Slack messages older than 90 days will be hidden for free users from September | Hacker News Reader

Slack messages older than 90 days will be hidden for free users from September

slack.com

26 pointsrerx22 comments

Ah, so Slack is transitioning from a freemium model to a ransomware model. Nice.

Yeah they should pay devs in beers and peanuts instead so we can leech freeware for ever.

I think disabling access to data you’ve encouraged your users to store for years is a distasteful monetization strategy.

I prefer this over sacking Engineers.

You were always going to lose access to that data on a free plan right? Now you just know exactly when you'll lose it.

It's going to be worse for small private instances but much better for large public instances.

When I last looked at Slack, they let the free plan access the last 20000 or so messages, which means the small private instances won't have to pay for years, and by the time they reach the limit, the information is stale that perhaps no one will miss it.

For those small private instance, there might not be many messages left after the 90+ days are hidden.

I've had my eye on "Twist" (from the same developers as Todoist). Seems like a cleaner, thread-focused version of Slack. If I were starting my own business tomorrow that is what I'd use, but sadly I'm stuck with Slack and Teams.

Having looked at their Features page, I really don't understand how they're accomplishing each of their listed features - even with the demos. It seems like the marketing and product list is written for a specific company, or person rather than some random person on the internet.

I have no desire to use their product. It doesn't do anything new, except maybe the way the interface is structured. If that's so great, why isn't it immediately obvious?

This is the modern internet. Make a killer demo. Make it fast. Make it fun.

This is boring.

I have been setting up a matrix server for my work but it's a mess for people who just want a slack alternative. I understand that federation is the whole point but what about use cases where that is not the most important thing? The weirdest thing about a synapse/element combination is that there is no real admin panel/ui. And even if there was, imo. admins don't really have the same level of control as a slack admin has, but that is needed if it's supposed to be used in a corporate context. After self hosting a huge stack of synapse, element, jitsi, matrix intergration server, matrix identity server, bridges etc... (it is seemingly never ending) just to get a truly self hosted matrix server.. i am actually ready to implement my own. It just has to implement enough to be a useful slack replacement.

You could just use Discord.

But maybe if you want something open source, consider forking an existing Matrix client rather than starting over?

I can't because I work at a research institution which _researches_ the use of open source software I'm government etc. It would be a little ironic, actually that's the whole reason why they want to move from slack.

I want to see a enterprise-ready replacement for Slack. Teams is bad -- too many feature differences, rollout is inconsistent, quality is usually bad. Slack is great at what it does, but their support sometimes mystifies.

What are people using today for technical communication besides Matrix (too cumbersome) and IRC (last line of defense)?

rocket.chat -- FOSS, based on Matrix, but more Slack-like

rocket.chat is not based on matrix. It does have some bridging to matrix built in, but that is very different from it being a matrix client/server. See here: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/30/welcoming-rocket-chat-to-...

Mattermost is what my company uses. It can be self-hosted on-site, configured to keep an auditable log of changes and conversations, and many of its features that are not compliance-friendly can be turned off.

I use both for different spheres of communication. I like Mattermost more than rocket chat, as a user, an admin, and for the Mobile notifications Mattermost still does and rocket chat doesn't.

Good rec. I'll check it out.

I worked in a game company that used discord. I much prefer it to slack.

Besides being less buggy, how is discord better for tech comms?

(now that our trust has been betrayed)

Is Discord structured in a way that would prevent them ransoming all your stuff years into a project like this?

Discord

I've been using Slack to support my teaching, so I will probably go back to piazza. No custom gif emojis, and you have to put up with the recruiting, but it basically works.

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