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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

> So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can't extract their conversations out of the silo.

I totally agree with article itself, but this is rather moot point. Slack still provide full history export for free and it's rather easy to self-host said history. IRC and XMPP didn't made it any easier to extract that data.

I aware that export doesn't include private messages, but it's not what Slack used for mostly anyway.

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> Slack still provide full history export for free

Wrong. If you want to export messages earlier than the last 10k, Slack will extort you to the tune of $10 per user (even if they aren't active). And that's per fucking month. Does your startup/club/laboratory of 29 people have $290/mo of income to incinerate, when you could just host an AWS IRC server for 1% of that?

Before making comment that you claim is false I went to our team management panel and exported full history for our team since 2016. It's not super active team we have, but it's still 20MB of logs in JSON and 64939 messages according to simple grep:

   grep '"text"' "./VCMI Slack export Mar 12 2018" -rn | wc -l

It's team with open registration so it's would obviously be impossible to ever pay for it. After all it's open source project.

You must be grandfathered in. Teams that I've been part of see their history actually cut off at the 10k mark.

If that is the case I probably won't ever find polite words for this kind of shady lock-in behavior. Certainly one more reason to abandon Slack.

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