These are power moves by Slack. They want to have greater control over the communication medium and presentation
If you thought they were ever going to support extensions of their IRC gateway for long, then you misunderstood their product and who their market was or rather who their market became
Same at my workplace. Slack is mostly used by the managers, all the devs avoid it. Even if you don't mind the proprietory protocol, the performance even on beefy machines is an absolute dumpster fire, that nobody wants to touch the app with a ten foot pole.
- Why does it have list of users with their avatars and everytime new person comes in it has a huge, slow animation lol
- ads for other rooms and quarter of the screen is "best comments top list"
- the chat user avatars are unaligned, some are bigger, some smaller, some have usernames under avatare, some on the right.
I'm not sure if it's a late april fools joke or what's going on here.
When Slack came up, some of our development teams picked up using it, because it was free and didn't have to be installed and because of "it was that hot new thing from Silicon Valley that all devs use now". Most people loved it. I've always been in the "we try to keep our other infrastructure mostly in-house for control/privacy/anti-lock-in reasons, so why add a dependency to an external service and push internal documents onto it while we don't even pay for that thing?" camp and therefore flat-out refused to use Slack until the issue of internal instant messaging got enough attention to be discussed on a company-wide level. It was agreed upon the need for such a service, but it was also recognized that the way in which Slack was used to serve that need was not sustainable and far from rational, so alternatives were discussed and we eventually settled on trying out Mattermost.
Within weeks, all teams using Slack had moved over to Mattermost, and even most of the people who never wanted to use Slack for various reasons, including me, were okay with giving Mattermost a try. Most kept using it, so it has become a widely accepted part of our internal infrastructure now.
Others mentioned Mattermost, Discord, but really, there are so many viable options out there. See this list of 25+ alternatives for example: https://fleep.io/blog/best-slack-alternatives/
From cloud-based to self-hosted, open-source and commercial... As long as they integrate with the tools devs use, there will be devs who use it.
Or are you referring to audio calls and video calls?
Some reasons:
* You are in all channels, all the time. * no threaded replies (most important) * the notifications system is weird * weak integration system (integrations cannot add widgets to chat)
Some more reasons that I forgot. But these ones most importantly.
While I haven't seen any legal threats, they tend to threaten end users with bans (due to breach of ToS) for using third party clients, client modifications (like BetterDiscord), and "self-bots".
Main difference is cost. If you're already paying for Office 365 then paying for Slack Enterprise (or Plus, or whatever it's called these days) across a fast growing organisation of 170 people on top starts to look really hard to justify versus Teams. You can, of course, stick with the free version but this caused two problems for us:
- We ran out of integrations,
- We found losing message history more than a few days old was really starting to hurt us - you couldn't even go back and refer to a conversation you'd had last week.
Teams isn't perfect: it's purple theme is pretty gross (actually it has a couple of other themes, but they're both foul as well), it can be very slow/laggy, and it has a plethora of UX annoyances (like having poorly designed chat window layout and formatting that wastes loads of space) but we saved £20k/annum by switching over to it. And we now have conversation history and unlimited integrations.
Plus, I have to say, I do not approve of this move by Slack. They could have approached it much more positively by partnering with the author (as an example).
Slack can shut off their web interface and rely on their own apps if they want to control that stuff.