Twist: Slack alternative from the makers of Todoist
twist.com
twist.com
This is a repeated pattern over the years, whether management or tech but when you get huge gains simply by not doing something invariably some group of people will gravitate towards exactly that problem and cause a net increase in BS for everyone. This tends to lead to technically imposed measures to attempt to insulate you from colleagues that themselves end up overstepping the mark.
Great to see serif fonts making a comeback too.
For what it's worth Slack has a hidden command to let you set the font to whatever you want: `/slackfont $fontname`
with slack, it's easy to have a thread with 15 different answers which are all slightly different.
The "knowledge retention" features I'm looking for is being able to mark a thread as "this is the decision made", have that highlighted in metadata and archival, maybe be able to link off to a notion page, and have the thread closed to finalize the decision.
EDIT: the number of times I've had to kick people off a thread because they're adding bad info during a crisis reallllly drives my desire for marking canonical messages lol
I guess the emphasis is on "defaults" because interruptions can be minimized by seeing notification levels and muting. Lack of structure? There are channels and threads, I'm not sure what else I'd need from a product like that. Retention is fixed by paying for it.
So let's applaud those who try, even if we believe they failed (or at least haven't succeeded yet).
With free accounts we had organized our account into different teams per site we run like Office Snapshots, Education Snapshots, etc with some people on multiple teams.
When we upgraded a couple users after they were really enjoying Twist, the upgrade only applied to a single team and not across all teams for the upgraded users. It would have cost $30/month/user to have a user get the Unlimited features on each of the 5 teams they were in.
I’m still not sure if we organized our teams in a weird way, but I still feel like it the pricing wasn’t presented in a way that made this clear.
Maybe your company requires certain behaviour, but that’s not a problem with the tool, nor will any other tool make things better.
Notifications rarely work for you.
Slack seems to work around keeping people looking without context
A well designed and well run slack requires a thoughtful setup and we’ll trained users which itself can become a barrier to participating.
In the free slack world, far too much information is lost after 90days and those slack communities stagnant and die. Slack could offer tools free for non profits and join the other software tools who help support open source projects.
A few friends and I are doing some side consulting and decided to use a Google Space within our public Gmail accounts. It has worked great and I haven't missed a thing, especially with the Gmail app on the phone, but I can mute pretty easily if I want to.
I have notifications on a couple of critics channels where time critical incidents are logged, they fire every month or two and that’s where I want to stop what I’m doing and look at those.
With teams however I can’t seem to find a way of muting corporate spam channels, so I have to keep the program closed when deep working.
I prefer teams to zoom now I’m afraid, the persistence of meeting chat windows for example, but for textual collaboration slack is orders of magnitude better. Maybe because we have managed to get our entire organisation at least federated and most channels are global or in large enough departments that you only need to be in one or at most two.
Teams definitely misbehaves in respecting notifications, less so on Apple products. I believe some notification settings are employer side settings.
Instead, slack keeps growing features that my org never uses.
Behavior is enabled by what the tool enables. The tyranny of the default means that an organization not prepared to rigidly apply certain best practices will live and die based on those defaults.
This may not be universally bad, but for some environments, it’s quite bad.
Twist looks like it focuses on many of the Slack issues that bite bigger teams. It’s one thing for me to better manage my use of slack, create focused topic channels, snooze notifications, etc. But none of this matters when there are 100 other teams all using the product haphazardly.
Better defaults won’t magically fix this, but there is a lot of value in defaults that encourage better habits.
The focus on async communication also seems interesting. My biggest issue with Slack was that people expect immediate answers, and that it’s easy to lose track of things if you don’t stay on top of the pings as they come in.
Again, this expectation doesn’t magically disappear with a new tool, but a new tool that focuses on this, and the introduction of which can be used as a catalyst for encouraging behavior change seems valuable.
Better tools won’t solve the whole problem, but I’m glad they’re putting these ideas out into the market. If nothing else, I hope it leads to more interest in deep work, true async communications, and awareness of the toxic and attention-destroying nature of many Slack instances.
What I like about Twist is that this would be a good interface for email, slack and forums/discussions.
Discord has a much better approach. It seems that slack may not be able to match it for historical, bureaucratic, and technical reasons.
I've moved anything I can to matrix and encourage everyone to do the same. A collaboration only necessitates invites to a channel. It matches the way we work and it's more flexible.
If you've ever used Discord with multiple logins, it's actually not seamless at all. You essentially switch accounts and are only able to see the chats associated with one account at a time.
Thus, not only would it probably be a non-trivial technical challenge, but they would also need to put in additional UI and UX work to make the experience better than what Discord offers. And all that effort probably isn't worth it when their money comes from customers who won't benefit from it.
Ultimately, I think if you want to run a chat but aren't providing the members with emails, you probably shouldn't use be using Slack.
There is nothing stopping Slack from doing the same while still getting money from companies needing their service.
Over time, a few dozen or so Slack instances popped up.
These were eventually corralled by central IT and merged into a single enterprise instance, but this just magnified the messiness - overlap between channels/workspaces, vastly different usage habits by department, etc.
Most of this happened pre-Pandemic, at a time when collaboration tools were 2nd class citizens, and nobody cared too much about the sprawl.
Now, Teams would have handled this better.
One team = make a team = make channels in the team
On the subject of Teams, if you want to see something worse than dozens of Slack instances merged into one, it's what happens when those are subsequently migrated to Microsoft Teams, with one team created per Slack channel. Not recommended.
Also not Microsoft's fault. The effectiveness of these tools depends highly on the implementation.
Slack means silo walls break down, channels are formed and disintegrate by people with stuff to contribute in an agile way, rather than a team structure which takes years to change.
That will happen even when starting with a single instance. But that's also going to happen in real life. You can only embrace it...
Jumping on every alert (message) is a recipe for ADHD (yes, you absolutely can _develop_ ADHD) and anxiety becoming the norm.
It was all down to how Flowdock implemented threads. They did it better and long before Slack ever did; Slack's threads frankly kinda suck.
I've heard Zulip threads work really well but I've never had the chance to use it with a team that was willing to try something else.
I feel like Salesforce will wake up one day and triple the price and 95% of customers will just say OK.
After reading this, I cannot understand how this is better or even different from Slack. If people are disorganized, allow themselves to be distracted, distract others, store information in the wrong place - all of that remains unsolved by Twist, as far as I can tell.
Using a few recipes to avoid having to break backwards compatibility every so often is pretty easy, as long as you know what they are (eg. you may need to live with your "referer" typo for a long time), and enforce them through coding standards and reviews and automated tests.
> makes collaboration easy from anywhere by using threads to organize your conversations.
Do you see something else?
E2E can by made discoverable by encrypting the session key with an additional account's public key.
> Give your team past context to learn from.
> Quickly onboard new employees and easily share context to past decisions with easy-to-access threads.
Slack and other tools are obviously inspired by IRC, but they do resolve a bunch of issues that IRC never got properly solved (or maybe did, but deploying it was too complex or it came too late).