I was using Slack to manage notes on my personal research projects. I never used any features besides channels, messages, and search. I loved it's UI, rich-text features, accessibility, and reliability. Amount of workspace messages after 5 years is 1154. Besides that, I'm using Slack's business+ plan in the corporate teams I'm leading.

Again needing to migrate from a once great app that's now getting ruined by Salesforce, again with no complete export features available, I start feeling ridiculed.

Zulip looks promising, and they even support good imports from Slack. However, their UI just feels too cluttered with all those borders around messages, and their rich-text support isn't as convenient as Slack's.

A majority of my team members felt the same, and we decided to spend a day for hosting an internal contest to build a basic alternative to Slack that we happily migrated our personal workspaces to.

What Slack could've done better: - Saving money at other places than the most critical one for backwards compatibility, message retention - Store messages locally, instead of on their servers - Offer complete exports - Don't advertise this change as "beneficial for free users" - As a last resort, offer one-time payments instead of a per-user subscription model