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Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

At this point, between no encryption, horrible clients, mistreatment of irc users, and questionable corporate behavior there's nothing in Slack that's worth saving it for me. Superior free software alternatives exist that bring the same or better functionality while also giving the user full control.

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What does any of that have to do with this article (other than that it's about Slack)? The ability for enterprises to control their keys is hardly unusual.

Please elaborate on "questionable corporate behavior". Everything else you said is matter of opinion and slack's growth would speak to the exact opposite.

"no encryption" - There is encryption, not end to end but data is encrypted at rest: https://slack.com/security

"horrible clients" - I disagree. They're not perfect but they work and are consistent 99.999% of the time.

"mistreatment of irc users" - People need to get over this. It's not IRC. That's like being upset that email doesn't support fax well enough.

What "questionable corporate behavior" are you referring to?

Which free alternatives?

Matrix is the most popular one I think.

https://mattermost.com/

Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and that's just off the top of my head. All three are free (as in speech) and aren't terribly hard to set up on-premise or spin up a container for somewhere else.

Zulip is a great choice, too.

I find Rocketchat quite good.

I like Slack a lot except for the fact that it's a sluggish web app hidden away in a native window. I understand it gives them a lot of freedom to change things constantly, but what I would really want is a proper native app.

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