Hacker News Reader

Comment by taegee | Hacker News Reader

If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.

We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.

That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV

Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.

Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.

In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.

We did the migration in stages, basically this:

    - Provide access to Teams
    - Create all of the new teams / channels there
    - Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
    - Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
    - Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
    - Remove access to Slack
    - Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
    - Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
    - Cancel Slack subscription

In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.

We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).

> In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs

Or, they could not in some practical manner do searches on previous posts, so they didn’t use them?

Wait. You moved from slack to teams? Why? We are in the process of moving to slack from teams and I can’t phantom something worse than teams.

As a product, I like Slack a lot more than teams. Chatting is easier, the apps are better, reminders and scheduled messages, workflows, etc. Threaded conversations are much easier as well, and aren't artificially restricted to certain types of channels.

At a high level though, Salesforce is often seen as a predatory company. Prices are high and they will squeeze their users for every nickel (as demonstrated here). They will also monetize your data in ways that you probably don't want.

Teams chat is pretty bad, I agree. But it does have these benefits:

  - Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.
  - Microsoft is probably a better steward of your data.
  - Teams video / audio calls are much much better than Slack huddles.
  - That's pretty much it tbh

> Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.

Not for long, at least for the EU and I assume for us in the EEA. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

I didn't make the decision, the company I worked for did. I was asked to come up with a way to help make the process smooth.

I don't know their exact reasons, probably budget related since they were already using O365.

I can nearly guarantee it wasn't because Teams offers a better user experience. :D

PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.

I agree, but I don't think they were using the PDFs programmatically.

I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.

Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?

Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.

So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).

Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.

IIRC, you have to do something called a "compliance export," which just like any other compliance feature (SSO, HIPAA BAA, audit logs, etc.) usually requires the highest plan. It's designed to add some extra friction so admins can't just add themselves to a DM from the main UI like they could with a channel, but it is possible.

If you think anything you do on your work computer or saas accounts is private I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

why the extra step of making them into PDFs?

We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.

Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.

There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.

It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.

Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.

One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.

Human readable format at rest, I assume.

PDF is definitely not a human-reable format.

In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...

I think you don't understand what "human-readable format" means. The Wikipedia article has a good overview[1]. Open any PDF in a text editor instead of a PDF viewer and you'll see why it's not a human-readable format.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-readable_medium_and_data

Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.

Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.

And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.

Zulip is awesome too. On prem.

What do you like about Zulip? Any drawbacks that you tolerate? Considering it for on-prem but would love to have some real-world feedback.

Used it for about 2 years at a growing startup. What I liked:

* Threads are way better than in Slack. They're top level instead of just a bolted on afterthought. This means all your various conversations scale way better and are way easier to find than in Slack. I can't overstate this enough, it's a killer feature and genuinely improves the overall organisation of your communications

* Font size is just slightly smaller. My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I still think they get the balance of legibility and information density spot on, whereas Slack feels cartoony in comparison.

* Search felt a little better, I can't exactly put my finger on why or how, just that finding things in Slack always feels comparable to the iOS Mail search feature: very basic.

Drawbacks:

* There are less out of the box integrations I think.

Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.

this is what we're doing :)

Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?

  - Zulip
  - Matrix/Synapse and Element
  - Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits

See discussions below in this HN thread.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...

[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again

You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.

The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.

My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.

I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.

For what it's worth, Zulip has a Mattermost data import tool, and communities are an important use case when we set product direction.

While I can't promise we won't ever change our exact monetization strategy, we're not venture-funded, and thus are immune to the usual enshittification pressures. https://zulip.com/values/ has some context.

(I lead the Zulip project)

Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"

It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.

Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com