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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Well. I can’t use this at work. But what I really need is not even to export the messages themselves.

I just want to save a list of all my channels, and the categories I’ve put them in.

Anyone know a way to do that, using either just Slack itself, or some specific tool that is only about managing followed channels and the categories you’ve grouped them into?

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Slackdump also has a mode that exports a list of channels. Not sure about category groupings. You could also screenshot/OCR or copy and paste from the browser?

Some paid Slack plans allow exports from their platform. Inside the ZIP, there will be an XML file that lists the channels - channels.xml, if I am not mistaken. However, I don‘t know about „categories“ - this could be some client configuration that actually is not part of the export. If it‘s not, I would perhaps take screenshots (overlapping is OK), and feed it to some LLM/VLM for extraction. I am confident that GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet will work, but Gemini 1.5 Pro should also work.

Should be simple enough to find the data by opening the browser debugger and reloading Slack.

Hm yeah true. I use the desktop app and sometimes I forget that it’s all Electron and that they also have a web version you can use in the browser as well. Thanks, that should be doable :)

The web version is amazing for scripting stuff. I used it to download all the emojis one time, just from the console. So easy to automate just from in there.

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