Which makes me wonder: Just how much of UI development had software engineering had consumed and automated since 1980s, or is it still in the realm of pure human art?
The core value proposition of Slack is next-level beyond that: it adds a visually appealing, highly intuitive UI/UX that almost anyone can sit down and immediately use, without any studying or setup or manuals or training. No technical skills are required. You don't need to understand anything beyond "type username and password"; the rest is self-explanatory.
And yet, there were dozens of other applications doing exactly that (Slack is a list of channels on the left, and the text of the channel in the center).
But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? - Same question, but taking into account that Slack captures your data and won't give it back to you ? How expensive is it to leave Slack ?
Sure, suc sucks, but we probably could converge on something less bloated and proprietary than Slack ?
I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server.
You could perhaps even make a local GUI application that spawns ssh once and reads+writes to it, and have your 90% slack functionality done in a weekend.
Wait, there has been a leak from the company so we need some security staff on it and maybe mandated TFA.
And it's nice to have a way to call people and not only chat.
I wonder if there is already an app that does that, even if it's bloated it would be more convenient...
Why? What's wrong with Qt? or any of the other x-platform UI toolkits I already use to target Windows, Linux and Mac?
(Your other points are irrelevant. I never claimed that suc will match slack 100%, feature for feature).
I did not know that. Can confirm that it works in FF on Linux.
But I'd also wager we can go quite far with a single cheap VPS. A few thousands user does not seem impossible at all.