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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Hype, certainly.

But the way I see it, AI agents created incentives for interoperability. Who needs an API when everyone is job secure via being a slow desktop user?

Well, your new personal assistant who charges by the Watt hour NEEDS it. Like when the CEO will personally drive to get pizzas for that hackathon because that’s practically free labor, so does everyone want everything connected.

For those of us who rode the API wave before integrating became hand-wavey, it sure feels like the world caught up.

I hope it will last, but I don’t know either.

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Unfortunately, I think we're equally likely to see shortsighted lock-in attempts like this [0] one from Slack.

I tried to find a rebuttal to this article from Slack, but couldn't. I'm on a flight with slow wifi though. If someone from Slack wants to chime in that'd be swell, too.

I've made the argument to CFOs multiple times over the years why we should continue to pay for Slack instead of just using Teams, but y'all are really making that harder and harder.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals...

It's going to take more people willing to move away from slack for those purposes.

As it is, I'm going to propose that we move more key conversations outside of slack so that we can take advantage of feeding it into ai. It's a small jump from that to looking for alternatives.

The argument used to be “Let’s move FOSS conversation out of {Slack, Discord} because they prevent conversations from being globally searchable, and they force individuals into subscription to access history backlog.”

Getting indexed by AI crawlers appears to be the new equivalent to getting indexed by search engines.

I'm happier we went with Zulip each day.

(Still) such an overvalued alternative to all these "ephemeral but permanent" chat apps. For folks who like a bit more structure and organization, but still want "live communication" like what Slack et al offers, do yourself a favor and look into Zulip.

Sounds sort of like an innovator's dilemma response. New technology appears and the response is gatekeeping and building walls rather than adaptation.

Slack was never an innovator. By the time they showed up there were lots of chats apps. They just managed to go beyond the others by basically embedding a browser engine into their app at a time most thought of that as heresy, I mean a chat app that requires 1Gb to run was a laughable proposition to us, techies. But here we are… MS Teams is even heavier, but users seem to care nothing about that anyway.

They were never an innovator, they just did this thing nobody else did, that some years later became the norm?

Blitzscaled? Yep.

I wasn’t aware of this, it’s extremely shortsighted. My employees’ chats are my company’s data, and I should be able to use them as I see fit. Restricting API access to our own data moves them quickly in to the 'too difficult to continue doing business with' category.

The reality is that Slack isn’t that sticky. The only reason I fended off the other business units who've demanded Microsoft Teams through the years is my software-engineering teams QoL. Slack has polish and is convenient but now that Slack is becoming inconvenient and not allowing me to do what I want, I can't justify fending off the detractors. I’ll gladly invest the time to swap them out for a platform that respects our ownership and lets us use our data however we need to. We left some money on the table but I am glad we didn’t bundle and upgrade to Slack Grid and lock ourselves into a three-year enterprise agreement...

Precisely the situation I'm in. I've fought off slack-to-teams migrations at multiple orgs for the same QoL reasons, but this will make that much (much) harder to justify.

We migrated from Slack to Teams and while it does work, it’s also not very good (UI/UX wise). We also did try out Rocket.Chat and Mattermost and out of all of those Mattermost was the closest to Slack and the most familiar to us.

I’d go for Discord if it had a business version without all the gaming stuff.

The dedicated voice/video channels are great for ad-hoc conversations when remote and a lot better than Slack’s huddles. They’re like dedicated remote meeting rooms except you’re not limited by office space.

> I’d go for Discord if it had a business version without all the gaming stuff.

Granted, my Discord usage been relatively limited, but what "gaming stuff"? In the servers unrelated to gaming I don't think I see anything gaming related, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

We've migrated a 1000+ product team to Mattermost 2 years ago.

Super happy with it. No bullshit upgrades that break your way of working. Utilitarian approach to everything, the basics just work. Still has some rough edges, but in a workhorse kind of way.

Endorse.

> I wasn’t aware of this, it’s extremely shortsighted. My employees’ chats are my company’s data, and I should be able to use them as I see fit.

True, and if you're the only one sitting on the data and using it, then what you say is true.

The moment you use another platform, entering agreements of terms of service and more, it stops being "your and/or your company's data" though, and Slack will do whatever they deem fit with it, including preventing you from getting all of the data, because then it gets easier for you to leave.

Sucks, yeah, but it is the situation we're in, until lawmakers in your country catch up. Luckily, other jurisdictions are already better for things like this.

If you are interested in scraping slack for personal use, I made a local-only slack scraper mcp: https://github.com/kimjune01/slunk-mcp

Thanks for building this, but also ridiculous that you had to do it. I miss irc even though slack is objectively better.

Hard disagree, IRC is still the best chat application out there.

Jabber & XMPP was the peak of instant messaging. Since then it's been downhill.

I use both daily and Teams absolutely sucks.

Very aware, zero desire to use Teams, that's why I've fought to keep Slack despite the cost.

But now they're actively making it more difficult for people like me to say "engineers like it more" and that be a compelling-enough argument.

A big part of my short thesis with Apple is that they'll try to do this sort of thing and it will mean real AI integration like what their customers want will simply never be available, driving them to more open platforms.

I think you'll see this everywhere. LLMs mean "normal" people will suddenly see computers the way we do and a lot of corporate leadership just isn't intuitively prepared for that.

> But the way I see it, AI agents created incentives for interoperability.

There are no new incentives for interoperability. Compare that were already providing API access added MCP servers of varying quality.

The rest couldn't care less, unless they can smell an opportunity to monetize hype

Well, interoperability requires competition and if there's one thing we've learnt it's that the tech industry loves a private monopoly.

MCP it's like API but with 100,000x the operating cost!

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