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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

> We’re also simplifying plan limits. 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, so you’ll never have to guess when your team will hit your limit. The majority of our active free teams will have access to more of their message history with the new 90-day limit compared to the previous limit. No matter how much your free team uses Slack, you’ll always have access to 90 days of history.

This seems, if anything, more of a noticeable change.

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Agreed - this is an outrageous change for low-traffic groups. In an instant, tremendous amounts of history and early documentation for small projects will be wiped out. Families will lose their vacation planning that they started 4 months ago. Small open-source projects and ramen-stage startups will lose core operational pins. And for every one of these communities that ponies up for Pro, ten will move to Discord. Tools like https://github.com/thomasloupe/Slackord2 already exist.

If anyone from Slack is reading this - I desperately want Slack to be the thing people reach for everything in their professional sphere. I want people to be exposed to it when they're working on that side project in college, or when putting something together for a family project. Because Slack's search is far better designed for documentation-style posts... but more importantly, the world needs a tool that feels native to colleagues and collaborators from all different generations. If younger collaborators never experience free Slack and their entire view of professionalism is Discord communities, they'll demand Discord. And Discord, with gaming culture still writ throughout its design system, is a big ask for a non-gamer business professional to take in - Slack is quite correctly designed to be the level of approachable it needs to be. So communities will splinter on age boundaries, and opportunities for collaboration will be lost. Some of them might have even made bridges that would have accomplished tremendous social good. All wiped out in the blink of a little rotating gamepad icon.

It's not too late. You could change the update to say "90 days of history, or the most recent 10k messages, whichever is higher." You could even do this silently so you don't need to walk back your posts. Doing so is at least a first step to preserving Slack as a cultural keystone into the far future in an evolving messaging environment. Please make the right choice.

>>Families will lose their vacation planning that they started 4 months ago.

Excuse my ignorance, but do people really do this? I use Slack for work, and have no desire to use it for personal reasons or with family. Especially when there are free messaging services that have fewer limitations.

Yeah, my wife and I are both members of various slack workspaces (work, volunteer groups, social/industry groups, etc) so it was beneficial to use the same tool (with a free, private workspace) for us to not only chat but also keep track of things in different channels (#wanderlust, #whatdowedo, #whatdoweeat, etc).

I was about to say that due to the new 90-day policy, we stand to lose pretty much allof the content in those channels but as it turns out, except for one message from July 2020, we already have. I suppose it doesn’t matter to me now if it’s 10k messages or 3 months of history but the former amounted to 24 months.

I can only speak anecdotally, but I'm on a social slack channel with a group of about a couple dozen or so IRL friends; it's mainly for shooting the shit, but we'll typically plan both small get-togethers and larger many-months-in-advance events through it (although, with our current usage, messages expire much faster than 90 days already, so we'll actually be benefiting from the retention change). I can't really remember why we ended up on slack vs. discord vs. something else (we moved to it from a big group SMS thread ~5 years ago I think), but it's been pretty nice overall, and I certainly prefer it to the friends group which uses facebook events and group chats to stay in touch and organize. At the end of the day, the free tier works well for what it is (IRC with threaded messages, emojis, and a nice mobile app), and if you really care about message retention, you can always write a TOS-violating bot which just scrapes&archives all the messages and host them in like an S3 bucket or something.

Yeah, my friends and I have used a low-traffic Slack channel for about four years. The era of the “free lunch” is over. Time to move on.

Yes, people do.

I've used it as a chat app with friends for > 5 years.

Nothing important should be singularly stored in a chat app. If it matters, store it somewhere more permanent.

Chat needs to be ephemeral.

Slack is permanent for all matters and purposes.

If you need the distinction, label it "discussion" instead of "chat", and assume that important discussions need to be kept around for reference.

We have tons of one liner tickets with only a title and a link to a Slack thread, and it saves crazy amount of time and effort.

This is a poorly designed process because, as this pricing change underscores, Slack is not permanent unless you pay them in perpetuity. Why would you place so much power over your internal processes in the hands of a third party? It may save a crazy amount of time and effort (it does not) but it will cost a crazy amount of money through lock in subscriptions or eventually being forced out of the ecosystem because your chats are 90 days old.

You could accomplish the exact same thing you’ve done by pasting the Slack discussion into the ticket or a text file with a link. Except you’d now control your future. So you’ve saved less than five seconds by copy pasting a Slack link instead of highlighting a bunch of Slack messages to copy paste.

Or you could use a libre and self-hostable chat platform (like Element on Matrix), and get rich discussion that costs little or nothing to keep around permanently.

I see it rarely discussed, but self-hosting has a maintenance cost beyond server time: you need people with knowledge and competences to keep it alive. If the rest of your stack is not self-hosted the same way, you'll be keeping these people around just for your chat platform and some other perhaps non critical tools, which might not make business sense depending on your company...

I don't know for your work environment, the last few companies I've worked for had a decent portion of their budget allocated to SaaS, from our ticketing system, customer support platform, marketing tools, BI, up to the hosting of our prod environment (and yes, they were also paying for Slack, and will probably continue doing so)

I see this as the same philosophy as leasing computers or company cars, relying on third party delivery companies to ship your goods etc. It's a business choice, and solving some of your problems with money is usually a valid strategy. When it stops making sense you reevaluate your options, check competitors etc.

PS: on pasting Slack text into tickets...it's really not optimal. If you really want the info in the ticket, spend the time to write a clear summary and still link to the original discussion. Formatting gets lost, or you're sticking screenshots of whole threads which is still horrible.

To note, our ticketing system is basically a fancy reminder/todo list and we're not SCRUM, if that gives more perspective into why time spent writing detailed tickets hasn't a stellar ROI.

> Slack is permanent for all matters and purposes.

Surely, you meant to say "Slack used to be permanent...".

It's a valuable lesson that, it seems, each generation of engineers gets to learn anew. If it's not under your control (direct or contractual), you will lose it at some point.

This is a lesson, but I think we've come to this point because it practically doesn't matter that much.

For instance I can't think of any document or design discussion I wrote in the past 10 years that would still matter today. Either the system is still somewhat live and running, and it's probably too far away from the original design for these docs to matter, or it's dead and buried, the company potentially not existing anymore.

In a way, actual permanentness is overrated for many many applications.

Now, people would be more sensible to disruptions of the current business, but arguably services like Slack or JIRA have a better track record than home made internally managed systems.

slack is a horrific place to store valuable things. search sucks, threads suck, and information literally floats away up off the screen over time.

Disagree. The history is not just "chat". It's a valuable stream of questions and answers, problem solving, code snippets, bug reports, and user stories. It serves the purpose that a FLOSS project's mailing list archive did a decade ago.

Did you know that SLACK was originally an acronym?

Except with a mailing list, every conversation is grouped under a subject and all the replies are somewhere in the thread.

On Slack, there's no such thing as a discussion-level subject, and people frequently end up replying outside the thread, or at a minimum there's other context outside the thread that people don't bother linking to because they think of chat as ephemeral, not that they are constantly building up an internal wiki.

Then again, for all of the Slack communities I'm part of, the chat history is valuable because that's where the people prefer to hang out, thus that's where the valuable discussions emerge without anyone even planning it that way.

There are often more durable options like a forum within the community, but that doesn't stop the Slack companion community from having high value discussions.

You often don't know you're having a conversation worth having until it's done. Kind of like when you see really good discussion in Stack Overflow comments that you wish were upgraded into a community wiki question, but that's not how it emerged.

When people bother to make them, channels provide discussion grouping at the subject level. Threads are an even finer-grained grouping that, granted, some people don't use. In my experience, all the problems you mention are also present (in some form) on mailing lists.

Slack is intended for exactly that durable use case. The name is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge

Now it’s an acronym for “Selectively Lost All Communications and Knowledge”

Why?

We quite successfully use Discord for business purposes. Both for team communications and the user community. Discord is not perfect, but there was something with Slack that made it even less perfect. Hard to explain, I think it has to do with their product thinking.

Ha, I knew I had seen your name before. Had a great time in your Discord community!

FWIW I also quite enjoyed using Discord when I used it for a project (even though I generally dislike it for many reasons).

> In an instant, tremendous amounts of history and early documentation for small projects will be wiped out.

Self-hosted or it's not yours.

I remember Hotmail would delete account if user didn't login for over a certain number of days. I lost a TON of stuff because of that and have never used Microsoft since.

I fail to see how any change can be outrageous when you’re literally getting a product for free and there are endless alternatives.

> Families will lose their vacation planning that they started 4 months ago.

if you rely on slack to plan your family vacation you have other problems

This is horrible for me and a few small communities I run. We’ll have to stop using slack (discord I guess) as we don’t have much traffic. We never got near the 10k limit and would use search quite a bit to find old items.

I guess Slack doesn’t mind losing these users. Of course we are free communities, but had also bought some seats for other projects.

But this means I won’t be able to use them any more.

I have nothing but praise for Matrix, via element.io or any other client of your choice. It's user-friendly, mature, history is not restricted, and the public matrix.org homeserver works great. You can use Element in your browser or as an Electron app. We've been using Matrix for a couple of years for the project I work on (Exosphere). It's a much better fit for open, public communities than Slack is (or Discord for that matter). Matrix lets you have both public, non-encrypted rooms, and end-to-end-encrypted DMs (and private rooms) where the server doesn't see the content of messages. You can organize a collection of rooms in a "space" for your community.

To ease the migration for your existing Slack users, you can even bridge Matrix channels to Slack channels, so people in either place still see all the messages.

I conceptually like Matrix, but in practice it has been a lot of pain. A project I participate in bridges Matrix and Discord, which arguably combines the advantages (I can go onto Discord to share an Image when Element freezes yet again, for instance ...).

Can recommend Rocket Chat if your looking for an open source alternative to Slack.

https://rocket.chat/

Rocket Chat is also migrating to Matrix on the backend!

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/30/welcoming-rocket-chat-to-...

It's possible to host a web app letting you view old Slack messages from an export, e.g. https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer or https://github.com/srid/Taut . I wonder if that can help in these use cases.

Discord is great for voice and gaming but not a good tool for anything vaguely professional. Maybe Element/Matrix?

Voice is the killer feature. Channels, not calls! Matrix doesn't have that yet and I'm not confident the new feature will actually be good.

As silly as Discord is in some places with all its ads and artificial limits, Element is glitchier, even slower and has even weirder UX choices, which I tend to find more impairing. As far as I know Discord also has better integration with other tools (bots for Github and Jira).

That makes it more suitable for professional use in my book - as long as you don't mind compromising on privacy and availability, but it's the same deal as with any other SaaS.

From an idealistic perspective I like Matrix and dislike Discord, of course, but the usability differences are hard to ignore.

fwiw Element added video rooms (and shortly voice rooms) the other week: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro...

We’re improving glitchiness & perf.

Just because it looks unprofessional? Because the only negative (aside from lock in) that I can think of would be the lack of SSO.

>but not a good tool for anything vaguely professional

Why? Discord servers can definitely be serious.

agreed. also, for several small groups I participate in that use Slack for coordination, this is a real downgrade, since we take years to generate 10000 messages.

Yeah, though I think filesizes are the main thing my private groups hit. I haven't measured, but I'm guessing someone uploading a few images or a video causes weeks of messages to drop off the tail end.

In some way "90 days" is a more humanly understandable limit than 10k messages or 5GB - as long as everyone knows it's an ephemeral channel they can work with it.

ooo that's nice of them. I'll immediately be using free slacks to ingest millions of log messages a day as soon as this lands :) my development logs searchable and organized by channel is gonna be great

They still store the message history, don't they? If you upgrade you will be able to go back further and see those messages.

Are they actually lost or just not searchable?

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