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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.

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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.

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