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Comment by jetsnoc | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

> 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.

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