is the chat client circle of life. An old chat client has to do something unpopular to obtain some return on investment. Users look for a new solution. They find one that is still in the "basically mature but trying to grow marketshare by using investor money to provide services and features for free." It works well while that investor money holds out/as long as they can get more ("look at our user growth!"). Eventually investors get tired of paying for things, look for an ROI, and they have to do something unpopular... Hopefully the "gamer" branding will keep Discord in their niche for a little longer. It will be a shame when we all have to transfer our gaming groups to something different.
  • imperialdrive 4y ago
    Teams is a mess, but it's a Microsoft supported mess that integrates with the rest of their mess. Granted I run version 1.5.00.23452 as of today which is even more messy than public.
  • acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Good time for NetMeeting to make a return.
  • vel0city 4y ago
    A cheap VPS could easily host your own Zulip or Mattermost server. Then you can be in charge of your own data.
  • thallium205 4y ago
    Google Workspace Chat! jk
    • major505 4y ago
      I'm using google workspace in my personal projects and when I'm the one sending invites to reunions. Works from the browser, is lightweight.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements. Forums can be indexed and found. Slack/Discord is like pissing in the wind. Here today, gone three hours from now.
  • insightcheck 4y ago
    An interesting partial solution to an older, niche Discord community I've found was the creation and sharing of a "lore document" of important insights and parts of the community's history. I generally agree that knowledge-sharing helps more people if it's easily searchable via Google, but then again, it's also possible that the interactions would be different without the exclusivity. Many events in the community's history may have never happened if it were more public.
  • chrisan 4y ago
    > Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements I always thought it was replacing irc and other previous chat platforms (google chat, hipchat, skype, icq, etc)?
• crecker 4y ago
  Go Mattermost!
• zackees 4y ago
• ethbr0 4y ago
  Setting aside that this is from a Slack competitor... > one would be hard-pressed to find any who are excited about it Me. You know all that bitching we collectively do about ad and tracking supported business models obsfuscating the cost of "free" products? The solution is being willing to pay for something you use and like.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    Except we still get tracked in the paid stuff.
    • femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      Exactly right. The whole “pay so they don’t track you” thing is a trope of maybe more than a decade ago. Now you pay to get the basic feature you need and you’ll get your data sold anyways.
    • StopHammoTime 4y ago
      The fact they track the amount of messages is analytics to begin with even if it has a valid reason.
  • withinboredom 4y ago
    I’d be willing to pay, but not that much for my brother and I to chat every now and then. Their pricing is geared towards enterprises with big budgets, not family and friends, nor even interest groups. It’s pretty much Discord everywhere now, and it’s just a matter of time until Discord eats the enterprise market too…
    • LunaSea 4y ago
      Discord just isn't a good fit for B2B
      • withinboredom 4y ago
        Yet?
• jbotdev 4y ago
  What is it about free services that brings out the worst complaints from people? I understand the paid plans aren’t cheap for small projects, but then maybe don’t rely on a free service for archiving important information.
  • verdverm 4y ago
    The CUE team was looking at a $8k monthly bill for keeping Slack. The money Slack wants can be pretty outrageous when most users don't even chat. Add on top that a single user is likely in several orgs, the money they make per user is approaching usury, if you'll pardon the pun CUE is keeping Slack for now and accepting limited history https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/discussions/1839 https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/discussions/1839 has an overview of the situation and a discussion of alternatives being considered
    • stavros 4y ago
      Zulip is a very good fit for open source communities, and much much better for communication than Slack. I hate how Slack encourages you to say everything in the main channel, threads are close to impossible to use. They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily navigate between them, it's really badly done.
      • verdverm 4y ago
        It's improved and is now resizable, still much much better than discord The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots, and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least that is the impression
        • stavros 4y ago
          Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the integrations than the much improved communication.
• insightcheck 4y ago
  My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't changed. However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is supporting the headline's assertion (in terms of migrations to the service after the Slack change). I'm also part of a smaller Slack group of a few people, and in abstract, it's understandable that it will be sad to see the older messages disappear. But then again, even in the tiny group, I always thought we'd hit the old 10,000 message limit someday, and never personally expected the messages to stay permanently.
  • carom 4y ago
    I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you instructions on some process then the next time you need it, it's gone.
    • earleybird 4y ago
      And then there's the folks that use Slack/Rocketchat for support - zero ability to curate any useful info.
    • hotpotamus 4y ago
      Huh, I worked at a place that used it for several years and kept all the history. It was actually amazing to be able to search through conversations within the company for problems that other people had run into and the solutions they came up with. Once or twice I ran into an issue and found the answer in a conversation I had actually had with a colleague and then forgotten. When the company moved to Teams (because it was free with the other Microsoft stuff), I asked if it would be possible to get an archive saved somewhere and I got the brush-off, "we'll look into it". It's a shame how much was just thrown out.
    • lazyasciiart 4y ago
      argh, or worse yet: you search and find someone had the exact same issue! You click on the response to their thread and it says "oh yea this, I'll call/email/whisper the answer personally to avoid helping anyone else in future"
• vel0city 4y ago
  So many people talking about how extremely valuable it is to them and yet they won't bother paying for it.
  • kelsolaar 4y ago
    If you are running a small Open Source community, it is close to impossible to pay for it.
    • paulcole 4y ago
      We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
    • icelancer 4y ago
      If you run a small open source community, you should run an open source community-enabling piece of software probably. Like Zulip.
    • vel0city 4y ago
      A cheap VPS could run something like Zulip or Mattermost or phpBB or other ways to communicate. Then that open source community would be in control of their own data.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulgb 4y ago
    I pay for Slack, but I'm also part of a number of non-organization communities. They're more like the phpBB communities of the 2000s. Even if I were willing to pay to be a member of those (which I probably am, but not to the tune of $8 each), the organizational overhead of collecting dues from everyone towards Slack fees wouldn't be worth the effort.
• aabhay 4y ago
  Just migrate to Discord?
  • asah 4y ago
    Just migrate to Zulip?
    • SubiculumCode 4y ago
      Just migrate to Mattermost?
      • ravenstine 4y ago
        Just migrate to RocketChat?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • worstestes 4y ago
        Just migrate to SMS?
      • joshmanders 4y ago
        Just host your own IRC server and migrate to IRC? /s
        • zaik 4y ago
          This, but without the /s.
        • Teckla 4y ago
          Or just use a popular, stable, free IRC network such as libera.chat. A lot of very good IRC clients are available for free. IRCCloud is a good starting point for a lot of people: excellent UI/UX, a free tier, and a very inexpensive paid tier (around 4 USD/month). Create as many channels as you like.
• bfung 4y ago
  According to the analytics of number of message, those infrequent and long running slack channels and users probably can just use email. Outrage for outrage sake. #2020s
  • insightcheck 4y ago
    It's a normal, universal human response to protest when something you're used to is no longer there. Even though I don't share the outrage, there's nothing 'current year'/particularly contemporary about it.
  • markmark 4y ago
    If you were using a free product with limited history and expected not to lose history then I have exactly zero sympathy for you. Even if the free product you were using changed their terms.
    • bfung 4y ago
      I don't use slack outside of work, so nothing from me. Just sayin' how people are so easily outraged w/o really thinking about their needs and technologies. I have no sympathy for those slack users either, cheers.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I think it would be cool to be able to pay on the user side and allow me to have some number of workspaces with distinct friend groups.
• JadoJodo 4y ago
  It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article). As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests. (I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
  • layoric 4y ago
    There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • JadoJodo 4y ago
      Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
• olingern 4y ago
  If Zulip became an overnight success, five to seven years from now I see them making similar changes. Resources cost money and Slack achieved what it needed to in order to establish itself as the dominant company in the space. If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
  • williamstein 4y ago
    One difference is that Zulip is 100% open source, whereas Slack is not.
  • kareemsabri 4y ago
    Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and saw the writing on the wall. I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
    • Karunamon 4y ago
      Slack only lost because of Microsoft using their near-monopoly in one space to take over another. Almost like this is a pattern of behavior for them. Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.
      • kareemsabri 4y ago
        Teams is horrible, of course. Like I said, Microsoft won cause of enterprise market dominance.
      • bachmeier 4y ago
        > Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. That's why Microsoft won. It's better than Slack for the people that make the purchase decisions. Who cares what the users think if they're not the ones that make that decision.
  • stavros 4y ago
• userbinator 4y ago
  IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
  • christophilus 4y ago
    From the size and performance of their website, I’d guess they’ve probably found a way to make their costs much greater.
  • lolinder 4y ago
    Slack allows image and file uploads, and in every slack I've been on that feature is used heavily. Those stack up fast.
    • insightcheck 4y ago
      Yeah, even if file uploads are disabled and limited to sharing links (e.g. from Google Drive), screenshots will be very useful for communication, for a long while.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      We need a IRC client that will convert images to ASCII art. no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
      • sweetbitter 4y ago
        I've seen a matrix client that does this, 'Gomuks' if I recall correctly.
  • Teckla 4y ago
    IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.
• rr808 4y ago
  Salesforce strikes again
  • tedk-42 4y ago
    f#ck salesforce same thing with heroku
• jms703 4y ago
  Good. Slack history isn't documentation. Long term data retention seems bad anyway.
• northisup 4y ago
  http://discord.com http://discord.com
  • agluszak 4y ago
    No, discord is not a good alternative. We just have to wait until they pull the rug from under their free users in order to aggressively monetize. And I think that will hurt much more than Slack.
    • sweetbitter 4y ago
      So, Element/Matrix it is, then? I'm not sure how it holds up to slack, having never touched Slack myself, however it fills the Discord niche for me.
    • Teckla 4y ago
      I like, and use, Discord daily, and like it a lot. But I have to agree: Eventually, management will start to more aggressively monetize it (i.e., "pull the rug from under their free users"). Truly free (e.g., IRC) alternatives seem like the only long-term solution, otherwise people will keep stumbling from one commercial platform to another, because they never last.
    • zhfliz 4y ago
      not just that, they're also incredibly hostile to users trying to retain privacy. they're requiring phone number validation just after registration or you run the risk that they suddenly lock your account, demanding a phone number for "abuse prevention". depending on ip reputation and possibly other factors it may be impossible to use it in the first place without providing a phone number.
• aeturnum 4y ago
  This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history. To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
  • jimvdv 4y ago
    > pay or lose months or years of history. You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history. Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.
    • macintux 4y ago
      You can’t download private messages, however.
      • sporritt 4y ago
        I jumped up and down about this to Slack over the course of a few emails, having some paid workspaces and a couple on the free plan that I use(d) for family. Eventually I got one of those "Hi this is such and such, stepping in for the other person" emails, with a link to this app that can export everything (including private messages): https://export.fountstudio.com/ https://export.fountstudio.com/ The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.
    • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• danpalmer 4y ago
  While this is a slimy tactic from Slack, I doubt that organisations significantly under the 10k message limit over 90 days are actually benefitting from it. That’s 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack. Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long enough form that email or documents would be a better option. Slack is a lot of overhead to read just a few messages, and is definitely best when multiple channels become necessary, and when not using it for email-length messages.
  • ledauphin 4y ago
    I am sorry to report from the front lines that such users and use cases do, in fact, exist.
    • danpalmer 4y ago
      Sure, but are they getting more value out of slack? I’ve been in many slack channels that would be better as email, IM, or other formats. I feel like many jump on the slack bandwagon because it’s popular rather than critically evaluating it next to other options. What do you feel it brings for these very small and low volume use-cases over alternatives?
• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click. I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
  • sdwr 4y ago
    That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a different light!
  • insightcheck 4y ago
    > "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy." It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats). I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
  • pygy_ 4y ago
    Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind. https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_roughly_13rd_of_its_audience_overnight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202011-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F0b2334,%2Fm%2F07fydk https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202... https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
    • samstave 4y ago
• megous 4y ago
  > However, Slack’s policies do not allow organizations on the Free or Pro plans to export their private channels and private message history. I guess, but individual users can still periodically sync everything they have access to via regular API to some database for archival purposes. That includes the private messages. You can workaround these limits that way.
• lawgimenez 4y ago
  My favorite is still Stackoverflow’s channels for community discussions. It sucks that SO didn’t find time to invest in the channels. I hate Slack and Discord for creating broken siloed communities.
• alberth 4y ago
  This is a Saleforce thing. They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.
• cutierust 4y ago
  zulip really is an amazing piece of software. Don't let the looks deceive you. They are "brutalist" because they are spending all the effort on UX and UI. If you download their terminal client, there is nothing to learn if you already know vim, and more importantly everything is very intuitive. Their messaging model is a bit different and needs an initial familiarization until it dawns on you that this is how messaging should be done anyway.
  • stavros 4y ago
    Extremely agree. After having used Zulip, Slack feels like going back to snail mail after email. Catching up on messages after days of being off is a breeze in Zulip. Threads are a joy to use, not an afterthought like in Slack. It's just superior in every way (except popularity, sadly).
• andybak 4y ago
  Stop using chat for things that you want to keep long term. It's not just about retention. Even with long term retention, it's nearly impossible to find things in a huge dump of unstructured conversation. EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Or better yet, pay people for what you want to keep long term.
  • danjc 4y ago
    Agreed, chats as your organizational memory are a disaster. We’ve set our Slack to cull content older than 30 days. Knowing that information posted on Slack is transient nudges our team to use the appropriate platform for information that needs to be persisted. Also, it’s more comfortable to chat casually knowing that what you say isn’t indefinitely retained and searchable.
• esprehn 4y ago
  My wife and I have used slack for years for our personal chat. The multiple channels made categorizing the messages easy (ex. #house, #kid1, #kid2, #coding, etc). The change in free retention meant we'd lose important messages so we've given up on slack and moved to a different service. I'm sure our small usage of it won't matter to slack, but the money grab and their insistence that this change was somehow better for me because it was "simpler" when I reached out to their support really soured my opinion of them. I wouldn't recommend them to others in the future.
  • turtlebits 4y ago
    I hate this entitled attitude. There is no “money grab”. They own the service, they’re free to set whatever price they want. If you don’t want to pay, don’t use it. In other words, don’t rely on “free”, as there is no such thing.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • esprehn 4y ago
      We stopped using it as you said. TFA is all about how many people did that. The money grab is in how they've gone about this. They made up an excuse about how this is better for users somehow (as discussed in the article as well). If they want to eliminate the free tier they should just do it.
    • throwaway1851 4y ago
      I don’t think it has anything to do with an entitled attitude. Nobody is demanding that Salesforce provide free services. What I see instead is valid criticism of sleazy business practices. IMO, the fact that Slack won’t unconditionally permit you to exfiltrate your private message data (even after upgrading two tiers to a “Pro” plan!!) says everything that needs to be said.
  • funOtter 4y ago
    Element (Matrix) might be a good alternative!
• ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago
  Boo hoo. Either use open source of pay for the service. It's bizarre that people think everything should be free and spoonfed to them
• stavros 4y ago
  Zulip is a much better communication medium than Slack, is faster, has better UX and is open source. I hope this move by Slack accelerates migration to Zulip.
  • alberth 4y ago
    > Zulip [has] better UX [than Slack] While yes I like the thread model, I don’t believe most users would agree and say Zulip UX is better.
    • stavros 4y ago
      Really? I'm surprised many people would disagree. Slack is slow, bloated, has threading as an afterthought, is really hard to navigate, and is very bad at traversing history. In Slack, if I've been away and going through channels to see what I've missed, and want to go back to something I just saw, it's impossible to find again unless I remember the channel name. In Zulip, just scroll up.
      • signalblur 4y ago
        Did you play Eve-O by chance?
        • stavros 4y ago
          No, sadly :(
      • flerchin 4y ago
        alt-left to go back. Just like a browser.
      • alberth 4y ago
        There is a massive difference in # of users of Slack vs. # of users of Zulip. Easily 2 orders of magnitude. People literally like the UI/UX of a Slack so much more than Zulip they are willing to pay for it vs. using a complete free Zulip alternative. I’m not trying to be negative. Just don’t let a vocal minority cause confirmation basis. People have spoken with their wallets on Slacks UI/UX.
• kazinator 4y ago
  Can't you use some channel bot to archive everything?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• smashah 4y ago
  I hope this is a wake up call for OSS projects that communicate from Slack to migrate to discord. And for discord based projects to have a plan to commit valuable conversations to a more open and permanent record.
  • mdaniel 4y ago
    I hope this is a wake up call for OSS projects that communicate via Slack to migrate to Zulip and turn on the public thread option so those chats show up in search results Going from one closed ecosystem to another closed ecosystem sounds like the makings for having to do that migration again when Discord does something evil this time next year I'm looking at you, kubernetes.slack.com
• ilovecaching 4y ago
  I hate the state of chat right now. IRC is the kind of open standard and FOSS technology we need, but terribly outdated, Slack and Co. are shiny but inflexible and locked in.
• drKarl 4y ago
  This will catch a lot of small teams unprepared, but to be honest they should've considered chat as ephemeral, and if something was worth keeping they should've persisted that elsewhere. Also that reminds me of the old days of IRC and how simple it was to keep logs of conversations.
• MexicanJoe 4y ago
  It's $6.67 per user. Just get a paid account. But no... people will spend hours or days switching to an alternative, and then they have to maintain it which will be even more time. I guess it ends up with: what is your time worth?
  • bachmeier 4y ago
    So if you have 15 users, pay $100/month? I suppose a senior engineer for Facebook wouldn't have a problem that. More seriously though > what is your time worth? What time are you talking about? If you're doing basic chat stuff on Zulip, and the free plan works, what exactly are you going to "maintain" that's worse than paying $1200 a year until you die - or until Slack decides decides they need revenue growth, so they bump up prices to $2000 a year.
    • MexicanJoe 4y ago
      If you are a company, then you have to move everyone over and they have to learn the new software, and Karen from accounting and others needs a lot of help switching and what the app on her phone. "The old one was much nicer", "I don't know Markdown". Now Karen hates the new system. If you self-host then you have to pay for a server. That server needs updates and backups so that is even more time. A server on AWS can just disappear overnight, so you need to prepare for that. And yet people still go to Starbucks and buy expensive coffee without thinking.
    • MexicanJoe 4y ago
      I don't know of any other industry, where (I assume everyone here is connected to IT) IT people have such a hard time paying other IT people. Slack has to pay salary, servers, networks, devops, health insurance, rent, etc etc. And people just expect them to be able to send out a free service to everyone, and yet they are even keeping their free tier. They are just changing it a little. The same would be true for Zulip. I assume their developers need to pay rent and provide for their families. But it's open source, you might argue. Okay, if you have contributed to the project you get 20 free accounts for life. The rest of us can pay a small fee every month, so their developers can pay rent and actually focus on making a better product for us.
• icelancer 4y ago
  Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah forget it.
  • tabbott 4y ago
    We merged https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming (thanks to the contribution from cheald down thread), which lets one migration many incoming webhook integrations by just changing the URL. See also https://zulip.com/integrations/ https://zulip.com/integrations/ for native integrations that often provide a better experience, taking advantage of topics to thread notifications together nicely. Can you provide a link to the 4-year-old GitHub issue you found? I'd like to clean it up to reference what has changed since then.
  • armchairhacker 4y ago
    Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-which-one-is-best-for-business-adb1e83e6694 https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-wh...). They're also a lot faster and have less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots, though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a lot.
    • dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
      There’s some kind of problem with Discord’s privacy history (either country of ownership, or founder) that makes it unsuitable for a lot of firms.
      • anticensor 4y ago
        Discord explicitly declares itself unsuitable for business use and their terms of service also reflects this.
• jmull 4y ago
  People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way, but that it will gone in the relatively short term. This is just reality.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction! Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card. Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!). Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg problem though.
    • rdbell 4y ago
      > without the cryptocurrency or blockchain If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.
      • oblio 4y ago
        That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser. Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
        • freddie_mercury 4y ago
          Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Imagine a ransomware company gives you a free SSD for your home computer, and then encrypts data making it inaccessible after a few months, and then reduces that to 90 days. That SSD doesn't seem so free after all!
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  Bring back mailing lists; ban Outlook from top posting to them. Distributed forums. Tada!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• verdverm 4y ago
  HACK: If you want to save all of your current slack messages, sign up for https://orbit.love https://orbit.love, connect it to slack, and then grab the messages from the API. Not sure how much longer this will work, it takes time and they may catch on. I do like Orbit as a user, still a relatively new product
  • hedora 4y ago
    As I was reading your message my brain inserted a second step, where you use a slack bot / api to reinject all the messages back into slack, but with today's date. Unlimited storage; 90 day retention! Whee!
• nyellin 4y ago
  Slacks pricing model makes sense for business workspaces, but it doesn't work well for public communities. I run the Slack community for https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta We'd gladly pay, but pricing needs to be different when you have a community that is open to the public and has far, far more users than the size of your company.
  • ajkjk 4y ago
    Same. I have some slacks with friend groups on the free tier. We'd like to see message history and would pay a bit for it... but the enterprise rates are way too high for random social groups.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• _8j50 4y ago
  No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much. Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel. This is why I don't support any platform that does not also use an interoperable protocol. This includes Signal which won't let 3rd party clients connect to its servers. Protocol is a foundational element of communication. If you are designing a communication system that others that are strangers to your system can't talk to your users because you don't have a protocol, your system isolates users and is hostile to its very purpose:communication. I mean really, I rant here a bit but have all these smart people never heard of adversarial compatibility? For Matrix, I really wish they didn't associate with their flagship client, others who build clients have to also compete with the protocol authors, this should be a lesson to future communications systems designers.
  • pleb_nz 4y ago
    I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you choose providers or clients, any recommendations?
    • coffeeling 4y ago
      If you end up using Element, beware one thing. Although it looks like Discord, it's not. Spaces may look like servers, but they do not contain channels. A Space is a list, phone book, a map that lists a bunch of rooms so you can join many of them conveniently.
    • twicetwice 4y ago
      Element [0] is the main/most popular client. FluffyChat [1] is also good. They both have web, Android, iOS, and desktop (Electron) apps. There are at least a dozen other clients but those are the only two I've tried so far. For hosting, I believe the flagship host is Element Matrix Services [2]. It's made by the same organization that leads development (it is all FOSS) of Element and the reference server Synapse. You can also self-host. Synapse is pretty slow and memory-hungry (it's written in Python), but for a small group it still fits pretty comfortably on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS. That's what I'm doing. It took less than an afternoon to set up (`apt install synapse` and then setting some config, mainly—there are a bunch of good guides online) and has been happily running ever since. Matrix is federated, so as long as you set up federation properly, you can seamlessly message anyone on any federated Matrix server. (Federation is opt-in.) There's also Dendrite and Conduit, Matrix servers written in Go and Rust respectively, which are much leaner and faster. Both are still in beta and missing some features, but are definitely usable. If you want to mess around with bots, I've had a lot of fun with both the Matrix Rust SDK [3] and JavaScript bot SDK [4]. Both are quite easy to get started with, and as of a few months ago both support E2EE pretty painlessly too (not totally pain-free though lol), which is cool. Overall, the ecosystem is still maturing imo, but I've been using self-hosted Synapse and Element "in production"—it's me and my girlfriend's primary method of communication—for over a year now with only some minor UX hiccups (mostly issues decrypting E2EE messages in Element). I definitely encourage giving it a shot as long as you're willing to tolerate a few remaining growing pains. [0]: https://fluffychat.im/ https://fluffychat.im/ [1]: https://element.io/get-started https://element.io/get-started [2]: https://element.io/matrix-services https://element.io/matrix-services [3]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk [4]: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk
• Test0129 4y ago
  I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If not, then you have your own freeloader problem you have to address. This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less than a cup of coffee) to support the host. It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to twist the screws a little.
  • muppetman 4y ago
    My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan things, talk etc etc. It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old. I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a member of 3 paid slack myself. Now we need to install a second app for this sort of stuff. As more people do that, it's going to mean more people are exposed to Slack alternatives and might move to them fully. Making things free also makes them sticky for people using them in more than one way. They've now broken that.
    • mrweasel 4y ago
      There's kinda of a https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ vibe to that use case. Being able to go back through two years of chats with your wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack. For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to. I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though. While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing. It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.
• mym1990 4y ago
  Seeing this, and then seeing Heroku cut its free plan…isn’t this just Salesforce dictating the future of the companies they acquire? Salesforce is traditionally an incredibly expensive platform and there really aren’t many things you get for free with them. The focus seems to be shifting to enterprise customers(even more so than before). (Salesforce developer here)
• ikiris 4y ago
  Why are we basically posting some barely disguised ad piece for zulip?
  • can16358p 4y ago
    Sure it's an ad piece, but it's telling the truth. Smart move from Zulip.
• chris_wot 4y ago
  OpenSource projects who relied on “free” slack were told by many, many people they were being stupid. And here is why.
  • omegalulw 4y ago
    I don't get this attitude. For an open source projects, especially ones not funded, properly utilizing free tools is key to success.
    • chris_wot 4y ago
      Right up till the moment they aren’t free any more.
• zacharybk 4y ago
  Slack was, and is, a business tool; It was never intended for communities (though they clearly didn’t discourage this type of usage). In Lenny’s podcast (link below), you can listen to Slack’s former head of product and growth, Merci Grace, talk about why they never implemented a block feature. The answer, like this 90 day limitation, is obvious once you look at it from the lens of a business tool. When you mistakenly look at Slack as a community tool, this change is bound to upset you. On a personal level, loss aversion sucks, and I’m sorry to lose all of the slack history that my wife and I had. https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1546515666420649984?s=21&t=NOGos-OARlE8aLzUZhQ5Qw https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1546515666420649984?s=21...
• matchagaucho 4y ago
  "But Clack’s marketing team isn’t happy with that! They ask the analytics team what can be done..." (sigh) If meetings and analysis are required to assess alternatives to freemium collaboration apps, then you can afford the $9 per month :-/
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  Curious if this is the first sign of what are likely to be more aggressive monetisation changes coming from Salesforce. I'd say that if this is a sign of things to come, it's time to plan your exit if you are on the free tier even if you aren't affected by this change. The good news is that Slack's success has bred a crop of much more free and open including self-hostable alternatives. It's a good time to check them out. Slack always was a bait and switch as a shallowly open but ultimately data-lockin play with a walled garden.
• ryanSrich 4y ago
  Not all software should be or can be free. If you’re using a FREE product you should have zero expectation of service or reliance on that product.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Specially no service you don't host yourself can be free. It can be paid by adds, but expecting someone else to run servers for free for you is insanity.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  The main competitor of your paid product cannot be your free product.
• rynop 4y ago
  guilded.gg is a great alternative for this use case (and many others). Transparency: I work there.
• fragmede 4y ago
  More power to Tabbot and the team over there, but for an active community slack I'm on, 90 days is an extension from 10k messages
• dotcoma 4y ago
  How many new users is Zulip picking up every day?
• surjithctly 4y ago
  Imagine if Google announced: We are improving Gmail Free plan. Earlier we limited free users with 15 GB storage. Now, we are giving full access to the past 90 days. Unlimited GB yay!!!
• kishansh 4y ago
  Wonder how many people jumped ship to https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Head of product of Slack recently said in an interview: [paraphrased] "We don't want to make money, the founder wants adoption"
• dijonman2 4y ago
  I’ve never subscribed to replacing documentation with Slack search. Use markdown, wysiwyg, whatever fits the org and restore good hygiene. The culture will probably improve as well.
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  Welcome to the "Extenguish" phase of the business model ladies and gents. Now that you're all dependent on their product they're going to charge for all the free features that made you embrace it. What, did you think their business model was to generate a profit by giving everything away for free forever? PersonallyI stopped liking them after they ditched the irc gateway. That was when I realized that all this silicon valley free-service bullshit is just a short-term ploy to expand their customer-base as large as they can before the free VC money runs out and they have to generate a profit somehow.
• isnhp 4y ago
  Saleforce's style, force you to sale
• nirui 4y ago
  > Instead of a 10,000-message limit and 5 GB of storage, we are giving full access to the past 90 days of message history and file storage. This limit sounded reasonable. In fact, I would rather set such limit myself to prevent leaks (for example, my Telegram account is set to delete if I'm inactive for 60 days). IMO, private chat message SHOULD be temporary by default, and made persistent only if user decides to achieve it. I also don't use chat services to share my PPTs/PDF/other files in general, there are way better place to do such thing than in an IM. As long as Slack don't delete my account and chat rooms (and it's settings), it's fine by me. Also... Smart move, Zulip
• jwmoz 4y ago
  Cough up.
• Liron 4y ago
  This is amazing marketing. I would never know or care about Zulip but I like how they’re dissing Slack so now I’ll keep them in mind.
• onion2k 4y ago
  Do you think most Slack teams on the free plan are active enough to send 10,000 messages every 90 days? That’s 111 messages every single day, or 156 every weekday! Maybe my team uses Slack too much, but that doesn't sound like very much to me. We have 11 devs, and a few non-dev roles, across 8 channels and we must be sending at least 500 messages in total on a busy day, and I doubt it's ever less than a couple of hundred. If I include the JIRA, CI, and bug reporting integrations it's far higher. We pay for Slack but this would be a good change for us if we didn't. This is also a good time to point out that Slack conversations are not documentation. If you're losing access to important things because you can't go back more than 90 days in your chat history then you need a better knowledge capture process. Recognise when important information has been shared in chat, especially in a private chat, and put it somewhere that's easy for the whole team to access and that you know will still be available in a couple of years time. You won't regret it.
• hit8run 4y ago
  ffs just use IRC. Not proprietary. You can host it yourself. All your base are belong to… yourself.
• stevebmark 4y ago
  Please understand that Zulip is nightmare software and it's absolutely not a replacement for useful productivity team software. Zulip is a joke (and an unfunny joke at that) for so many reasons. I've worked at three companies that tried and abandoned Zulip, all for good reason.
  • jakobnissen 4y ago
    That's interesting - I've used Zulip casually and it's always been more responsive and stable than Slack, which has endless UI glitches both on my phone and laptop. Not to mention that Zulip has some nice features like sane markdown and latex integration. What has your problems with Zulip been?
  • deadbeef57 4y ago
    I'm a huge fan of Zulip. I use it heavily on leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages/week). I've never used it in the setting of a company. What kind of issues did you hit? Doesn't sound fair to me to call Zulip an unfunny joke without providing any serious reason.
  • dsr_ 4y ago
    We have been self-hosting Zulip for about 3 years now and it is immensely popular. It would be nice if there were a good fail over or cluster model so we could run it at multiple sites.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  How does Slack make money off the free plan? If they don't, I don't see that anyone has any business complaining about any changes they make to it whatsoever
• alexalx666 4y ago
  Gen F? People who demand free stuff and complain like babies instead of building a solution based on an existing docker image in 1 day
• pjmlp 4y ago
  It is about time newer generations understand no one lives out of thin air, and other professionals pay for their worktools. Or they can keep jumping from free tool to free tool, while complaining some good ones end up vanishing.
• tsujp 4y ago
  Honestly... good. For company-private communication sure but for FLOSS projects it genuinely irks me that Slack (Discord too) is _ever_ used as a communication medium. Make a forum, use IRC/Matrix or even Gitter/RocketChat. Almost all the time whenever I reluctantly decide to join a FLOSS project's Slack it works out like this: (1) Hunt for the invitation link and hope I can actually join because a lot of them have that annoying error where if your email doesn't end in `@theirproduct.com` you cannot join. Unless I really, really, REALLY want to join I give up here 99% of the time. (2) If the invite link hasn't expired, and if they allow any email to join then I am in but the channels are all basically ghost towns even for big projects like Kubernetes. I suspect the friction in being able to easy join versus just visiting a website (forum) or opening a chat (IRC/Matrix, even Gitter) is why.
  • ptman 4y ago
    (gitter is backed by matrix these days)
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    Yeah an IRC channel is a /join away… I refuse to engage with projects that use things that require accounts. #ubuntu requires a registered nickname, so that's terrible as well :D
• KronisLV 4y ago
  I think that something like this is basically inevitable for most free offerings that deal with data storage. We saw something similar planned by DockerHub because there were a lot of abandoned container images, GitLab briefly wanted to do something similar to dormant projects and I'm sure that there are plenty other cases like that out there. That said, this always comes with quite the backlash, so quite possibly it's better to bake in data expiry and cleanup from day 1 if you can get away with it. Personally, though, I think that more people should host their own Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Nextcloud Talk or other chat solution instances.
• hankman86 4y ago
  The 90 day cap on the search history essentially turns the free plan into a time-limited trial. Slack is probably happy to part ways with whoever still cannot justify their subscription price after that time. They will have figured that these users are not likely to upgrade to a paid tier at a later date either. As a for-profit entity, Slack has no reason to offer a free service to a longtail of non-paying users. From a business perspective, this makes perfectly good sense.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    > whoever still cannot justify their subscription price after that time There's also a lost opportunity in not selling these users a subscription at a lower price. Products like Gmail partly succeeded because that's what people used at home, so they wanted to use something equally good at work. If you push users towards alternative in their private life, you risk that they want to bring new product into work.
• nmcela 4y ago
  I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands. We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too. So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.
  • Gatsky 4y ago
    This should be the top comment.
    • jorl17 4y ago
      While I agree with the sentiment that external dependencies are a risk, why should this be the top comment? This person was having a service for free, having the possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an absurd mentality? If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free!! Not even my taxes pay for it.
      • Gatsky 4y ago
        Why? Because it describes a technical solution to a problem, instead of complaining/rationalising.
      • nmcela 4y ago
        I am/was their paying customer but I already explained that in the other comment. My point was that I'm tired of not being able to trust any SaaS company long term. The service generally only gets worse over time, and then your data is at risk. So I decided I'm not gonna take any more chances with these and just try hosting everthing I need myself. So far so good.
• nix23 4y ago
  >>I have recommended Slack for almost any project! I can't do that anymore... :-( Yeah, don't recommend something you have no control over DONT DO IT....EVER!!!
• huxflux 4y ago
  They finally got us guys! is anyone surprised at all?
• OOD 4y ago
• buzzwords 4y ago
  I would imagine this is the first wave of changes to come. Salesforce wants to see bigger profits so more and more changes will come.
• benreesman 4y ago
  You've got to have a pretty sticky and/or differentiated product before you won't see a lot of price/feature sensitivity in the skew-small groups who would be affected by this. Slack as a product is pretty good, but it's not wildly better than the other zillion messaging things. If you've got 10-100K people in your Slack, that's a high switching cost, but you're not using the free tier at that point. I have Slack along with Signal and Telegram and Discord and iMessage and Google Meet and IRC and and and and... some people I need to talk to are on it. But is it scratching any itch that I have as a small fry that isn't easily scratched elsewhere? Not really.
• mikl 4y ago
  One reason for this change might be all the dead Slack workspaces out there. I’ve been in over a dozen Slack workspaces over the years, and many of them were just used temporarily for one project or another. Slack probably has millions of such zombie workspaces, that pay no money, but with the simple 10k message limit system, they had to keep their data around forever.
• s1k3s 4y ago
  Get a $10 VPS and install Rocket Chat. Same functionality, supports hundreds of users.
• deadbeef57 4y ago
  Big fan of Zulip here. Admittedly, I haven't used Zulip in the context of a company. But I'm a happy user of - leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages / week) - coq.zulipchat.com (~1200 messages / week) - categorytheory.zulipchat.com (~600 messages / week) as well as the quieter - isabelle.zulipchat.com - hott.zulipchat.com For research groups, it seems to work exceedingly well. The UI is unobtrusive, and values my screen real estate. (Slack only devotes < 50% of the screen to the actual conversation. On Zulip, the list of users and threads are delegated to the margins, so that the actual messages have the center stage.) Besides that, I find that Zulip found the Goldilocks-equilibrium with its threading model. It works really well for both synchronous and asynchronous conversations, and you can easily switch back and forth between the two within one thread. I'm a big fan.
  • zaik 4y ago
    I wish they would integrate an IRC or XMPP gateway per default. I know that #isabelle is visible in isabelle.zulipchat.com, but if the instance admin does not enable it, there's no way to participate using the standard IM protocols.
• dabedee 4y ago
  I would take this post with a grain of salt given it's written by a direct competitor who has many reasons to have a biased point of view. That they noticed people signing up in troves on their platform is a totally valid point. They do mention that fact, but a big disclaimer is the kind of information you'd like to see at the top of the article.
  • Ensorceled 4y ago
    It's on their corporate blog; I'm totally unfazed by the lack of disclaimer since it's literally running under their banner. Do you have any issues with the article?
    • dabedee 4y ago
      I didn't know Zulip or what they did prior to reading this, so I guess it's also contextual. I understand why they would advertize that they didn't change their plan even though Slack did and they are indeed free to post whatever they want on their corporate blog. I would just take it with a grain of salt given the underlying interests.
      • Ensorceled 4y ago
        Oh, I agree completely that the article should be taken with a grain of salt but don’t need a disclaimer. I also didn’t really see anything in the article that made me suspicious.
• MrOxiMoron 4y ago
  my first thought was: why not move to discord for you hobby project?
  • deadbeef57 4y ago
    my first thought was: why not move to Zulip in general?
• bartwe 4y ago
  We've looked at paying for our free slack a few times but the pricing is just far too high to take serious for the amount of users we have.
• itsmeste 4y ago
  I was using Slack to manage notes on my personal research projects. I never used any features besides channels, messages, and search. I loved it's UI, rich-text features, accessibility, and reliability. Amount of workspace messages after 5 years is 1154. Besides that, I'm using Slack's business+ plan in the corporate teams I'm leading. Again needing to migrate from a once great app that's now getting ruined by Salesforce, again with no complete export features available, I start feeling ridiculed. Zulip looks promising, and they even support good imports from Slack. However, their UI just feels too cluttered with all those borders around messages, and their rich-text support isn't as convenient as Slack's. A majority of my team members felt the same, and we decided to spend a day for hosting an internal contest to build a basic alternative to Slack that we happily migrated our personal workspaces to. What Slack could've done better: - Saving money at other places than the most critical one for backwards compatibility, message retention - Store messages locally, instead of on their servers - Offer complete exports - Don't advertise this change as "beneficial for free users" - As a last resort, offer one-time payments instead of a per-user subscription model
• dcdc123 4y ago
  My rather large extended friend group uses Slack free quite heavily. We have less than 90 days history right now so are looking forward to the change. It is also nice to know exactly how long messages will be around for. I think people are overreacting.
• TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  For users in the European Economic Area, could they get the private message export by making a subject access request using the GDPR?
• lmeyerov 4y ago
  We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in general. Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for a good competitor to knock them out from the bottom. Discord is an obvious possibility, but it can be anyone new too. In a world where Teams is already knocking them out of the enterprise market, Slack intentionally losing their main advantages in community, vs pulling up the ladder on competitors, seems pretty dumb.
  • EamonnMR 4y ago
    Good free IRC on mobile would be killer.
  • nakedrobot2 4y ago
    No one is stopping you from using a different free product.
    • lmeyerov 4y ago
      We are paying users with a growing annual account, this is not about free. We want 1 product for chat, enjoy that Slack solved much of community side of chat (cross-company, ...), and Slack's UX is slightly better than Discord's + significantly better than Team's. Likewise, there is gravity keeping us there: text history + customer accounts. My point is Slack's lead is tenuous, and they are steadily eroding their primary moat for us -- community-minded features. Our community account already has limited search and customization, and this update obliterates that further. If/when we move our free community channel, we will move our paid account too.
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  I thought that all the cool kids are squatting in Discord now?
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  If you're upset with changes like this, you weren't using Slack as it is intended to be used. Nowhere is Slack advertising itself as a data archival platform, a file storage, or a project management software. It's a chat application. Look at all the reactions in the article, they all are using Slack in ways it is not supposed to be used. Also note that the article is written by a direct competitor of Slack...
• andix 4y ago
  They should just make it to 3 months -or- 10.000 messages and everybody will be happy.
• yrgulation 4y ago
  To where? Another free platform? You want quality services, without ads, you need to pay for them. Get used to it.
• jpm_sd 4y ago
  > Your chat history should be a valuable knowledge repository No, no, no. Anything important needs to go into a document with some kind of shared permanence. Chats are not not not documentation! Have been burned by this too many times.
• 734129837261 4y ago
  I'm just wondering why these services need centralised hosting to begin with. Peer-to-peer networking isn't new, Blockchain as a tech could take care of decentralised but shared information. And I don't mean that a company of 10 people depends on each other, their messages are also hashed, seeded, encrypted, etc. on the entire network. Each company and each individual can have their own unique key that's used to make their own messages and content readable again. Of course, a company should be able to choose to only share messages across their own employees and not to anyone outside, if they are wary of security issues. Messages could have set expirations, too, etc. We shouldn't need an expensive middle-man. It should be a free open-source project. But I'm not a networking expert. Is this simply not feasible for other reasons? I'd love to work on such a project as a software engineer, for sure.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  I see a general move towards "reducing costs at all costs", which at least for me, indicates that people are getting ready for the upcoming Autumn/Winter Economic crisis...
• zenith035 4y ago
  If people have small communities on slack they can use Niche Community https://niche.community https://niche.community
  • mdaniel 4y ago
    I find that landing page insulting to anyone who might want to learn what that product is and why I should use it. So your webpage allows me to play basketball or go hiking together, is that what it does? Only by going to "the changelog" link, because I'm a curious fellow, does one find the discovery page and see an actual implementation: https://niche.community/niche/pzd3x67l0gmqn/hackernews/ https://niche.community/niche/pzd3x67l0gmqn/hackernews/ > What is the current stage of Niche Community? > Niche Community is in the early stages of its development. Yeah, no kidding
    • zenith035 4y ago
      Have added a new "Discover" section on the landing page based on your feedback :)
    • zenith035 4y ago
      Thanks for feedback.
• bborud 4y ago
  My goodness people need to rein in their sense of entitlement. It is a free tier. Buy the product.
  • bborud 4y ago
    Or better yet: build an alternative that is good.
• aka-rabbi 4y ago
• ultra_nick 4y ago
  The 90 day limit is better for large groups. We have 12,000 students in a free slack chat and we can't see yesterday's messages because they're past the message limit.
• Invictus0 4y ago
  Why would you expect a business to provide a free service in perpetuity? Some people ar eso entitled and naive.
• TabTwo 4y ago
  Oh cry me a river. You don't pay for it - you are not a customer, you're probably the product. You don't own the server - you dont own the data on this server/service (anymore). You cant afford to pay for such service - declare bankruptcy, obviously your business is not sustainable. You cant afford to pay for the needed SLA and your business won't survive a few days downtime - declare bankruptcy, obviously your business is not sustainable.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  I don’t understand the criticism. I worked with a lot of free Slack accounts. None of these had 90 days of history. Would say 20-30 days or something like that on average. To get 90 days history is an improvement for most larger consumers on free tiers. No?
• balls187 4y ago
  Slack makes no momey from free users. So how does free users being upset and leaving hurt slack? Maybe that will help bolster a competitor. But ultimately Slack wins, some free users will convert to paid subscribers.
• hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• NonNefarious 4y ago
  Talk about entitled. First off, this is a CHAT system, not document storage. If you want permanence, send E-mail (and archive it). Second, it’s FREE. Case closed.
• deleted 4y ago
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• garfieldnate 4y ago
  I tried using Zulip for a short period of time at a small company with lots of chat and was completely overwhelmed by the volume of messages that that I had alerts for. There didn't seem to be any obvious way to choose not to include the whole company in a conversation by default, allowing them instead to opt in. I had thousands of unread messages and just declared bankruptcy by deciding not to read all of them. I mostly had to just wait for someone to @mention me.
• d3fault 4y ago
  I haven't seen Mattermost [0] mentioned by anyone here, especially considering it's open-source and you can self-host. Admittedly, it has been a while since I've done some research on these platforms, but is there something I'm missing that makes Zulip or Rocketchat better? [0] https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
• tedmid 4y ago
  An exodus? An exodus of free tier users whom Slack doesn’t want anyways, or an exodus of paying customers?
• mic47 4y ago
  To me this looks like better plan. Instead of unpredictable mechanism on when the messages disappear from you history, it's now predictable and you can act according to it.
• neop1x 4y ago
  An example of the company making the world better (for its investors): 1. Destroy low-maintenance forums and IRC (often fully owned by their owners) by providing 'better' and more convenient services, let them 'own' a virtual channel and a promise (no public history in order to force the creation of more accounts, paid for by investors but that's a detail) 2. discontinue or make free plans unusable in order to force users to pay and bring investors huge profits 3. sell the company and live your life, laughing at the stupidity of the users who now have no history and no money
• onetokeoverthe 4y ago
• addicted 4y ago
  So many smaller companies I know paying for Slack are doing so because their employees used free versions of Slack in some form or the other so recommended it as the first choice, as opposed to Teams, or other alternatives. If the employees were agnostic about the choice, it’s highly likely that many of these companies’ IT departments would choose Teams instead, because MS is certainly more company friendly (and its bundles tend to be cheaper). I think Slack may end up regretting losing these non paying customers, who usually end up being their biggest and only cheerleaders in paying contexts. The other problem for Slack is this decision makes open source alternatives more popular which means more users of the open source alternatives which would likely lead to more maintainers and developers for those projects, leading to them becoming increasingly competitive with Slack. That would squeeze Slack from all sides, with MS hitting them from the enterprise end and these alternatives from the open source end. It would be difficult for a company to justify paying Slacks high prices when they have all these options instead.
• koffiezet 4y ago
  While it might suck for some people, the 10k message limit was always there, so if you wanted to keep history - why the hell would you be on slack? And the people here shouting matrix and "don't go to discord" have never tried to push more non-technical people onto it. It starts with differently named apps on desktop and mobile (sure there are a few multi-platform clients). But then the naming? Back in the old days, IRC for a lot of people was not IRC, but mIRC. Why? Because the icon they had to click had that name. Thank goodness it at least resembled the name of the actual thing they were connecting to, where they could go "IRC? you mean mIRC?". If I now tell someone to go on matrix - they don't have a matrix app on their phone, Mac or pc, and I have no idea which-one it'll be. Branding and name recognition is important here.