Looking over the donors page, I'm pretty amazed at slack's absence. Ditto for Microsoft Teams. Way to give back to the community.
Slack co-maintains Electron together with GitHub, employing multiple core maintainers full-time, contracting those who can't join us full-time. We've also just hosted (and paid for) the first Electron conference. We're also maintaining a fairly large number of electron-userland modules.
tl;dr: That page might be misleading, we're investing heavily in Electron.
Why it needs so much resources just to send a few bytes of text?..
Waste. It doesn't cost them much[0], and they don't seem to care on an ethical level about it either, and wastefulness allows them to achieve their business goals faster. Until there's a business pressure for it, things won't improve, and I have no idea what such pressure could be.
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[0] - How many of their users are captive anyway? I didn't choose to use Slack, some non-tech folks at the company I'm working with chose it. Elsewhere, someone in the community of a technology I use also chose Slack. So now I'm forced to use them in both cases.
> Sblack works exactly like a browser with small tweaks. We inject the dark mode style at the end of the Slack’s html, and that’s it
I bet it's just embedding a WebView, and the app is small because it uses the system's WebKit2
It just highlights why donation is a terrible business model for open-source.
Come up with a better support model and people will pay.