Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

https://blog.zulip.com/2022/08/26/why-slacks-free-plan-change-is-causing-an-exodus/

by williamstein • 4 years ago

687 756 4 years ago

blog.zulip.com

ethbr02• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Except we still get tracked in the paid stuff.

femiagbabiaka• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

The fact they track the amount of messages is analytics to begin with even if it has a valid reason.

withinboredom2• 4 years 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…

LunaSea2• 4 years ago

Discord just isn't a good fit for B2B

majormajor• 4 years ago

I would be excited if it applied to paid plans too so "oh the documentation is this ancient Slack thread" would stop being treated as a viable option. ;)

a1371• 4 years ago

I have like 7 Slacks. 2 of them are paid, 5 of them are hobby that I may use once a month. What are you suggesting? That I pay an extra $40/month just so that maybe I need an old message in one of those? I'd agree with you if Slack were indie devs but does Slack need my $40?

The unhappiness comes from the fact that people want to rely on a service, even if it's free. It would make sense if this was a change for the sake of resources or paid user experience. This is for neither, just a tiny push for people to pay or leave. Ironically, It may make me want to stop paying because having all the conversations in one place is nice if I take the hobby slacks elsewhere

xen2xen1• 4 years ago

So I have to ask, why use Slack for hobby things instead of Discord? Is that driven by people used to having it at work? I'm confused by the thought of "hobby Slack channels".

barbs• 4 years ago

Paying for something does not necessarily mean you won't be tracked, or even not be shown ads ( Windows, anybody?).

The better solution for that is to use open-source software.

jbotdev• 4 years 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.

verdverm7• 4 years 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 has an overview of the situation and a discussion of alternatives being considered

stavros11• 4 years 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.

bombcar4• 4 years ago

In general your worst customers are the ones who see no value in your service; which tends to collect in the “free” tier.

ravenstine2• 4 years ago

People don't value things that are cheap or free. Anyone who has spent enough time doing work on commission knows this. If you set your price too low, you'll get customers of quality proportional to that price, some of whom will believe it's their right to ask the moon of you (or their money back). By raising your price, you won't have as many customers, but the customers you do keep will likely be high of quality and much easier to work with. Even if they request more work of you, they will likely make it worth your while.

I noticed this as an independent web developer. When I charged very little, all my clients believed they could make unlimited changes to the expectations of the project, no matter how impractical or time consuming. When I charged what at the time I thought was way more than I was actually worth, someone still ended up paying me and they actually respected my expertise while leaving me alone most of the time.

insightcheck11• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

And then there's the folks that use Slack/Rocketchat for support - zero ability to curate any useful info.

hotpotamus• 4 years 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.

lazyasciiart4• 4 years 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"

hedora2• 4 years ago

I thought the only selling point of slack was that your chat history was archived and searchable.

Oh well. Time for the industry to move on.

vel0city3• 4 years ago

So many people talking about how extremely valuable it is to them and yet they won't bother paying for it.

kelsolaar• 4 years ago

If you are running a small Open Source community, it is close to impossible to pay for it.

paulcole• 4 years ago

We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!

icelancer7• 4 years ago

If you run a small open source community, you should run an open source community-enabling piece of software probably. Like Zulip.

vel0city3• 4 years 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.

paulgb2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Just migrate to Discord?

asah• 4 years ago

Just migrate to Zulip?

SubiculumCode2• 4 years ago

Just migrate to Mattermost?

insightcheck11• 4 years ago

The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many people in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-enough user interface over the casual look of Discord.

I've been in Discord servers for volunteer work, and while it generally works pretty great, the system feels a lot more casual to users (e.g. with non-human profile pictures). On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft Teams is almost too professional, and has an emotional association of being too corporate/formal for more pleasant use.

Discord is also tougher to create group conversations easily (you need to be Friends first). Though, if message history is really that important, it could be a worthwhile tradeoff.

cassianoleal• 4 years ago

Microsoft Team is almost too professional

The problem with Teams is not that it's "too professional". The problem is that there is more spacing in the interface than there is actual text. You know, the conversations - the thing it's meant to do best. Threads are a mess to follow, channels are awkward... If professional == terrible UX, then you may be right.

And let's not even talk about how unstable and unreliable it is.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u• 4 years ago

The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many people in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-enough user interface over the casual look of Discord.

1) That's not much of a moat for Slack. If Discord were serious about entering the enterprise market, and there's sufficient user feedback on this point, I'm sure they could adapt with a few month's work.

2) I've heard similar critique about Slack in the past as well. IMHO professional vs casual comes down to expectation and familiarity. As more youths who are accustomed to Discord enter the workforce, the casual connotation would go away.

There was a time when e-mail was considered too casual and unfit for professional communication, too.

phpisthebest3• 4 years ago

Microsoft Teams is almost too professional

Teams target is Corporations so it should be professional?

Microsoft has tries to make Teams "less professional" or more causal and people hate the changes. They recently changed the theme of the emoticons "Microsoft Fluent Emojis were brought to life to embrace expressiveness and play" they seem to be well received by non-professional users, or even professionals in "creative" fields, but for traditional corporate users they look terrible and are not well received at all, the feedback asking for the return of the traditional emojis has 10's of thousands of votes.

for work I want a professional platform, I want teams to be a professional tool for professionals

mproud• 4 years ago

Discord doesn’t have any limitations on message history, or the amount of messages.

bfung2• 4 years 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

insightcheck11• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

bfung2• 4 years 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.

renewiltord2• 4 years 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.

JadoJodo2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

JadoJodo2• 4 years 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)

systemvoltage3• 4 years ago

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.

PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

getcrunk• 4 years ago

Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.

gernb2• 4 years ago

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.

On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

joe-collins3• 4 years ago

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world.

I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.

chx• 4 years ago

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

insightcheck11• 4 years ago

The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation.

I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.

holler• 4 years ago

Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...

throwaway18513• 4 years ago

Discord’s UX is a disaster for most of the things I’ve seen Discord used for. Lately, I don’t even bother trying.

conductr• 4 years ago

Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later.

Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.

Melatonic• 4 years ago

Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful

atwood22• 4 years ago

Reddit is pretty much dead IMO. There seems to be a few substantial posts, if that, per day. Discord is way more active.

nyanpasu64• 4 years ago

In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?

Buttons840• 4 years ago

I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident

I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?

Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.

nerdponx5• 4 years ago

See also: mailing lists.

ddingus• 4 years ago

I really am missing forums. One area of interest of mine has a good one and it has a solid population. I value it increasingly highly.

Arainach• 4 years ago

Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today.

However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.

fivre• 4 years ago

rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread.

i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.

lazyasciiart4• 4 years ago

I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.

nottorp9• 4 years ago

Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages.

The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?

RileyJames• 4 years ago

They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information.

Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)

Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.

Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.

Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.

Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.

julianlam4• 4 years ago

Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums.

Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)

e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.

(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)

antifa4• 4 years ago

Not a lot of options where it's a fast, modern language (crystal/nim/rust/etc.) and also not an SPA.

mig39• 4 years ago

I host a bunch of Discourse sites. You can do it yourself on a 1GB server.

The docker install is super easy.

insane_dreamer2• 4 years ago

Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.

SXX2• 4 years ago

There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there.

Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.

derefr• 4 years ago

Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident)

You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.

snapdeus• 4 years ago

You can't switch users on mobile!

aendruk2• 4 years ago

…and I’d be terrified of using that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741

AceJohnny2• 4 years ago

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely

May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.

I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.

The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.

Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.

In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.

berns• 4 years ago

In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?

Discourse is 100% open source.

masklinn4• 4 years ago

The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.

Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.

sweetbitter5• 4 years ago

I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know how to design anything. The people who do know how to design websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the interest of some alien species from another dimension- see how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density. Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.

BeFlatXIII2• 4 years ago

Last activity and a (small) icon are valuable information. The icons visually distinguish users and "last seen" lets you know whether you are replying to a person or primarily replying for the benefit of the community. Also, distinct pagination means you have a stable location for each post instead of "scroll around until you see it".

I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.

neovive• 4 years ago

Flarum (https://flarum.org/) is an interesting option.

sh4rks• 4 years ago

I would give Discord servers another go. They definitely have that "community" feel, especially for more niche servers.

dirkhe• 4 years ago

I think https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.

KhalPanda• 4 years ago

I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.

The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.

EamonnMR4• 4 years ago

The joy is probably the lack of friction.

olingern• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

One difference is that Zulip is 100% open source, whereas Slack is not.

kareemsabri2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

stavros11• 4 years ago

I can self-host Zulip, so I don't care what they do, as long as they're alive.

userbinator2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Slack allows image and file uploads, and in every slack I've been on that feature is used heavily. Those stack up fast.

insightcheck11• 4 years 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.

phpisthebest3• 4 years ago

We need a IRC client that will convert images to ASCII art.

no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)

Teckla3• 4 years 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.

manquer• 4 years ago

To me it is a feature not a limitation

blueflow• 4 years ago

But: It does not randomly change payment tiers or features or require a client update. In fact, IRC works stable for like, 40 years now?

megous2• 4 years ago

Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and corresponding lack of client side history logging)

Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.

There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).

With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.

vlunkr• 4 years ago

Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research.

The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

I did work at one company where the main means of communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were also available. Of course this was a company that specialised in networking and communications products, so perhaps they were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great experience.

RunSet2• 4 years ago

The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.

Read that as "IRC has integrated anti-non-hacker technology."

Consider holding physical meetings with hard copies of reading material (or at least some Lorem ipsum) to occupy the other employees.

jmclnx• 4 years ago

Yes, and searching history in slack is very painful, I have no use for history in slack, might as well delete it after 2 days.

With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.

LtWorf4• 4 years ago

I normally use localslackirc (which I mostly wrote) https://github.com/ltworf/localslackirc to use slack.

I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.

I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.

mrweasel4• 4 years ago

One of my main concerns about IRC, for the average user, is the lack of good modern clients. IRCCloud is pretty good, but that's also sort of missing one of the point with IRC, to me at least.

That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.

major5053• 4 years ago

I mean, where are we gonna go? Microsoft Teams? Damn thing is terrible.

I guess Discord can be a option.

smabie• 4 years ago

Telegram is pretty good

hcurtiss• 4 years ago

Maybe our needs aren't terribly great, but Teams works pretty well in our enterprise. ~3000 users.

Aeolun6• 4 years 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.

major5053• 4 years 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.

kirbyfan64sos• 4 years ago

...Zulip, the author of this blog post?

bee_rider• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Good time for NetMeeting to make a return.

vel0city3• 4 years ago

A cheap VPS could easily host your own Zulip or Mattermost server. Then you can be in charge of your own data.

thallium205• 4 years ago

Google Workspace Chat! jk

major5053• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

insightcheck11• 4 years 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.

chrisan2• 4 years 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)?

rr808• 4 years ago

Salesforce strikes again

tedk-42• 4 years ago

f#ck salesforce

same thing with heroku

jms703• 4 years ago

Good. Slack history isn't documentation. Long term data retention seems bad anyway.

northisup• 4 years ago

http://discord.com

agluszak• 4 years 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.

sweetbitter5• 4 years 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.

Teckla3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

aeturnum2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

You can’t download private messages, however.

price• 4 years ago

No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post, for example.

In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)

(I'm one of the Zulip developers.)

aeturnum2• 4 years ago

I don't mean to say that people were led to believe that free instances had no limits - just that this is a reversal of the nature of those limits. Groups that had planned based on the old limits are now in a tough spot.

I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.

0x457• 4 years ago

pay or lose months or years of history.

You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.

Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:

- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money) - never going to pay (families, online communities)

Changing this to 90-days plan:

- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack. - Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day - Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away

The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.

chrisan2• 4 years ago

Isn't slack a bit heavy for families/houses/groups of friends? Why not something like Telegram?

Aeolun6• 4 years ago

To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for.

Did you expect Salesforce to?

danpalmer2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I am sorry to report from the front lines that such users and use cases do, in fact, exist.

danpalmer2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a different light!

insightcheck11• 4 years 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_• 4 years ago

Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind.

https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...

https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic

samstave3• 4 years ago

DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX.

Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...

The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.

Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.

mritchie712• 4 years ago

Slack has actually caused this same situation before. Tuple benefited when Slack shut down ScreenHero.

https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...

lebaux• 4 years ago

To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.

Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.

Transport of data was at that time trivial.

deadbeef574• 4 years ago

Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.

Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.

YetAnotherNick• 4 years ago

Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.

megous2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

alberth3• 4 years ago

This is a Saleforce thing.

They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.

cutierust• 4 years 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.

stavros11• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Aeolun6• 4 years ago

Or better yet, pay people for what you want to keep long term.

danjc• 4 years 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.

esprehn2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

esprehn2• 4 years 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.

throwaway18513• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Element (Matrix) might be a good alternative!

ArrayBoundCheck• 4 years 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

stavros11• 4 years 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.

alberth3• 4 years 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.

stavros11• 4 years 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.

kazinator• 4 years ago

Can't you use some channel bot to archive everything?

smashah• 4 years 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.

mdaniel4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

MexicanJoe3• 4 years 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?

bachmeier2• 4 years 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.

MexicanJoe3• 4 years 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.

MexicanJoe3• 4 years 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.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Anything self hosted you pay twice. You pay for the infrastructure and you pay for the time lost setting things up. Engineers are really bad at time estimates and they'll argue it's easy and not a big deal. And then they'll end up spending hours/days on it, which by their hourly wages means you are getting a much worse deal than a paid service. And even if you are saving some money, you are still losing time that you might have used more productively.

And if you cut corners and don't do a proper job of self hosting, you are going to pay a third time when it inevitably blows up and needs more time and attention to be fixed; all while your company has no access to whatever the thing was you were self hosting. I've seen Jira go down, self hosted gitlab servers running out of disk (without backups), irc servers go down, jenkins build servers blowing up, etc. Very disruptive when that happens. And preventable if you do a proper job. But that costs extra and you need competent people to be on this. People that could be doing more valuable things instead.

We use freemium accounts Github and Slack. So, we have Github Actions, issue tracking, chat, etc. without actually paying a single dollar. Github actually used to charge and the company I was CTO for at the time was happily paying for it (we upgraded from our self hosted Gitlab because I got tired of dealing with that). But then they removed the limitations on private repositories. So, these days, using Github and Slack for free is kind of a no-brainer for me. I'd consider paying for this stuff even but there simply is no need currently and the added value of the paid only features just isn't that high to me.

MS did what Slack should be doing. They realized that the value of being the number 1 choice for a commodity service is that you end up with an insanely valuable thing: every developer joins your service. They have Linus Torvalds hosting the Linux kernel on Github even. The percentile of developers without a Github account is ridiculously low. And their dominance as the number 1 choice in the corporate world is huge because of that. And there are plenty of ways to monetize being that large other than asking companies to pay per month per user. As soon as they'd force companies to pay, they'd inevitably open up the market to competitors and lose their dominant position. Gitlab is the obvious one. But it is merely the largest of a very long tail of alternatives. As long as MS keeps their pricing as it is, they get to keep their position.

Slack is dominating corporate chat in a way that MS never really achieved despite trying very hard with various products. However, chat is a commodity and Slack succeeded in on-boarding lots of companies and teams by giving it away for free. As soon as it stops being free, people will vote with their feet because there are plenty of other free/cheap options. They should prevent that at all cost and focus on finding better ways to convert some of their users to paid users. Shrinking their user base is counter productive for that.

icelancer7• 4 years 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.

armchairhacker• 4 years 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-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• 4 years 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.

icelancer7• 4 years ago

I use Discord for some personal stuff where the groups use it, and I don't think it's anywhere close to as usable as Slack for a small business unfortunately.

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

Integrations is the main deal for me as well. Discord might have some integrations here and there, but slack is virtually on every dev tool.

Like nextjs for deployment/fail messages.

cheald2• 4 years ago

We tried it, I even made some contributions trying to get it to work. In the end we just migrated to Mattermost, which speaks Slack webhooks natively and is a very competent Slack replacement. We self-host it, too, which is a big win.

icelancer7• 4 years ago

Huh, that's pretty enticing. Unfortunately last time I set up Mattermost it exploded on a VPS so that wasn't too good...

tabbott3• 4 years ago

Those contributions were much appreciated and were merged as:

https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming

It probably deserves another pass on the documentation; it's been improved a few times since then and may no longer deserve the "beta" designation.

pritambaral• 4 years ago

Zulip has Slack-compatible incoming webhooks. Is that not sufficient?

tabbott3• 4 years ago

We merged 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/ 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.

jmull• 4 years 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.

quickthrower22• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

k099• 4 years ago

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...

oblio7• 4 years ago

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.

kyrra2• 4 years ago

This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people take are reversible.

Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back.

People love credit cards and similar products because there is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some kind.

If you start building a system that supports micro payments, the cost of running such a service scales with the number of payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people running a system need a way to make money. They can't just lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing with chargebacks and fraud.

jwr3• 4 years ago

In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.

frxx• 4 years ago

Makes me remember flattr. That was great and I still miss it.

dehrmann2• 4 years ago

I am a little frustrated that there are services I would pay $1 per month for, but the floor for monthly services is usually $10, occasionally $5.

nottorp9• 4 years ago

Slack is $9/user/month :)

verdverm7• 4 years ago

There is an argument to be made that while it looks like a loss in a limited time frame, having all those new developers become advocates later on will pay itself back

---

edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar argument might be made still

joshspankit12• 4 years ago

True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies):

Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.

And because there’s no way to know; the cost-cutters look at the numbers and say “cut the free plan enough to stop the hemorrhage”. Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts dropping and there’s no “clear reason why” and then it’s too late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust from scratch.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

There's not many ways to know many things with 100% certainty, but you can have a decent probability of knowing the impact the free tier has.

xmprt• 4 years ago

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

balderdash• 4 years ago

This is so important - if it’s not quantifiable, people have a tendency to ascribe no value to it…which can be a horrific mistake

joshstrange• 4 years ago

It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.

thayne• 4 years ago

And it is even worse than losing your positive word of mouth, because people burned by this change will start recommending against using slack now.

greggman3• 4 years ago

I agree with the idea, at the same time I'm sure there's some income vs expense graph that shows expenses raising faster than income and at some point surpassing it.

I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer free hosting for open source projects, including github actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source" part is enough of a filter?

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

I think all of this is possible through sampling and customer interviews. Besides Slack has fairly high awareness. The marketing strategy changes as your product moves through the awareness curve.

techsin1012• 4 years ago

dark ages of A/B driven blindness

dkrich• 4 years ago

There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.

So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather those made by massive sales teams.

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

Not only that but there are decisionmakers in organizations that also use free tiers for stuff in their private lives. Piss one of them off enough and suddenly you can lose a big sale or existing customer.

So tinkering with free plans downwards can have unforeseen consequences.

And with the amount of data slack uses so low and costs of bandwidth and spinning rust approaching zero - the idea that free tier limitation are anything other than create a painpoint for people to upgrade is a joke.

nine_k• 4 years ago

Slack's leadership likely think that Slack is already so ingrained in corporate settings that people will go for it by default, without word of mouth from people using a free plan. There is enough word of mouth from people who used it on a previous job. Sort of like Jira.

I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.

rattray3• 4 years ago

GitHub is a good example of an enduringly useful (to the company) free tier.

Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.

EdwardDiego• 4 years ago

By now, I'm pretty sure everyone who was going to use Slack has used Slack.

TomSwirly• 4 years ago

Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth.

They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone knows about slack.

jwie• 4 years ago

After the Salesforce acquisition SF may believe they no longer need this funnel, since Slack now has access to all Salesforce customers and vice versa.

domador• 4 years ago

The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all if they knew that at some point they'd be forced to go from paying nothing at all to paying $87 a year per user?

I understand that to some companies their free or low-priced tiers end up being more of hassle than it's worth. But an $87 jump in order to access essential, previously available features seems like a good way to chop off your long tail of low volume users. Such a change could be deadly to a service's popularity and long-term prospects. Or maybe not.

rtpg3• 4 years ago

low volume users unprepared to pay anything to Slack ever are low value users.

There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community" slacks

viraptor• 4 years ago

The pricing step is crazy. There's no way it matches the expense from Slacks side, but I guess they're just saying "you're not our target market" by charging that much per user.

The weird thing is that if that's the case, their target market doesn't really need a free tier at all - maybe a time limited demo. So I expect more restrictions in the future.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

but that it will gone in the relatively short term

I've had data stored by Google and Dropbox for free for over a decade. Even Discord has stored all my messages and files for over half a decade.

jwr3• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. I offer a free tier because I want to, as a service to hobbyists and makers. It is not intended to be temporary. It's also not an upselling tool: features are distinctly different and there is no paid plan that would make sense for hobbyists.

Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat grinder.

gridspy• 4 years ago

Admirable!

But there is still a profit incentive. Users who have been running a hobby or community on your SaaS today might be creating a startup or advising a corporate tomorrow.

So while the community might never need your paid product, the very same users might create separate, paying accounts.

marklubi• 4 years ago

Thank you!

zmmmmm2• 4 years ago

Well, what you said applies even if you are paying for something, if the price is unsustainable for the service provider at scale.

The real question you have to ask is, "is my use of this service providing a sustainable benefit for the owner". If not, you can guarantee it will go away or change eventually. If it is, it's probably OK even if its free. For example, I don't expect Google search to go away, even though it's free.

marricks• 4 years ago

Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and companies have been shoving them in our faces for decades.

- "Free gigabytes of mail storage!"

- "Free communication with your teams"

- "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!"

The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate them. Once the competition is gone or investors demand more money destroy the tier/raise prices.

FB is trying to do that to Craigslist with marketplaces, Uber and Lyft and doing that with Taxis, AirBnb with... etc etc etc

wolpoli• 4 years ago

Don't forget how "free unlimited photo storage" ended too after competitors shifted their business model.

numpad0• 4 years ago

Yes, and I believe the model is as follows:

- infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially;

- user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially;

- OpEx may increase, linearly;

- therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with astronomical wealth.

- and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual costs is pointless. Harmful even! We’re offering values, not collecting fees. We’re going for the moon! Forget about gases for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That’s irrelevant.

This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight. And now Houston is working on a solution.

baby2• 4 years ago

The same is to be said to a company no? If you offer free tooling for too long, pulling the plug will upset a lot of people

onion2k2• 4 years ago

A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product.

Or to stop people moving to a competing product in order to stifle competitors.

Or to leverage a network effect to grow the user base to support investment.

Or because the company simply believes their product should be accessible for free.

Using a 'freemium' model is a common approach to revenue growth but it isn't the only reason for a free tier to exist.

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

Well there was this episode of I think a16z, where initially they used the free accounts in their numbers (around, churn, etc). But later around those to marketing and cac instead.

All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

They also have to understand, every single business outside computing, pays for they work tools, even if they got them at some flea market.

victor9000• 4 years ago

Yeah, but this is the equivalent of Costco raising food court prices to match real production costs. Costco would never do that, of course, because they understand how a loss leader works. The real solution is to reduce costs using vertical integration, so if AWS storage is your main cost driver then start building your own data centers. Instead, this move will harm their best customer acquisition channel, negatively affecting long-term growth.

klelatti• 4 years ago

Doesn’t have to be reality. Even when a firm is profitable and has scale it can still act as a funnel for new business.

It also helps to keep some competitors out. One less toehold for newcomers to get traction in a market. Just look at the comments on the recent Heroku announcement - how many will now consider an alternative option.

More likely management have lost interest in growth and are looking to squeeze as much out of the existing customer base as possible. Not usually a good sign for investors or users.

threatofrain• 4 years ago

Would one say the same thing about GitHub?

flohofwoe• 4 years ago

On one hand that's true, on the other hand search is mostly about text data which has negligable storage size requirements (they could just say: we'll keep the search history for ever, but drop large binary blobs like images and videos after 90 days).

oxfordmale2• 4 years ago

If Google had bought Slack, the free tier would almost certainly have stayed. Of course the compromise would be that you would be served ads and you would have to agree your Slack messages would be used to target those ads to your specific interests.

Salesforce is where products go to die. Slack will eventually get integrated in their Frankenstack and lose functionality. Salesforce can afford this strategy as long as they can keep charging $$$ for their CRM software that genuinely deserves its own circle in hell.

hnarn• 4 years ago

Everybody understands this.

Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.

You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start, that’s on you.

It doesn’t matter if the product is “worth it” because when you piss people off, they will gladly put in effort into migrating to another provider they can trust, because that’s what it’s all about: trust.

The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this, where Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive backlash.

It’s simply a consequence of just staring at the numbers, without properly understanding the psychological effect of taking something away from what is, despite the zero income but rather in a sense of trust, a customer. It’s just a customer you failed to get any revenue out of, and that’s your fault, not the customers.

Changing pricing pisses people off. Killing features pisses people off. Bad communication pisses people off. It’s really not that hard.

At the end of the day you’re making a deal with the devil with these overly optimistic loss-leaders, because you’re getting growth you never would have gotten otherwise. Failing to capitalize on that and then blaming the users while throwing features out the window is just not good business practice.

chrisseaton3• 4 years ago

will piss people off

Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything.

It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.

digitalengineer• 4 years ago

Same with Evernote. Massive ‘growth’ on the free plan. No good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting features and locking people’s content in. There is no regular export to get everything out and you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app…

mstipetic3• 4 years ago

I think this should be outlawed. So many industries destroyed by cheap vc money, and then trying to raise prices once everyone else is gone. You can lose money doing research all you want, but the moment you start interacting with the market there should be a time limit until you can get your unit economics to work, or get out.

dvfjsdhgfv• 4 years ago

Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.

This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people will be pissed off but your profit is from those who stay (because they invested too much to just migrate away).

pid-13• 4 years ago

Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed?

My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay for services) start adopting a product.

It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last forever.

mmcnl• 4 years ago

I think if you are on a free tier and your business depends on it, you should anticipate for changes in said free tier. If you want guarantees, you need to be a paying customer.

ghaff2• 4 years ago

Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.

I'd argue that most companies understand that perfectly well. They have a generous free tier to drive growth. Once that growth is attained and demand starts to level off, it's time to trim the resources devoted to free and force users (to greater or lesser degrees) to either start paying or go use someone else. There's great wailing and gnashing of teeth for some period of time on HN, Twitter, etc. but life moves on.

It's a pretty predictable playbook. See also Heroku of late. It should probably also come as no surprise we're seeing a number of examples of this going on at the moment.

webmobdev4• 4 years ago

Very true. Reminds me of what Seth Godin wrote on how the internet has changed people's behaviour:

Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. A hundred million people hear a pop song on the radio and less than 1 percent will buy a copy. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in their homes. (In the former case, the purchased music is better–quality and convenience–than the free version, in the latter, the print is merely more accessible, but the math is the same–lots of visits, not a lot of conversion).
We don't hesitate to ask a consultant or doctor or writer for free advice, but often hesitate when it involves a payment. ("Oh, I'm not asking for consulting, I just wanted you to answer a question…") And yes, I'm told that some people cut their own hair instead of paying someone a few bucks to do it. The bet a creator makes, then, is that when she gives away something for free, it will be discovered, attract attention, spread and then, as we saw in radio in 1969, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it.
As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish when they pay for something when the free substitute is easily available and perhaps more convenient. Think about that–buying things now makes some people feel foolish. Few felt foolish buying a Creedence album in the 1970s. They felt good about it, not stupid. This new default to free means that people with something to sell are going to have to push ever harder to invent things that can't possibly have a free substitute.
Creators don't have to like it, but free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive. The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.

Source: The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap - https://seths.blog/2011/06/discovery-free-145/

daniel-cussen4• 4 years ago

That makes sense. It was a race to the bottom. Now we're at the bottom.

It's like 2001 in a lot of ways. Spesh the terrible economics of websites, or apps, or call them almost whatever they want, platforms, anything.

Giveaways bring users. Free beer people show up.

Like there's no business here. No excludability. It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck of a cent for, and now they want to charge...well guess people will go to IRC directly. And maybe there'll be an FOSS prettification.

And that'll be it.

rkangel2• 4 years ago

The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this, where Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive backlash.

In what way have they back-pedalled? I'm affected by this and hadn't heard anything.

kennend32• 4 years ago

You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective.

Consumer:

noun 1. a person who purchases goods and services for personal use.

It is sort of weird that people don't pay for a product, yet expect to be able to use it forever? It should be obvious that companies intend to convert "users" to "customers"?

You call them "consumers" but they are not given the have not paid for the services. Maybe "users" is more appropriate?

Do let us know what products you produce, and give away for free for years and dont want to monetize, it is just a charity thing for you even thought it costs you money to offer the service.

madeofpalk3• 4 years ago

if you promote your product through a loss leader

To be fair, I don't think Slack ever actually did this. Slack has always been pretty terrible for semi-public communities, and I don't think they did anything to promote this. Free slack has always had pretty annoying retention and storage limits, and others like limits on how many integrations you can add.

I think Slack's problem has been that reasonably (at least in the beginning before Discord got popular and copied all of Slacks features), people liked Slack from their experience at using it for work. Indeed, Slack's advantage has/had been in appealing to the hundreds/thousands of employees making something they would want to use.

wpietri• 4 years ago

If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start, that’s on you.

Yes, exactly. Companies can't tell consumers "it's free" and then be surprised people get upset when they change the terms. Do sufficiently sophisticated people know that free plans are always at risk? Yes. But clearly a pretty small percentage of people have fully internalized that, or there would be a lot fewer companies talking up their free plans in ways that suggest they're unlimited along important dimensions like time.

soundnote• 4 years ago

The latest Google Apps fiasco

What did they do now?

fennecfoxy• 4 years ago

It's not trust they migrate for lmao, it's things that are "free". People are irrationally outraged when they have to pay for a product or service that was previously free.

Especially considering all of Google's products/services, people still cry about Youtube ads/having to get Youtube premium.

People are so freaking self-entitled.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary

the reason big SV VC are shilling web3 so hard.

hn17• 4 years ago

I think they made a mistake disallowing single user upgrading to paid plan.

Non-corporate users will migrate to Discord, Slack will cut resources costs = more money without new users. Everyone happy, just allow us to export data ;)

throwaway18513• 4 years ago

My family has been using Slack for several years to share/store odds and ends like recipes and bookmarks. When I heard about this change, I did a full data export. After 5+ years of not-infrequent use, the data blob was all of 1.5 MB. Virtually nothing.

davnicwil• 4 years ago

The free tier usecases don't themselves need to convert for this to work out long term. They do need to convert the same customers for other usecases though - usually work.

Keeping the free tier indefinite (in time, if not in storage) helps to keep the product used, therefore top of mind, therefore the default choice for the latter when those decisions come around. Or, even where the user is not the decision maker, they will likely still be an advocate / non-complaining user at the least.

Just directly trying to convert the free usecases by time-limiting them so as to make many of them unusable feels like more of a short term 'upcoming quarters' geared strategy. For sure they will convert some 'real work' usecases here who are able to function in the current space-limited free tier, as well as saving some costs on compute and storage, and it may boost numbers in the short term.

But long term, is it the best strategy? If all those free users now switch to, say, discord, guess which tool gets picked more for the 'real work' usecases by those same people in 5 years. Over that timeframe, will the savings in resources have been worth it? I guess this analysis must have been done, but it feels very possible the answer will turn out to be no.

HelloNurse• 4 years ago

Long term, users learn not to trust cloud services that are based on taking the customer's data hostage: not only the loss leader free tiers that are too good to be true, but anything.

shrimpx• 4 years ago

They should make an exception for low volume/infrequent users. Yes free-tier power users should get incentive to level up. But if you have a slack with your spouse for house ideas where you post a few times a year, I think this is the type of user that gets the most pissed off by limits, because leveling up to the paid tier for a few messages a year seems like a ripoff/moneygrab.

michaelvmata• 4 years ago

That's not necessarily true.

I have several free Slack groups that I've used for years. I haven't paid a cent. But it means I've also have Slack installed by default. At every company I've worked, I've supported using Slack because I'm a happy user and these companies have shelled out for paid plans.

It feels similar to how MS Office is given out for free to students and sold to companies.

ummonk• 4 years ago

The issue is that people are usually members of multiple organizations on Slack, most of them free but some paid. A change like this that retroactively impacts non-grandfathered chats (especially chats which are low usage and likely low infra cost) is going to alienate people who may at some point have decision-making power over an organization’s choice of paid chat service.

ordiel• 4 years ago

I agree with your comment, but most importantly, I hope (tho I know it won't happen) this helps people to open their eyes and realize the importance of self hosting their own stuff, I could understand that maybe 10 years ago it wasn't just as easy but now days if you are trully a small team or one with very low transit you can host your stuff even on a Raspberry PI and it would not be more expensive than permanently keeping a light bulb on besides granting you tons of flexibility. I mean, if you are less than 10 people you can even use that same hardware to keep a IM server and possibly a simple web page or some other application of interest, honestly that's what you get for being too cheap

quickthrower22• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Bring back mailing lists; ban Outlook from top posting to them.

Distributed forums. Tada!

verdverm7• 4 years ago

HACK: If you want to save all of your current slack messages, sign up for 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

hedora2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

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• 4 years 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.

badrabbit• 4 years 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_nz2• 4 years ago

I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you choose providers or clients, any recommendations?

twicetwice• 4 years 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/

[1] https://element.io/get-started

[2] https://element.io/matrix-services

[3] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

[4] https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk

altantiprocrast• 4 years ago

In addition to what the sibling comment said, Beeper is a great 'all in one' bridges type of software. The client is proprietary, but still interoperable with the larger Matrix network (and they contribute to upstream too).

coffeeling2• 4 years 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.

MaxBarraclough• 4 years ago

There's a talk that made the same points: Signal: You were the chosen one.

https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-196-signal-you-were-the-chose...

Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244795

aero-glide2• 4 years ago

Matrix too slow, missed important messages. Never again.

Test0129• 4 years 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.

muppetman5• 4 years 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.

mrweasel4• 4 years ago

There's kinda of a 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.

HatchedLake721• 4 years ago

And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?

parkingrift• 4 years ago

Its been great for you to use Slack and to be able to go back and view conversations from years ago. It’s so useful to you that you’ve used it for years, and you love it.

…but you won’t pay $12/month for it?

Yes, you are a freeloader. And you’ll inevitably keep bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no economic value to Slack, Discord, or wherever you end up next.

rattray3• 4 years ago

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.

The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price. There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal community (especially if even only some members could not afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working - probably only $1-2.

Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages community feelings), etc. Yuck.

For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and personal value from. Important business and career networking, fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even close.

mym1990• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Why are we basically posting some barely disguised ad piece for zulip?

can16358p• 4 years ago

Sure it's an ad piece, but it's telling the truth.

Smart move from Zulip.

zacharybk• 4 years 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...

chris_wot2• 4 years ago

OpenSource projects who relied on “free” slack were told by many, many people they were being stupid. And here is why.

omegalulw• 4 years 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_wot2• 4 years ago

Right up till the moment they aren’t free any more.

matchagaucho3• 4 years 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 :-/

zmmmmm2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

The main competitor of your paid product cannot be your free product.

dsr_2• 4 years 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.

rynop• 4 years ago

guilded.gg is a great alternative for this use case (and many others). Transparency: I work there.

fragmede2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

How many new users is Zulip picking up every day?

surjithctly• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Wonder how many people jumped ship to https://mattermost.com/

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

Head of product of Slack recently said in an interview: [paraphrased] "We don't want to make money, the founder wants adoption"

dijonman2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Saleforce's style, force you to sale

nirui• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Cough up.

Liron• 4 years 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.

onion2k2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

ffs just use IRC. Not proprietary. You can host it yourself. All your base are belong to… yourself.

stevebmark• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

deadbeef574• 4 years 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_2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

pjmlp2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

ptman2• 4 years ago

(gitter is backed by matrix these days)

LtWorf4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

mrweasel4• 4 years 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.

nmcela4• 4 years 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.

Gatsky2• 4 years ago

This should be the top comment.

jorl17• 4 years 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.

rattray3• 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing your experience, this is very useful!

Along with these came many new business opportunities

Curious to hear more?

Also curious how long you've been running this stack and how large your organization is?

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

Do you have integrated collab apps too ?

yrgulation2• 4 years ago

The freemium model needs to die. Entitled “customers” that dont pay are pita and thanks to their mindset we end up with stuff like facebook and generally speaking an ad filled internet. Sorry for the tone but i’ve had it.

tomrod3• 4 years ago

Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd love to self-host in the mid-term.

nmcela4• 4 years ago

Not yet, but that's on my todolist. I recommend this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.

After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.

tebbers• 4 years ago

You're not a customer, you don't pay for the product. If you want to be treated like a customer, then pay for the product. This entitlement mindset is extraordinary. Slack was literally paying for you to use their product. Regardless, it sounds like you're happy with your move.

capableweb• 4 years ago

Even if you pay for the product, using SaaS products VS hosting your own software, still puts you under someone else's control. The feature you really needed from them, might be decided that it should be removed, because only 1% of the total users actually used it, and you'll have no recourse.

This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where each user can run their own version.

0xedd• 4 years ago

Does that mean you'll have no problem if Google deletes your email account, GitHub your repos and HN your posts (as well as put all threads behind a paywall)?

Honk honk.

nmcela4• 4 years ago

I am their paying customer.

I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.

I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.

miragecraft2• 4 years ago

I’m not convinced running your own service is cheaper than paid solutions in general, if Slack can provide the same service for cheaper than it should be considered even if it’s no longer free.

I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).

However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.

Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.

nix23• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

They finally got us guys! is anyone surprised at all?

crecker• 4 years ago

Go Mattermost!

buzzwords• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Get a $10 VPS and install Rocket Chat. Same functionality, supports hundreds of users.

deadbeef574• 4 years 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.

zaik2• 4 years 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.

dabedee2• 4 years 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.

Ensorceled2• 4 years 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?

dabedee2• 4 years 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.

MrOxiMoron• 4 years ago

my first thought was: why not move to discord for you hobby project?

deadbeef574• 4 years ago

my first thought was: why not move to Zulip in general?

bartwe• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

For users in the European Economic Area, could they get the private message export by making a subject access request using the GDPR?

lmeyerov2• 4 years 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.

EamonnMR4• 4 years ago

Good free IRC on mobile would be killer.

nakedrobot2• 4 years ago

No one is stopping you from using a different free product.

lmeyerov2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I thought that all the cool kids are squatting in Discord now?

iLoveOncall• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

They should just make it to 3 months -or- 10.000 messages and everybody will be happy.

yrgulation2• 4 years ago

To where? Another free platform? You want quality services, without ads, you need to pay for them. Get used to it.

jpm_sd• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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...

zenith0353• 4 years ago

If people have small communities on slack they can use Niche Community https://niche.community

mdaniel4• 4 years 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/

What is the current stage of Niche Community?
Niche Community is in the early stages of its development.

Yeah, no kidding

zenith0353• 4 years ago

Thanks for feedback.

zenith0353• 4 years ago

Have added a new "Discover" section on the landing page based on your feedback :)

bborud2• 4 years ago

My goodness people need to rein in their sense of entitlement. It is a free tier.

Buy the product.

bborud2• 4 years ago

Or better yet: build an alternative that is good.

ultra_nick• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Why would you expect a business to provide a free service in perpetuity? Some people ar eso entitled and naive.

TabTwo• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

NonNefarious• 4 years 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.

garfieldnate• 4 years 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• 4 years 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/

tedmid• 4 years ago

An exodus?

An exodus of free tier users whom Slack doesn’t want anyways, or an exodus of paying customers?

neop1x• 4 years 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

addicted• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

mic47• 4 years 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.

Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

Related Stories