_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
game_the0ry wrote 3 min ago:
Something similar happened to another independent tech educator who was
running a slack community for his niche. [1] Slack has completely gone
down hill since the salesforce acquisition.
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/ad...
joshfraser wrote 4 min ago:
I switched from Slack to Discord back in 2017 and I can't imagine ever
going back. Their free offering is better than what you get for $$$$
from Slack.
Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust
each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large
low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers
far more granular controls.
They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't
recommend it enough.
xnx wrote 23 min ago:
Since no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way
to dump Slack: [1] . Is there any alternative chat system that will
import these dumps?
URI [1]: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump
hrdwdmrbl wrote 22 min ago:
Yes, both Mattermost and Element have tools that can.
(BTW, I tried Element and regretted it (massively lacks polish)
before switching to Mattermost and I'm loving it!)
hrdwdmrbl wrote 21 min ago:
Sorry, you specifically mentioned "these dumps". I don't know about
"those" dumps. Mattermost and Element can import everything from
Slack, but it might require following their instructions.
tschellenbach wrote 29 min ago:
Consider building your own (many large communities do). [1] It's super
simple to build with Stream and far lower costs than Slack. (i'm the
CEO, founder so don't take my word for it). But we have quite a few
customers building either communities into their app or large companies
running integrated chat workflows. (think airline operations,
construction collaboration etc.)
URI [1]: https://getstream.io/chat/
austin-cheney wrote 27 min ago:
There is also IRC, which has web frontends like KiwiRC.
tatsumaki19 wrote 31 min ago:
I created an HN account solely to share this. A couple of years ago,
our edutech company experienced a fourfold increase in Slack usage, was
given weeks in notice too. We promptly transitioned to Google Chat
(which we were paying for through Google Suite). Back then, Google Chat
was quite inadequate, but I must admit that it now fulfills nearly 99%
of the functions we used Slack for. Considering the numerous
integrations with Google Suite products, it might even exceed 100% now.
However, Google Suite promptly raised its prices when they integrated
Gemini. Nevertheless, the Google account manager provided us with
significantly more advanced notice and a substantial discount.
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for
non-profit should really inform way in advance.
gchamonlive wrote 34 min ago:
As long as consumer protection is an afterthought companies will
continue to change their agreements after purchase and screw over
consumers.
I'm left to wonder why do we even use words anymore, when tipping isn't
optional, when purchasing doesn't mean you own the thing you buy, and
an agreement can be changed without notice.
Why is it called tip and not fee. Why is it called purchase and not
rent. Why is it called agreement and not... well I don't even know what
to call that... a pinky promise?
We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's
just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation.
I just can't trust anything anymore.
jeena wrote 35 min ago:
Slack is still a thing?
At this rate it's cheaper to pay a full time DevOps team to run several
Matrix servers so you have high availability.
hrdwdmrbl wrote 16 min ago:
I tried to like Matrix but the UX was just so bad! Switched to
Mattermost and I couldn't be happier. Everything that I liked about
Slack.
dansmith1919 wrote 35 min ago:
Our company wants to move away from Google Chat, I'm happy that Slack
is letting us know upfront that they won't have to be considered at
all.
btown wrote 44 min ago:
One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub
for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've
established yourself as a customer service channel and internal
coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They
already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them.
And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B
bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than
X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible
channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend
more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still
charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator
program.
But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully
licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an
unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of
customers.
nailer wrote 45 min ago:
"Hi Stewart Butterfield here, I coufounded Slack and I'm sorry about
this. We're taking steps to fix this from happening again and Skyfall
will have free Slack for life"
Hypothetical easy win for Slack here.
dommer wrote 46 min ago:
For changes of this size, to any client, grace and care is the well
trodden path. The only case where this isn't the route is when you
don't want that customer, or where you can no longer afford that
customer. Does it seem like the cost of AI on everything is coming home
to roost?
Bluescreenbuddy wrote 48 min ago:
Sales force is going the Broadcom route. They only give a shit about
megacorps that are basically trapped and anyone else can go fuck
themselves.
deepanwadhwa wrote 53 min ago:
URI [1]: https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack
IceDane wrote 53 min ago:
Slack is easily the worst platform I can think of using for something
like this. Why would you not be using discord instead? You know, the
free platform that every teenager is already using? You could archive
your messages using any number of bots.
Slack is fundamentally wrong for this kind of thing. Every time I find
out the support channels for anything is a slack server, I groan. The
whole workspace setup is awful.
nyeah wrote 54 min ago:
They're serving notice. Data in vendor custody belongs to the vendor,
not to the customer. Customers can go to court to prove otherwise.
realaaa wrote 58 min ago:
well thanks Slack ! now I know about Zulip ! which looks quite nice
cheers to all
smashah wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
That's so annoying, but all things considered, a universal blessing in
disguise now that the team is moving to an open source solution.
Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for
that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.
bluecheese452 wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Seems like a good lesson. Donât trust giant corporations. Use open
source solutions. Build your own. It is one thing to be told it, it is
another to experience it. Short term pain, long term gain.
nickdothutton wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Important to know how to get out of a service faster than you got into
it.
OutOfHere wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
We need a blacklist of vendors that subject clients to extortion. As
per user reports, two such vendors are Cloudflare and now Slack. These
are to be avoided at all costs.
ok123456 wrote 17 min ago:
The bad actors are pretty well known:
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- SalesForce
- Broadcom
steveBK123 wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
A reminder that the only thing worse than paying for software is
renting cloud SaaS & ceding them all your data.
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back at some point before the
entire world are vassals to the same 5-10 megacap US tech companies.
gabo_m wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element [1] , I don't know why more
people don't do this.
URI [1]: https://element.io/
jrochkind1 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
I'm curious about the choice of mattermost, which also looks like it's
$10/user/month, not cheap! I guess they do have non-profit pricing
for self-hosted. Curious if self-hosted mattermost is what Hack Club is
looking at?
Charmunk wrote 53 min ago:
Hack club member and volunteer here, we are selfhosting a fork of
mattermost on our own infra
sarlalian wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
You can self host for free. You lose some features, but overall
itâs still pretty good.
PunchyHamster wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
sad that open protocols lost chat wars.
Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch
of people clueless about average user's woes.
"let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server
some things just outright not work!"
xd1936 wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
Thank goodness we have a hundred improved protocol alternatives now.
Matrix, Tox, Jami, Briar.
jcmontx wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Anyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option
edude03 wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Integrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and
provide an off ramp in the meantime
0:
URI [1]: https://www.linen.dev/
thebiglebrewski wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
This is so messed up! Hack Club has done and is doing amazing things
for teens and young adults who love to build things. Shame on you
Salesforce.
micromacrofoot wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
switch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go
proprietary again!
jijji wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
not only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps
dev_l1x_be wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
Have you tried IRC?
michabyte wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Speaking as a member of Hack Club and a former summer intern of the
same, we started on IRC if memory serves. The first issue is that HC
aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a
user-friendly medium. Sure, a skilled power user can learn to work
around its quirks in a few hours. However, a beginner to
programming/complex computer skills with nothing aiding them but a
passion for learning more would find it confusing enough that giving
up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition,
we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features
(think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be
added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but
simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps
answer your question :)
carlhjerpe wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
Not intended to pick on Hack Club, but I don't see why anyone with tech
competency in-house would choose Slack, and if you don't you probably
have MS Teams.
I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some
Kubernetes communities and such.
Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.
gloosx wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.
wanderingmind wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
Dumb question maybe. Can the users in Europe raise a GDPR request to
extract all their data from Slack? I realise it's not easy to port the
data to other platforms yet, but atleast you have a copy of the data
jeeybee wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Iâve always loved Slack. Itâs been core to how we work, and Iâve
recommended it to countless others.
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club â sudden 40x price hike,
almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of
history â makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our
work.
I donât want to leave Slack. But I also donât want to wake up one
day with our teamâs history held hostage.
myflash13 wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
If there's one good thing to say about Microsoft (not about Teams),
it's that they strive to keep good business relationships with their
clients, including backwards compatibility. I don't think I've ever
heard of a story like this about Microsoft.
NetMageSCW wrote 52 min ago:
That is true, but perhaps part of the lesson is you canât count on
that staying the same as executives change and companies get new
goals, such as stock price.
nycdatasci wrote 3 hours 53 min ago:
Maybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and
landed at: [1] â¦Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke?
The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
URI [1]: https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/
rob wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit
company yet that isn't in the tech space?
karel-3d wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
they could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.
anovikov wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
Question must be asked: why would anyone teach teenagers coding these
days?
People naturally love coding, especially teens. It's addictive. And it
no longer leads to any career prospects, or chances to contribute to
society, or money, or anything really. It's over as a mass occupation.
Addicting teens to it does them a bad service. In the future,
personality traits that will lead to happiness and success will be
opposite to those nurtured by coding, or are typical among professional
coders: empathy, likability, social skills... Kids who got hooked on
coding now, are heading for a life of misery.
flemhans wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Mattermost is crippling their open-source edition and it gets worse
every year. At the same time, it's difficult not to update, since the
mobile app will require a new server version, and most regular users
install and auto-update the mobile apps.
It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to
something else again.
karel-3d wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
In what way is it crippling?
(I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)
coder543 wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Mentioned elsewhere in this discussion:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287107
immdischt wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
What a dick move to do that.
fifteen1506 wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
Ok, I really think this is going to cost me karma, but the snyde remark
has to be made.
They don't do "Sales", they do "Salesforce"d.
bob1029 wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
You could pay for 200-300 MS Teams seats for a decade with that kind of
money pile, or a F100-sized Oracle database instance.
I went through the whole slack->mattermost pipeline a very long time
ago to avoid (at the time) Skype for business and the initial rollout
of Teams.
It turns out we wasted a lot of time trying to be clever and not pay
the devil for his services. Unfortunately, there are some proprietors
in the space who occasionally make the devil look like a saint. I'd
rather do business with him than return a call to a "at least it's not
you-know-who" company that fucked me this hard. The devil is brutal but
not this brutal. Larry Ellison would at least have his sales people buy
me a fancy steak dinner first.
tedggh wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Whereâs Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of
extortion. It doesnât matter if you have a contract, they could still
be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes arenât the smartest
people. I went through a similar drama with AWS a few years ago and
after months of sleepless nights I decided to open a case with the
office of the attorney general in my state. They were pretty quick to
follow up m and contacted AWS directly. My case was resolved a few
days after that.
michabyte wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Hi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is
incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very
much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official
capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection
laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the
meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic
option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.
gruez wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
>It doesnât matter if you have a contract, they could still be
breaking the law.
Under what principle? They were near the end of their contract, so
there's no legs to stand on. It's not like there's rent controls for
SaaS contracts.
hackboyfly wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
This is a nightmare of a PR for Salesforce / slack. I guess someone did
not do their due diligence before reaching out and informing you about
the price hike.
aenis wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
I wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they
could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone
felt very proud of having automated this important, but often
neglected part of their business model.
p_l wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
Or didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion
target".
serbuvlad wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
I don't understand how "multi-channel IRC with history, multimedia and
good UI/UX for the desktop" is such a small market with so few
competitors while "single-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good
UI/UX for mobile" is such a saturated market.
For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the
main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat,
Telegram, Signal, Threema, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with
different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features
and security/privacy profiles.
For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of
it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone
use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used
by non-techie people with... privacy needs).
MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a
thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and
individuals.
And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different
segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira
account.
I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it
really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're
serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over
what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if
you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you
arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional
enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.
So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a
company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing
on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can
out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with
professional vibes if you tried.
inciampati wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
matrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not
marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by
groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and
truly federated.
alper wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
We figured out a decade ago or so that Slack was entirely unsustainable
for any kind of community type usage. Glad to see that more people are
coming to that realization.
lelanthran wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
I suspect that the same applies to discord.
nurumaik wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
Pissing off community with the word "hack" consisting of thousands of
students with lots of free time to spare. I hope nothing will go wrong
for salesforce after this move
VoidWhisperer wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Hack in this context is the software development one, i.e. 'hacking
on a project' meaning working on a project. You are thinking of the
cybersecurity one.
like_any_other wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
Please frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues"
with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".
mkesper wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
This is a good reminder why it's important to own your communication
stack yourself. Could happen also to all the projects relying on
Discord etc.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit
plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable,
and we valued the service they provided to our community.
>However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we
donât agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year,
theyâll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message
history.
>One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit
offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the
bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more.
This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love
to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty
makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
sd9 wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
What details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
Reading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they
received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication
with Slack since then.
The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key
element to this story, but that is glossed over.
NetMageSCW wrote 30 min ago:
You seem to think you know details the people involved do not and
have an axe to grind against them.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 20 min ago:
No - it's very clear that the people involved know details that
we do not, and are withholding them for the sake of a better
story. I have an axe to grind against people who use technical
platforms to air mismanaged and misrepresented grievances.
raesene9 wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
Slack seem to be doing this to a wide range of groups. The Kubernetes
project and CNCF were told by Slack that they would lose access to the
paid version with quite short notice.
In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of
someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a
non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend
looking at alternatives...
Firefishy wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
OpenStreetMap Slack [1] was forced to downgraded to the free edition
earlier this year for similar reasons.
URI [1]: https://slack.openstreetmap.us/
cmckn wrote 4 hours 51 min ago:
Funny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you
have any references where I can read more? I didnât hear about that
raesene9 wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
Best place for info is probably the announcements channel on
Kubernetes slack. thatâs a link which is a good place to start
URI [1]: https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p175008711...
boramalper wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
Here is the public announcement: [1] > UPDATE: Weâve received
notice from Salesforce that our Slack workspace WILL NOT BE
DOWNGRADED on June 20th. Stand by for more details, but for now,
there is no urgency to back up private channels or direct
messages.
URI [1]: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kuberne...
freetonik wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
>Anyway, weâre moving to Mattermost.
I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough.
Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat
organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered
textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.
lokimedes wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
Please consider IRC or something open protocol instead.
dayvster wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
It's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always
adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is
high enough
j1000 wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
Maybe Mattermost is solution?
rkomorn wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
If only they'd written they're moving to Mattermost in TFA.
Edit: oh wait there it is:
"Anyway, weâre moving to Mattermost."
bromuk wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
saas are really owning themselves by pulling crap like this.
I work in education sector, over the last year or so multiple saas
providers have pulled this, we've inevitably gone in house, self
hosted, open source. Saved tonnes of money and have bought skills back
in house.
Lapra wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC
channel...
_flux wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Just IRC with
- a decent mobile client that uses the same account
- and decent notification system
- a backlog that survives disconnects
- a search
- file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also
persist
- markdown
But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.
LightBug1 wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
Just another middle-aged SaaS company, with no new ideas, now moving to
the bend-your-customers-over-the-table phase, in order to keep ARR
increasing.
Sympathetic to the customers, but not surprised.
hamonrye wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
I'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.
bapak wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Are there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot
comprehend.
WhereIsTheTruth wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
> $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid
when you are that stupid to "happily" pay 5k a year for their chat
tool, you deserve that raise to 195k
ctm92 wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
Slack is doing questinonable things anyways. When we migrated away from
it to Teams, I wanted to export the workspace to be able to look stuff
up in case we need it. We are a very small company and had the smallest
plan, no chance, export only with the expensive plan.
Since I'm located in europe, I thought of just doing a data request
based on GDPR (at least for my messages). They declined it and referred
me to my organization, since we are in charge of fulfilling such
requests (how would we even do that if there's no functionality for
it?). Absolutely ridiculous.
matt-p wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
Do you mind me asking if you'll be self hosting mattermost? If so
they're moving to a 1000 User hard limit for self hosted instances.
URI [1]: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitations...
matt-p wrote 47 min ago:
Seems like they've gone past even their own '1000' users. In v11 it's
a cap of 250 users! They're also rapidly removing features for team
too.
- User limits were lowered to final threshold of 250 for Mattermost
Team Edition
- GitLab SSO has been deprecated from Team Edition.
- Playbooks has stopped working for Team Edition.
I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
What's happening on the hosted side of things? Ah;
- Introduced support for Mattermost Entry Edition with message
history limits.
matt-p wrote 43 min ago:
Calls plugin has been restricted to only DMs (so no group calls and
so on too)
Tepix wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
That discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork
called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"
matt-p wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
It also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may
2024 ? [1] -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own
fork.
URI [1]: https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter
matt-p wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
Yes, I mean they are not difficult to remove, but I think it would
be fair to add the context that they're going to have to fork it.
E.g open source is not a panacea either, they will likely also
struggle with postgres being a bottleneck for that number of users
(particularly on search), the redis integration is not part of open
core.
aMadMan wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Ha-Ha!
That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first
place....
blef wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
I guess history repeat.
KronisLV wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
> Anyway, weâre moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us
that owning your data is incredibly important, and if youâre a small
business especially, then Iâd advise you move away too.
Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though.
Meanwhile, did a bit of a test drive in my org with Mattermost, devs
were mostly okay with it, but it was decided from top down to go with
Teams instead. Wonder how that will work out in the next decade.
p_l wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
Don't need a decade, I rarely if ever see Teams not malfunctioning
daily...
e40 wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
aleph_minus_one wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
[flagged]
tomhow wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
We detached this comment from [1] and marked it off topic.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us all to be
kind; they're the first words in the "In Commemnts" section:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jrflowers wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Trying to figure out if this was the result of the sheer exhilaration
of smashing the post button or a humiliation kink where you want
people to yell at you
hosh wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
How is this helpful for the non-profit?
And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It
was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put
experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times,
life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve
and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike
me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to
burn bridges and requesting help.
skylurk wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
What does grief have to do with it?
nusl wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being
pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy
for the situation
nusl wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being
pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy
for the situation
fch42 wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
why would you not be sad about something great you lost ? Even if
it was "just a freebie" ?
hosh wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
The non-profit is still in crises mode and can use help. The
grief and reflection can come when the crises has passed. Whether
it is grief or not, how is describing these stages of grief
helpful for the situation as it is right now?
fch42 wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
Only in the sense of (helping to) "move on".
When you find yourself at the receiving end of monopoly
extortion (at least as it appears to you), then best do what
you can to get away.
It seems they are on that path now.
tux3 wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's
bait-and-switch territory.
If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this
racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely
profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term,
and don't mind losing customers.
Aurornis wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a
comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many
free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the
number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high
traffic was significant enough that it couldnât be completely
ignored.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course.
However Iâm not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or
highly discounted accounts at this stage.
RealityVoid wrote 59 min ago:
It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the
high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done
with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.
ceejayoz wrote 30 min ago:
It's a "chat app" that includes large file uploads, video calls,
and whatnot.
kmacdough wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Maybe, but theres a real benefit to getting your tool in the hands
of ambitious kids if you want to sustain a market share once those
kids grow older.
There's a reason Apple still gives pretty solid educational
discounts even as the largest consumer hardware manufacturer.
Simran-B wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.
Barbing wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to
optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
A_D_E_P_T wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this
It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
raxxorraxor wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
bluecheese452 wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
That is insane.
dijit wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
What? No? Why?
timeon wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed
service is very risky.
scrollaway wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
Slack is not a VC backed service right now. It is owned in full by
Salesforce.
Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea
and that I agree with.
anonzzzies wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Move to Zulip already...
tossandthrow wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become
incredibly bad.
Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.
When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value
proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around
it), one should consider self hosting.
YetAnotherNick wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle
didn't got it reputation out of thin air.
tossandthrow wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
You are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more
leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before
having gone through arbitration.
Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if
you are dead.
dominicrose wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
We've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to
Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really
an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more
just cost or self-hostable.
This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion,
Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.
redserk wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
If youâre going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat
conversations back into email, you might as well throw those
summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..
Havoc wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
> Slack reached out to us and said that if we donât agree to pay an
extra $50k this week and $200k a year, theyâll deactivate our Slack
Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? Thatâs some big city
mobster tactics right there
mixcocam wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for
internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which
auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat
from nextcloud - not great but does what we need).
All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web
archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still
reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
scrollaway wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and
unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish
the attitude is? Especially in using the word âjustâ. âJustâ
do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to
your users and how they work together, and which doesnât actually
solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually
using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication
rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience
is.
Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your
comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of
people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and
validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using
email as primary communication.
Either that or you donât actually know what Slack is. But then why
comment?
Izmaki wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
Tell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform
that the teens and kids already use: Discord.
anonzzzies wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
Not open either, so that'll go the same way in the end. People will
want more money no? Or get bought and then the buyers want more
money... Pick something open and self hosted OR that at least allows
you to move everything and tinker with it yourself when (not if) the
company becomes evilll.
Cort3z wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
Wonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.
pmontra wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
TLDR "weâre moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that
owning your data is incredibly important, and if youâre a small
business especially, then Iâd advise you move away too."
lordnacho wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to
Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of
text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future.
A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a
vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.
I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that
display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but
it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat
service.
If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be
annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
elAhmo wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not
all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues
is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions,
etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
mixcocam wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built*
using email.
I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low
bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough
achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of
communication (other than physical letters here and there).
elAhmo wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure
they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule
them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more
bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long
quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and
ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar
company cannot render it properly).
Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident
reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts),
video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced
notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications
with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so
many different tools.
Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things
as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a
reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the
last decade uses it or its equivalent.
It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in
academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we
are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would
exist in this form without Slack-like tools.
o1bf2k25n8g5 wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into
Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also
just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or
"team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up
with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the
company.
reddalo wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
> I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future
Tell that to project maintainers switching from old-school good
forums to chat apps such as Discord...
danieldisu wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
I spend around 30%, if not more of my work time on Slack
(collaborating with others, solving customer issues, searching,
documenting)
I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like
(Teams, IRC etc)
As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the
job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at
the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best
keyboard etc
Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is
"best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best
and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of
communication tools I think the difference is huge.
Is this needed to do my work? nope
It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes
ThePhysicist wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
People with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as
well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond
the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a
company, and I find it not great if people complain about such
minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some
degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks,
frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely
strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be
difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless
tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.
raxxorraxor wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited
usage. Completely insane pricing.
Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
OhMeadhbh wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
The cloud is other people's computers.
ozgrakkurt wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
You could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage
chat for just this amount of money
hosh wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
Or an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and
adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.
PHGamer wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
netsharc wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
How about not relying on a third party for your organization...
preisschild wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Just more of the same
No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
Cort3z wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
It is free, as I understand it, not 200k per year.
LunaSea wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
It is free, for now.
euLh7SM5HDFY wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
It already gives kinda creepy "You use this server, why not
support it ⦠or else" vibe all over interface.
integricho wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Slack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke
gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are
random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad
reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.
trashymctrash wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
never used the web app, but never noticed any sluggishness with the
desktop app.
now my company âforcesâ me to us Microsoft Teams and iâm
thinking back to the good old days with Slack.
integricho wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
I run the desktop app also, but since it's just the electron
packaged webapp, I expect no real difference between the two.
mrroryflint wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
I am fairly indifferent to Slack - I have to use it for work.
But our experiences seem so vastly different:
- UI is, with the exception of large media, snappy and pretty native
feeling
- no jumps (that I can recall)
The mobile app is okayish though its offline indication and
notifications are a bit frustrating.
What machine are you running it on?
integricho wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Not sure if it might be related to specific instances, i.e. large
organizations with hundreds of channels, etc like in my case...
still, my workstation is pretty beefy, threadripper pro 7985wx,
256GB RAM, RTX 4080 (and this is no software issue, as other, much
more resource intensive apps run just fine)... though slack is
unmistakably sluggish, to the point of me being frustrated enough
with it to complain about it here :)
just hate it.
mrroryflint wrote 4 hours 1 min ago:
Yeah I mean - that machine isn't going to struggle with much!
I'm on an M1 Mac and it's pretty smooth. Of course, maybe I just
have terribly low standards.
gethly wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
No sane person should pay even those $5k a year for a STUPID CHAT
APP!!!
It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the
backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own
shit for $5 a month, FFS!
s20n wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
Personally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but
Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative.
There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see:
Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman < [1] >
URI [1]: https://stallman.org/slack.html
m-schuetz wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Convenience is king, and unfortunately Matrix is not very convenient.
Way too cumbersome to get going from a user perspective.
lenbot7 wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
As a member of the hack club slack, to update you all, we have been
backing up absolutely everything and going as quick as we can
jacinda wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The
threading model is fantastic.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have
interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source,
so the students can even help with it.
URI [1]: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organization...
pcthrowaway wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components
optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require
contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can
tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.
Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.
I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack
Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit.
Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack
however.
I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over
Mattermost.
thetridentguy wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be
poor.
IshKebab wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.
MaKey wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice
anything bad.
sundarurfriend wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
When was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in
Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and
was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't
used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much
more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.
Simran-B wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
I liked Zulip a lot until that Flutter rewrite. Maybe it's more
accessible now but the new look is not for me. I believe the app
navigation is largely unchanged, and still doesn't quite feel
right. I love the topic-based model nonetheless.
willdr wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from
Flutter.
skrebbel wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Why?
adastra22 wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
To what? What is the alternative?
supernikio2 wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Makepad looks really promising
elAhmo wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
Native is also a good option, for something used that
extensively.
p_l wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way
of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android
clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V
adastra22 wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
Flutter compiles to native though? Iâm not sure I
understand what you are saying.
solidr53 wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant
canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real
native views, so you get actual platform widgets,
accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of
shipping your own game engine.
Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly
killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).
matt-p wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Expo/RN TBH.
adastra22 wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework,
and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open
source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the
context of OPâs situation.
matt-p wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
It's just react native tooling
ggm wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
I have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very
responsive as backend support.
I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people
directly impressed me immensely.
IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker
control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...)
which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online
state. Again, the devs are unusually available.
I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it.
I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
thepancake wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
Nothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the
unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.
tonyhart7 wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
this is bad
but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway
developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on
close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one
it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical
infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same
community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
jillesvangurp wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
We're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay
Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly
transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is
pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our
company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't
lose it (Google drive mainly).
And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to
their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so
far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a
gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc,
icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And
that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to
use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no
big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.
Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got
acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing;
so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that
the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium
offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with
all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins
the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
swiftcoder wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
> And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to
their chat solution
It's uh... not good? I have one client that uses it, and it's just
painful. Threading doesn't work well, notifications are hard to
configure, rich text entry is subtly broken...
nodar86 wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Hey! I have an open-source project for browsing an exported slack
archive, it may be useful to you so you can see and search the history:
[1] I havenât maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs
are welcome :)
A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently
it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and
should be simple to extend
URI [1]: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser
preisschild wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Mattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages
URI [1]: https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...
ta1243 wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
From one walled garden to another?
sznio wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
You can self-host it.
danielheath wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users
for years now.
It really hasnât required any maintenance at all beyond
incrementing the version number.
They are starting to tighten the screws (showing admins a warning
if you have over 2500 users), but itâs still looking good for a
few years before I need to act on that.
pcthrowaway wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
Notably, Mattermost can be forked to a community edition if the
team behind it does anything too user-hostile. It's a fine
balance for them to keep their "team edition" nudging users to a
supported edition without being so annoying that users are
motivated to make that community edition.
I have other reasons to want a community edition personally, but
sadly they've been successful enough thus far that there isn't
enough interest from other developers to make it happen.
andy_ppp wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Honestly, I did not know Salesforce had bought Slack. I would encourage
everyone here to avoid that company - their business model seems to be
create a spiderweb of critical touch points within an organisation and
its data then suddenly hike prices. Certainly in this case but Iâve
heard it happen with other products too.
anonzzzies wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
From Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher
well.
menzoic wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?
v3ss0n wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it
have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
hrdwdmrbl wrote 19 min ago:
Can you elaborate on "threaded nature"? Mattermost has threads...
gschizas wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
I set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a
bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try
again though.
v3ss0n wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
It's well documented and very easy to follow, just need to run a
few Ansible scripts
dijit wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
If you want help, I'm more than willing.
I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my
new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for
a mid-sized AAA video game development company...
I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at
another development company I was briefly a part of)
bfelbo wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring
me off.
grues-dinner wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
The Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.
porker wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
We found worse mobile apps was good because it put boundaries
around our interactions and kept us using it in a focused way
during work hours.
jacinda wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are
from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They
recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.
We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and
everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to
Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product
because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's
not been a concern for a long time).
reeredfdfdf wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
At my work we use Zulip, and I haven't really found many people
complaining about it. At least on iOS works just fine for me.
drowntoge wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
Do not use Slack.
mrweasel wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack
was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all
of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or
whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the
absolute worst.
But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in
Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you
just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of
software that I'm forced to use.
The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out
of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are
people surprised?
IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy
to write and you can run your own servers.
jrochkind1 wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
I think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and
found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a
proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people
Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just
"tricked" into thinking this.
sneak wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Note that Mattermost is fake open source cosplay, and keeps important
features in their non-foss application. If you want these table stakes
features (like SSO or message expiry) youâll find yourself
maintaining your own fork or janky scaffolding (I have cronjobs that
run SQL directly against the db).
They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their
proprietary enterprise software product.
Itâs still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation
isnât improved quite as much as one might think.
pcthrowaway wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
Mattermost is fully licensed under AGPLv3 terms, and portions can be
used under Apache 2 terms as well.
I'm not sure why people would say they're not open source.
It's true there's no community-led edition, but that's because no one
has taken the initiative to create one yet.
olavgg wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
Mattermost is open source, but the licensing is complex and full of
bullshit. It is not a community driven project. Once you have
installed the self hosted solution, you get a user interface that
asks you to upgrade to the enterprise edition in every corner and
menu.
A self hosted version is better than nothing though.
fredrikgangso wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.
jbrooks84 wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Welcome to Microsoft Teams
skirge wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
expensive IRC with history
bigyabai wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Nowadays even the history ain't a feature...
Hobadee wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat.
(One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact
reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving
requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These
aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify
the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when
renewal comes around.
eptcyka wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable
alternative.
2muchcoffeeman wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue
stream from users or they donât want the overhead of maintaining
those users.
From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.
mcherm wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
Yes, they fucked up -- not by charging more, but by saying "pay
us 10x your annual rate within 1 week or we destroy all your
data", with no notice.
Knowing that they would consider treating ANY customer that way
means no other customer should use their services.
nyeah wrote 45 min ago:
How have so many commenters missed this point?
eptcyka wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
I will never create a new slack workspace unless forced to.
Unless this non-profit is costing them more than what they were
paying, I doubt this move made any business sense. And if it cost
them more than 5000$ a year to support these users, there's
either more to the story or Slack as a company has been heavily
overvalued.
beezlewax wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
Because microsoft would never do such a thing
exhilaration wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the
huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used
strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's
a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its
history to 10 days!
At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's!
Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link
to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at
every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit
means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions
outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any
reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new
tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new
interface) nobody would really care.
Ma8ee wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to
Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft
Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies
like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I
wonder if there are any than can.
p_l wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
O365 pretty much always includes a Teams license, so if you're
paying for O365 anyway...
NetMageSCW wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
Not any more due to the EU antitrust case ironically brought by
Slack.
magicalhippo wrote 45 min ago:
True, at least in Sweden the Basic subscription with Teams is
66 SEK vs without which is 54 SEK. So that's ~12 SEK, while a
Slack Pro user is about 90 SEK.
dahcryn wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they
apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in
their increases. It all adds up of course
SXX wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
I mean we all know Microsoft and their reputation, but they not
exactly known for rising price x40 for non-profits.
Usually Microsoft was opposite: giving a lot of software for
education for cheap or free to vendor lock-in people into their
stack.
NOT advocating for using Teams because God please no, but Microsoft
reliability us much better than Salesforce.
ivell wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
With moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies
consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to
be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over
companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if
desired).
SXX wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on
Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger
monopoly.
And I might not like MS tech, but I never heard any stories of
rug-pulls and pricing changing x10 overnight.
whizzter wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
That was until someone decided to start strong arming people
with dissenting opinions via compromised companies.
URI [1]: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-...
nhinck2 wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Not overnight but I remember sql server licensing having a huge
increase when they decided to pursue rent seeking via azure.
p_l wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
And even then (let's say 2008), if you purchased the most
expensive license (Enterprise processor license) and paid for
all sockets (it was calculated per socket, not per core) you
could run as many SQL Server instances with as many users as
you wanted on that server, in however many VMs you needed. No
subscription, permanent license. You might have to purchase
support extensions if you wanted ability to call MS for
issues, but that's separate thing and you can ignore it if
you don't need it.
darkwater wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
> Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on
Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger
monopoly.
Absolutely not. You had your physically purchased copy of
Windows and its licenses. If your org was growing a lot you
might be strong-armed into paying more for the new licenses but
at least you kept what you already had, nobody could take it
away from you. The SaaS world is a completely different story.
Robelius wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
I donât think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down
to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer
how sticky are these products.
stroebs wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and
Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.
servercobra wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have
the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year.
Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch
of annoying caveats.
Corrado wrote 2 min ago:
We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack
came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more
later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they
said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new
pricing for double the current price.
The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving
to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".
jonplackett wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Yeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Canât imagine
thereâs many people still left using it now.
Mo3 wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
> Yeah they fucked Heroku hard
Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over.
They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The
experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But
nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would
look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup -
reasonable
jrochkind1 wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
in fact, if you actually look at the historical timeline, many of
the things we think of as core to developer experience only were
released after salesforce acquisition.
I think even multiple buildpacks at once only came a couple years
after acquisition.
Possibly they were in the pipeline before acquisition, sure.
But I'd agree, heroku is still a better DX than almost any
competitors, although it's features and pricing have really
stagnated. So better DX as long as you don't need any features it
doens't have. But it hasn't really been 'ruined' in any way, it
just started appearing frozen in amber some years ago.
The new 'fir' platform is promissing, before that I didn't really
know that any actual development was taking place in heroku, but
it's a big move, modernizing things and setting the stage for
more. Including slightly improved resource-to-pricing options.
We'll see if it all works out...
wereHamster wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
We just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago.
Good riddance.
gregsadetsky wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
what did you migrate to?
TuringNYC wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
Not OP, but we originally migrated to Digital Ocean. But now,
all complex stuff is on AWS and dual-stack stuff is on Replit.
gregsadetsky wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
and what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting
env vars to replicate the heroku features?
also, you used replit for the frontend deployment? or
frontend and some backend?
thanks - just super interesting as I'm in the space and
feedback/real cases are really useful
TuringNYC wrote 38 min ago:
>> and what did you use to manage git push deployments,
setting env vars to replicate the heroku features?
Yes Digital Ocean did all this, they were very
feature-close to Heroku. We have over time migrated
everything stable/prod to AWS just because AWS has more
products and hence you have everything in one place inside
a VPC (e.g. vector db)
For Replit, i'd use it for anything I can in early-stages.
It helps to prototype ideas you are testing. You can
iterate rapidly. For PROD we'd centralize onto AWS given
the ecosystem.
gregsadetsky wrote 34 min ago:
cheers, I really appreciate your answers
and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you use
something like elasticbean or app runner? or did you roll
your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
TuringNYC wrote 30 min ago:
> and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you
use something like elasticbean or app runner? or did
you roll your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
We started with Lambdas because you can split work
across people and keep dependencies to a minimum. Once
your team gels and your product stabilizes, it is
helpful to Dockerize it and go ECS, that is what we
did. Some teams in the past used EKS but IMHO it
required too much knowledge for the team to maintain,
hence we've stuck with ECS.
All CI/CD via Github --> ECS. This is a very standard
pipeline and works well locally for development also.
ECS does the scaling quite well, and provides a natural
path to EKS when you need the scale bigtime.
For logging, if I could choose I'd go Datadog but often
you go with whatever the budget solution is.
jorisboris wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
I still have old personal projects on there
Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over
mrroryflint wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Hundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet itâs a downward trend
with no hope of a turnaround.
apatheticonion wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Bring back IRC lol
sneak wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Thatâs not what extortion means.
dismalaf wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
It's Salesforce...
This is why I use open source or buy services based more on the company
than the product itself... Not a fan of rug-pulls...
rollulus wrote 9 hours 1 min ago:
âPay 50k$ within a week or weâll delete your dataâ. Ransomware
gangs are even friendlier than this.
KingOfCoders wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to
$800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our
company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's
on you.
pxeboot wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom
merger was announced.
KingOfCoders wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
No. Also VMWare moved perpetual licenses to subscriptions, not
the other way around.
irfn wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
Indeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.
joshu wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
we built a tool on slack for communities and companies, and then did
some outreach to community leaders about trying it out. they almost
universally said that they hated being captive to slack and wanted to
transition away.
okcoder1 wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!
okcoder1 wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack
Club Slack.
We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages,
DMs, etc.
Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working
personnel there.
SadTrombone wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
Not sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that
Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users:
URI [1]: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
wltr wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Thanks for pointing that out. I was exploring self-hosted
Mattermost recently, and completely missed this.
adastra22 wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.
Zekio wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
there exists a fork that is basically limitless [1] so if that ever
becomes a problem you just swap server binary
URI [1]: https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter
haute_cuisine wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
Once enough people do that, they'll fix this
coder543 wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
A fork that has not been touched in at least 7 months does not
inspire confidence, especially when the mobile apps depend on the
server staying up to date.
raxxorraxor wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Good news and good luck with that, hopefully Mattermost will behave
better.
Make sure to warn others of Slack/Salesforce, customers need to have
a voice and this behavior must become prohibitly expensive for
Salesforce.
spamjavalin wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc
matthewaveryusa wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
For those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use
it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn
servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE
certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl).
Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.
The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is
open.
For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on
videoconferencing and mobile
TulliusCicero wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
The responses you're getting perfectly encapsulate the problem.
I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but " client sucks,
use client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.
1gn15 wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
I recommend Matrix, and it works well for me. I'm using Element (old)
on Android though, not Element X.
opan wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever
use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads.
Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy.
The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is
FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for
me.
Arathorn wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
Are you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the
old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?)
(Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and
Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC
(Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically
still beta as weâre still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android,
notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you
give the app total permission to run in the background they should
work.)
matthewaveryusa wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
I was using element X. I can re-install the stack and see if things
have improved. If you want someone to debug with I'll gladly hop on
a call to see if I'm doing something wrong. The jist of my setup
was postgres, coturn, element web and synapse with traefik in front
of it exposed to the web in a docker compose
sneak wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix
implying that theyâre holding it wrong.
If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or
tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending
rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until
itâs ready.
Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one:
with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app,
trying to run the server, etc. Itâs clunky and slow when it does
work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite
being selfhosted. Itâs a pain in the ass for end users to point
it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just âthe whole thing, client, server,
protocol - itâs all still in beta and you shouldnât expect it
to work wellâ. If thatâs the answer, I wish people
would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
Arathorn wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
I'm not implying they're holding it wrong - i'm explaining that
we're finishing a migration from one VoIP stack to another, and
the new tech is still beta, hence asking which one they're using.
If you're going to try to flame my replies, please at least read
them.
jwrallie wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
Around a year ago I could do calls reliably on it, but recently I
have been having a bad experience, I am not sure what changed.
darkamaul wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
I canât really comment on video calls in Matrix since I never used
them in Slack either. For me the main draw is having one tool that
does one job well, rather than trying to be the all-in-one hub for
everything. Iâd rather have messaging in one place, email wherever
it lives, and video calls on a separate tool thatâs actually good
at that, instead of relying on a centralized system that tries to
cover all bases but ends up being mediocre at most of them.
jandrewrogers wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
It has been a year or two since I used Slack heavily, but when I
did the video calls were unreliable and poor. Maybe it has improved
since then.
aitchnyu wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
What "years of institutional knowledge" does Hack Club and others have
in Slack? I assume anything more than a week old to be unsearchable. In
fact I want chats older than 1 week to be deleted so inportant stuff
will be copied to wiki.
sadeshmukh wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
We extensively use Canvases, as well as pinned messages and message
links to reference others. As in, I often need to look at older
messages, very occasionally years old, but usually within the month.
jb1991 wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
You would be surprised how many companies use bookmarked Slack posts
as their wiki!
wredcoll wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
> so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
Weirdly this part never actually happens.
lazystar wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
my favorite part of joining a new team is reading old merge
requests and tickets that have a summary of "the reason is based
this slack conversation" and then have a link to a slack
conversation from a year ago... in an org that deletes slack chats
older than 1 year.
wredcoll wrote 9 hours 19 min ago:
I mean, yeah, but frankly the link to a source is a big step up
from someplaces. Its a culture thing.
accrual wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
There are a few rare folks that love writing wiki pages, the catch
is getting one on the team.
moi2388 wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
I personally wouldâve gone for matrix since itâs free and open
source, but Iâm sure this license will be better..
p0w3n3d wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual
communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums
than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but
it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g.
does not have groups for some reason in the free version).
I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me
something?
nottorp wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google
whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer
communication.
Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.
No channels either.
Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was
automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how
good the clients are though.
davehawkins12 wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
Very shameless promotion but if you really enjoy threaded chat we're
building [1] which keeps everything threaded by default.
You can create DM groups with yourselves if you like private chats in
groups also.
URI [1]: https://cushion.so
kilroy123 wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
Campfire is solid:
URI [1]: https://once.com/campfire
bombcar wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Teams added threads in chat channels (I donât know if itâs only
new channels or what, check settings) but itâs horribly confusing
to some and they canât figure out how to look at a thread.
But itâs there. Iâll give that the Microsoft, they start out
incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until itâs somewhat usable.
willvarfar wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
I get the sense that Mattermost is the same kind of
eventually-get-you-paying play as Slack.
Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free
as well as Free open source.
jeremy46231 wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!
mcv wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these
proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but
there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit
from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We
know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should
stop falling for it.
Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost
for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.
jwrallie wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid)
for a new project starting in October because my workplace already
have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no
90 day retention annoyances.
You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making
a bad decision for a ~30 person team?
Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly
assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I
have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never
for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux,
which is why I use it.
friendzis wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many
pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them
have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however
unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular
framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's
not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure
your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active
Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a
meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in
a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant,
meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps,
linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite
powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your
organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional
enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain,
especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own
chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with
third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially
ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
komali2 wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.
I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure.
The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it
implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts
(or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can
have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and
there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess
you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly
control your whole stack.
And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't
use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even
though the android one was really good, and even though you're
spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So
everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not
do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on
the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then
stop participating.
And so on.
We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have
10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue
(we're an engineer-owned dev shop).
I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
Arathorn wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
> I tried running a community on it and it was a colossal
failure.
I'm sorry to hear that. When was this? We have been making a huge
effort to fix problems like these over the last 1-2 years (albeit
focusing on workplace comms rather than discord-style comms, but
the hope is that discord-style comms will follow).
> The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it
implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts
It sucked for sure on the legacy apps, but I think we fixed it on
Element X.
Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never
did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users
by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix
'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were
trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this
would be painful.
> there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server
Assuming we're talking about the same thing, the canonical
identity server is [1] (formerly [2] ).
URI [1]: http://github.com/element-hq/sydent
URI [2]: http://github.com/matrix-org/sydent
komali2 wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and
never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with
inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an
email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org).
If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I
can see why this would be painful.
Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really
wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent
with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it
working, not even with matrix's identity URL.
We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due
to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite
capable it seemed to me.
This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to
find, I think sydent may not have been as officially
"canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up?
It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have
time to resolve after taking a crack at it.
I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x
however we recommended our members not to use the element x app
since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as
threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs
for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!
I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or
whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram
messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch
for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running
duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can
use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I
really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy
option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for
it one day when discord enshittifies.
aine wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
we stopped offering identity server a long time ago because
of the privacy concerns the whole concept raised and the fact
the only non-Sydent option at that time was basically
abandoned (ma1sd). The situation was basically 2 bad
decisions: either lock in with Sydent or don't use an
identity server at all.
Considering the low interest in the identity server
functionality and the amount of concerns around the concept,
we took the latter bad decision - that way we don't offer a
self-hosted identity server but don't limit customers in
using the matrix.org's one (even with their own Matrix
server). That seems like an acceptable trade off. After all,
even Sydent's README contains the following:
> Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver?
>
> Short answer: no.
>
> Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients
use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity
server whatsoever.
PS: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers
p0w3n3d wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with
teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much
better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat
which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and
channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).
Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We
rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on
colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.
I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have
time to experiment with it.
So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings
and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in
my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in
this article
zuhsetaqi wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of
which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I
really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just
does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which
are some apps those people use privately.
I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on
Android and iOS, but it's not.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
zenmac wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
While I agree with you. Element is tooo heavy! I know there is
Element X, but it has a lot issues working with others who has
different clients. I would rather not use element if possible.
There is a lighter weight Hydrogen seems more pleasing on code
and front end. [1] So on the up side about matrix is if you don't
like you can roll your own.
URI [1]: https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login
Arathorn wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
(unfortunately Hydrogen is no longer being developed; nobody
funded it. Instead, focus is on Aurora, aka Element X Web: [1]
etc)
URI [1]: https://element.io/blog/hacking-for-a-sovereign-digita...
Arathorn wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
This would make sense if you were talking about the old Element
app, but Element X is generally seen as a night and day
improvement. Can you say what the problems are on Element X?
Trying to speak dispassionately as someone who lives their life
in Element X iOS, I find it is way more reliable than WhatsApp
(where I get way more âwaiting for messageâ¦â e2ee bugs than
Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You
canât compare with TG given TG isnât E2EE.
I am not disputing the lived experience on your side, but
something big must be different. Is the server underpowered or
misconfigured or something? Or is it using a beta server like
Dendrite?
jwrallie wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Night and day improvement is relative. For example, last time I
tried the iOS version had no localization to some languages,
which the old one has, and not everyone can deal with an
interface falling back to English.
zuhsetaqi wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
I don't know about the server being underpowered or
misconfigured.
I compared it with those Messengers because that's what we as
users are used to.
I know that TG is not E2EE and therefore not comparable on a
technical level, but that's still what users of Element are
used to.
I personally use iMessage the most as my Messanger and in the
last >10 years I never had any problems with a message not
being able to be decrypted. And iMessage not being as
featureful as Element is not an excuse for having more bugs
especially in key areas of the service. Again, iMessage being
just an emxample.
jasonfrost wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
If you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared
docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service
happymellon wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
Strongly disagree.
It is NOT a good place to share docs.
Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose
documentation through things getting siloed.
The calls are fine though, and the chat is substandard. A bunch
of teams use it for support channels, however there doesn't
appear to be a way to join the group for support without being
pinged by @channel_name. So you join for support and then you are
alerted by everyone else who is looking for support.
At least they have stopped fucking around with "newest on
top/bottom", there was A/B testing last year (or maybe the year
before) and you couldn't tell which way you had to scroll from
one day to the next.
StopDisinfo910 wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
> Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to
lose documentation through things getting siloed.
That's a feature not a bug.
Chats are for quick collaboration on documents. You share it,
you get immediate collaborative editing, you do what you have
to do and then you eventually archive the document somewhere it
makes sense to archive it which in MS Teams would be a Team.
I really like the break down between Team which persists and
chat for one off things but I know it really throws off some
people.
zenmac wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
For docs, there is cryptpad.fr
moi2388 wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
URI [1]: https://matrix.org/
vjeux wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We
ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord
has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of
communities.
quietfox wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
Let's revisit this assessment in a few years.
keithnz wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
we've been using discord for years, it's great. Its model for
making money is different, its primary market is gamers. Servers
are content for their users to consume and they charge the users
directly.
quietfox wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
I'm a Discord user myself, in private as well in job context. But
we all have been here long enough to know that the only reliable
constant is change.
mkhalil wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
Unpopular opinion: I think it's wild that ANY ORG would pay $200k for a
chat app.
If I ever ran an org that needed a chat app and the costs came even
close to $200k a year, I would rather hire an engineer, contract a
designer, and create our own, or more likely, contribute/fork an open
source project like Matrix; providing us with the ability to *really*
integrate it into our company/tools - as oppose spending it on IRC+ for
"good enough" integration. PLUS ... our data stays on under our
control.
donperignon wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
Not unpopular at all. Thatâs the way
casq wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
Hi, Iâm Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this
news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in
Hack Club. Itâs an accurate description of whatâs happened, and
weâre grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a
special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and
volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs
around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to
every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and
then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill
and not to pay as late as Aug 29
Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to
de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11
years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year
moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including
inactive ones)
For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact
people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us
in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack
Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free.
This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate
exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving
young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever.
If Salesforceâs goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount
of time to migrate- and donât club us over the head like this. We
have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced
the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you
can help us: christina@hackclub.com
mindcrash wrote 10 min ago:
Have you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?
rozap wrote 19 min ago:
Salesforce is in the business of forcing sales.
tschellenbach wrote 28 min ago:
Happy to help, did you consider [1] ?
You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for
what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.
URI [1]: https://getstream.io/chat/
ghm2199 wrote 30 min ago:
This makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a
scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one
page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them
to another piece of software.
Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
DyslexicAtheist wrote 44 min ago:
maybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.
freejazz wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
You should sue slack.
paulcole wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going
to de-activate the Hack Club Slack
Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days
of history?
adamtulinius wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Then they lose their 11 years of history
1970-01-01 wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to
BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
ebiester wrote 45 min ago:
That's hard on a fast deadline.
ktosobcy wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?
adamtulinius wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
This is very well explained in the linked post.
prng2021 wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
âFor anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to
contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrateâ
You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of
contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your
calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their
response when you asked why you werenât given longer notice?
anonbuddy wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to
move somewhere else?
hiatus wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a
law specifically granting you the right to data held by another?
Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine
even though they have it?
notpushkin wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
GDPR (and similar laws, like CCPA) require companies to provide a
data export when requested. Probably this could be used here?
Xss3 wrote 54 min ago:
If every user did a gdpr request perhaps
SeanDav wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we
use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers
pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that
resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives
exist.
6c696e7578 wrote 51 min ago:
> to Slack from Teams
They're the same thing in terms of billing and data.
bombcar wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to
how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to
squeeze you, but not put you through the Juiceroâ¢.
tyteen4a03 wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to
you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels
is bonkers.
I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having
been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time
to reconsider...
abirch wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
I hate microsoft, but I really hate slack.
Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I
didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.
bombcar wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
I really wonder why Discord didnât start an enterprise
offering called Concord. Iâm sure thereâs enough kids
using it that it would get some traction.
elevation wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that
were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which
you'd still recommend them?
jeremyjh wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have
native/built-in integrations for Teams.
I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.
Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera
freezes.
rplnt wrote 59 min ago:
It's very easy to describe for me. Teams is horrible in writing
text, editing text, reading text, notifications. I'd rather use
IRC than teams for text communication.
btbuildem wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into
"channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more
people.
iamkeithmccoy wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
That Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a
huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects)
and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an
organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you
have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that
team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you
join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a
cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to
be involved.
Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a
SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team
and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a
cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site
and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace?
That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange
groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more
difficult because if your team is public then anybody can
join your email group.
That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications
have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with
Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted
Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a
complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure
out how to transform the message from the "common alert
schema".
And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use
the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later
and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power
automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too
much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it
resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me
tomorrow".
End rant
bombcar wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
You can create chat between any group of people that you
want and then rename the chat to have a name, but thatâs
not a channel and itâs not a team and it doesnât really
have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files
in a rudimentary way.
mpeg wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the
emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the
charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee
waived
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
linhns wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku
before but Slack is unprecedented.
Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of
the truly good ones.
driverdan wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with
one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
IgorPartola wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got
bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?
Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group
chat is a necessity for todayâs workforce. But it is still just
group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
elphinstone wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
pelagicAustral wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with
anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support
and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of
forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities
because of spam...
Fyi, Campfire is open source now:
URI [1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
48terry wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity
getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not
self-managed? My God, dude.
gosub100 wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
The number two focus of a charity should be good financial
management. First being the charity's mission. I would not
support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.
jack_pp wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something
like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming.
When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it
IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being
immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a
non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company
can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having
to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This
isn't the case for a non profit.
pelagicAustral wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he
decided to start teaching via Discord server.
crossroadsguy wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
I wouldn't mind if it comes with fish and wine. On the other
hand, I believe Discord will be the next bomb for too many
communities/groups out there. Or maybe after they get acquired
first, either by a PE or a PE-esque corp (e.g. Salesforce,
Oracle).
mvanbaak wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
What does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?
Fade_Dance wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
It's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the
typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral
paragon.
taegee wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
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.
lsaferite wrote 12 min ago:
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
davedx wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
Zulip is awesome too. On prem.
taneq wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, itâs pretty
straightforward to set up and then your dataâs nobodyâs
hostage.
nickjj wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending
on which plan you have. [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-work...
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
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.
raziel2p wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
why the extra step of making them into PDFs?
nickjj wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
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.
wffurr wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
Human readable format at rest, I assume.
andruby wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
Does that break DMâs privacy or does it only let you export
your own DMâs?
zdc1 wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
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).
ZiiS wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.
misiek08 wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
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.
nickjj wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
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.).
boringg wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use
programatically.
mattlutze wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
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.
cskartikey wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
this is what we're doing :)
smartbit wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
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] [1]
URI [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/mat...
URI [2]: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limit...
taneq wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
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
jeremy46231 wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we
can't be extorted like this again
itfossil wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"
It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
p_l wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new
contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business
entities?
conductr wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed
to change terms at their discretion in the future
Aeolun wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court.
I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
p_l wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
Depends on what you want to fight about.
If your rates were raised and you have not received new contract,
if you can drop the service at that point, they can't collect
including any cancellation fees.
If you want to continue using the service, that's a bit trickier.
zeroq wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the
opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.
On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms -
almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff -
as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to
say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe,
and walk away.
I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the
contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this
and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
Still a dick move.
chii wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
> but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless
'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your
data).
p_l wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some
lawyers on, tbqh.
p_l wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Well, you can amend a contract, but you need to send the new
conditions, and it gives the other party option of not accepting
the new contract, which means either amending party needs to
accept continuation under old contract, or dissolution of the
contractual relationship with no fees/damages/etc for the party
that didn't accept new contract.
The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't
even send a new contract.
lelanthran wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a
sunset clause.
Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific
clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific
date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or
similar.
I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager "
in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by
depending on the charity of a single company.
eru wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
> I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager
" in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
Well, that's what you have lawyers for.
Otherwise, agreed with your comment.
behringer wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
You have a lawyer to warn you about things you might not notice
in your contract. But to not know your general payment terms
comes off as pretty lazy.
lelanthran wrote 36 min ago:
> But to not know your general payment terms comes off as
pretty lazy.
TBH, in this specific case you don't even need to read the
fine print to know that getting a $195k discount on a $200k
bill is only a temporary thing!
Dylan16807 wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
> The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by
depending on the charity of a single company.
This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and
they can migrate if it's truly necessary.
eru wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
The special rate was charity.
raphman wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage
patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting
the maximum amount of money from the customer is also
"charity", no?
To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and
schools are not offered because large companies want to be
nice, but because they want to catch future customers.
paulcole wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Yes, that is correct.
lelanthran wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
> If a special rate that better fits an organization's
usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not
extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is
also "charity", no?
Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate
better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was,
more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."
No reasonable person can have the expectation that a
discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue
forever!
At this discount, it really is charity.
mlyle wrote 37 min ago:
No one is ever going to pay per-seat for tens of
thousands of teenage volunteers. If you're an unusual
customer (nonprofit, with lots of volunteers and program
people in the slack) you might end up with a long term
special deal recognizing those circumstances (charging
you for employees but not others).
The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack
had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it.
(Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of
future decision makers instead of Discord where these
users all naturally congregate was a major win!)
To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a
month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit,
is messed up.
swiftcoder wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
> it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."
It's more a tacit admission by Slack that their pricing
model can't possible work for orgs that don't match a
strict employer-employee model.
Nobody would agree to pay per-seat for every customer who
uses a support tool, for example (which is much closer to
the model this nonprofit is operating)
actionfromafar wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very
shortsighted.
burnte wrote 21 min ago:
And yet entirely predictable.
ferguess_k wrote 46 min ago:
Who cares? Managers just bagged fat bonus and jump ship when it
goes down. The whole world is like this now /s.
ecocentrik wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all
work for Saleforce now.
micromacrofoot wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
coders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that
has worked on writing code for it hates it
alexey-salmin wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company,
it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement
decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the
business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first
companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this
point.
isleyaardvark wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $
increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue,
this is directly related to procurement.
alexey-salmin wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only
$5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever
is the tiering their account managers follow.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of
low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much
they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice
of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client
altogether.
zoechi wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
That could be done so that it doesn't look like extortion
though
alexey-salmin wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
Absolutely, it's just there's no commercial pressure on
Salesforce company structure to evolve towards valuing the
feelings of small clients.
AndyMcConachie wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America
early so you're not disabused later in life.
xedrac wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore.
AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior
reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary
software can very quickly become a big liability.
nobleach wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a
software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in
being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to
extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial
goals... but they were always interested in being part of the
"software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has
never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on
their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't
want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole
pool and charge you to swim in it".
burnte wrote 20 min ago:
Marc Benioff is an acolyte of Ellison, he learned and uses the
same tactics.
boringg wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.
whstl wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with
automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat
with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
pessimizer wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
And that if you don't fight it when everybody is telling you to,
you end up with Bari Weiss running CBS news.
ZiiS wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
Just seems more efficient to me.
Aeolun wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This
is firmly one of those âfoisted on you by managementâ kind of
products right?
Tade0 wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands
in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all
comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some
cash.
loloquwowndueo wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
Makes me filthy rich doesnât imply I like it.
baq wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Margin Call is a great movie.
bombcar wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad.
But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having
direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent
people, it's pretty meh.
notpushkin wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Iâd love a self-hostable, in-browser Access. Preferably
Access 97.
bombcar wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
Thereâs a couple of open source projects that get almost
close but not quite. Itâs like a number of them have 20 to
50% of what you need.
I agree that it would be a very useful product.
bayindirh wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity
we waste.
bombcar wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Hush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to
serve a simple status page.
bayindirh wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
I'm an HPC admin, I can (and will) make you serve this page
from NIC's unused core. I need these cores for streaming
cat videos.
bombcar wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no
capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k
server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home.
Runs Prime95 like a baws
artk42 wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the
cleaner the future to be built.
beAbU wrote 54 min ago:
You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.
thrance wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer
practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own
egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
AbstractH24 wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Salesforce either knows exactly want itâs doing or itâs in an
epic doom loop.
On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything
everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it
will crumble.
Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be
exploited to grow in new directions.
Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining
steam.
vintermann wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can
be exploited to grow in new directions.
Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man.
Apropos nothing.
ipython wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
Just wait till they learn about Broadcom!
luckman212 wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
dylan604 wrote 17 min ago:
But they use the dreamy McConaughey for their ads, so they must
be a good company. /s
stonemetal12 wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Never used it, so I don't hate it yet.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.
But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a
person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...
nickdothutton wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a
2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is
usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my
list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.
ekidd wrote 14 min ago:
Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering
and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They
are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently
delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.
The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work
for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I
am less interested in the face that they present socially.
no_wizard wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
Counterpoint though, theyâre sometimes exactly what
theyâre described as.
Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this
NetMageSCW wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Except those examples are specifically and obviously not
true, except maybe Larry Ellison.
Zagreus2142 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in
the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a
percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations
to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might
spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.
matwood wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
My sales people love it.
duxup wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?
Iâve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it
was a horror show, but Iâm curious what it looks like to
sales folks who like it?
dahcryn wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the
product is designed to make their lives easier and more
effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why
they are so big.
But they are horrible at integrating with anything else,
making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They
wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer.
The sales people are.
So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that
despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year,
we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of
our staff is actually quite positive about them because the
old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
trimethylpurine wrote 27 min ago:
My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless
as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts.
It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken
promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that
CRM means "place to store phone numbers."
It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And
it does do everything, as long as a developer builds
whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't
do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people
realize on repeat.
jmclnx wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove
it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a
revolt happened and the cancelled they project.
This is at a fortune 500 company.
eru wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion
on them.
bee_rider wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal
backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools.
Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some
universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.
gregw2 wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of
mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau,
Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1]
tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has
infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support."
Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of
corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft
has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed
the title of most despised â not by competitors but by its own
customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software
products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The
products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT
departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move
away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the
barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it
was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever
did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow â and to arrogance on
the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used
acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a
reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies
bauruine wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA
Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.
I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
alephnerd wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of
old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs
were all cut.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a
whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due
to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them,
along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom
demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and
staff need to get the stick.
Aeolun wrote 3 hours 53 min ago:
Youâd think they failed based on the description given
earlier. But that doesnât sound like failure to meâ¦
safety1st wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted,
yes. But does it really matter?
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero
to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to
create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them,
extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the
users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a
sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more
gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on
par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all
manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this
game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you
something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once
you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again,
and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU
Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as
far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the
perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want
everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By
encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to
prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more,
especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you
write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally
think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in
both. Regardless these are the two written works which together
will give you the full context about the software industry, how it
works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it
is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck
nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They
knew. They will do it again.
Aurornis wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
> You would think that making your users hate you is
shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users
can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their
prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free
or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping
the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to
reduce their support load, server count, and increase their
revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give
you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is âgiveâ. The free plans were always
supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the
platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free
plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no
longer serves that purpose. They donât need to spread the word
because everyone knows about Slack. Itâs a pop culture word,
now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk
about it to their bosses.
notpushkin wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Makes sense, but thatâs not the problem here. They could have
given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the
price 2Ã, or they could have handled it in any other way
thatâs not âyou have a week to pay us $50k or your data is
goneâ.
felipelemos wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
> But does it really matter?
I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really
good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.
And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at
all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.
eru wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is
that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty,
brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean
that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything
like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is
that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and
they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want
to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give
decent returns to shareholders.
lokar wrote 3 min ago:
The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building
monopolistic âtrustsâ was avoiding âruinous
competitionâ, the nation would be better off with a few big
monopolies
pessimizer wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
I have no idea what you mean by "questionable economics" here.
You seem to be saying that it seems true, but doesn't conform
to your values.
Workaccount2 wrote 38 min ago:
The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is
because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or
unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to
know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing
as the real world.
actionfromafar wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from
day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time
roll into that (local?) optimum.
mihaaly wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
I believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also
reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing
their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for
the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an
organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
dotancohen wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in
such a course.
amelius wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.
actionfromafar wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
Hey, I think we agree on something.
imarkphillips wrote 11 hours 19 min ago:
We switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more
consistency.
dbg31415 wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been
better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those
lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers! [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
URI [2]: https://flarum.org/
URI [3]: https://www.simplemachines.org/
tomhow wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're
turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.
==
The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided
view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e.,
everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct
knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the
reasoning for the pricing change.
I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have
happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company
was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something
about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.
According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and
educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did
they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's
status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been
misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even
attempt to explain any of those details.
I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a
terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.
But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making
this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but
not much light. [1]
URI [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for...
URI [2]: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-for...
SigmaEpsilonChi wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed
about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we
qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off
their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack
was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no
complaints about them.
The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore,
all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they
are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since
their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot
of those lately).
I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it
really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us
to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having
our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access
to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that
kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than
extortion.
tomhow wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then
you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I
don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is
missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole
picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way
but also that there is more information about their reasoning that
would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
milkshakes wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
unless there is something going on behind the scenes, like an
astroturfing signal, this seems like a pretty weak justification
for the heavy handed moderation actions taken. it seems at face
value like you might have killed an organic front page post
attempted by a teenager trying to raise awareness and save his
very cool grassroots distributed hackathon charity from an awful
lot of unnecessary pain... because there "must be more to the
story". i haven't ever seen anything like this on HN.
tomhow wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
OK, message received, I've turned off the downweights and we'll
keep it on the front page.
The intention wasn't to "kill" the story, but to try and get
more details so it would address the questions that came up for
me and that I assumed would come up for other readers (which
indeed they have [1]). My words "must be more to the story"
weren't intended to suggest Salesforce are likely to be in the
right, but just that it would be helpful to know. I.e., does
this affect all nonprofits/educational organizations? Is this
change just targeted at this org? If so why? But I didn't know
it was written by a student/teenager, who may not be on top of
those details. And given it's late at night and there's such a
short timeline for cutoff, we're happy to let the story stay on
the front page now.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284260
novatea wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May
iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a
week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the
whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack
announcement, anyways.
tomhow wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being
told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible
for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we
really don't know much at all.
milkshakes wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
it seems your concerns are addressed here: [1] why has this post
been taken off the front page, and why has the title been
editorialized?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
colonelspace wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
> why has the title been editorialized
Indeed, the HN guidelines:
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
linkbait; don't editorialize
dang wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
By "editorialize" we mean changing a title to introduce spin,
or cherry-picking one detail to bias the reader in the
direction that the submitter personally wants, rather than
reflecting the article as a whole (see [1] for a recent
comment about that).
In this case, that wasn't at issue. The operative clause is
"unless it is misleading or linkbait". A word like "extorted"
is too baity for HN's frontpage. This is nothing personal
against the OP! It's actually better for them and for Hack
Club if the HN title is relatively neutral while still
conveying the critical information.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136
dang wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
Yup we agree and have restored the post. The extra background
was helpful, plus the community response is clear from the
thread and we try never to fight the community.
The title edit is standard practice though - the word
"extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage (see [1] : "Please
use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.").
Making titles somewhat more factual/neutral is normal HN
moderation. That's not a criticism of the OP, mind you! - we'd
feel the same way too in their position.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
yerushalayim wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
Oh, please!
nikcub wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
There are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0].
One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why.
Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_price...
pbhjpbhj wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
My first thought was had this moved the stock price - but the day
price is up. The 5Y price is back to where it was ... over all
they're still 6000% up.
charlieyu1 wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
S&P 500 up 3x in 5Y so back to same level isnât great
I guess stock price is a reflection of crap management which in
return leads to these behaviours. Maybe I should check the stock
price first before deciding on a product.
rKarpinski wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
> the company started as the anti-Oracle.
The company was founded by an Oracle executive...
worthless-trash wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
I mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they
want to mow lawns.
JdeBP wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
For the young people who might be reading this thread:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
arrty88 wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
Thatâs salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure
bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.
dangoodmanUT wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
i wish discord worked better for work
orphea wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
I wish it worked worse and people stopped used it as a replacement
for forums.
daedrdev wrote 18 min ago:
Its 2025, people don't want their conversations out on the public
internet to be mined and profiled. Discord offers that base
privacy.
keithnz wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
it has forums now :)
okcoder1 wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
skulk thats only for fun and games sob
altairprime wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
This is remarkably familiar.
raffy wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.
joshmlewis wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
It's also not a coincidence that Slack is neutering the ability to
access channel history via the API very soon. With a very generous rate
limit of 2 requests per minute I believe it was and a max of ~10
messages. This is already enforced for new marketplace apps and will
apply to all apps starting in March according to their docs.
xavxav wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
I'm surprised GDPR has nothing to say about this. You should have the
right to your data, but I suppose that doesn't extend to companies?
flipbrad wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
EU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to
roll out.
scrollaway wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
It does to some extent, because companies have to respect gdpr for
their own users as well: so individual employees/slack users have
gdpr rights and they individually can get those enforced against
the slack operators.
_kidlike wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
what kind of joke is this...
donperignon wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
And archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace⦠very aggressive
move to destroy free and non enterprise tier
DarkmSparks wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
The fact they think they can charge this much tells me that there is a
lot of room for competition in the webguis for irc space.
Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till
February but this would make a nice Christmas project.
buovjaga wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
New projects in that genre keep popping up, for example eIRC: An
Enterprise Chat System Based on IRC
URI [1]: https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
hkt wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
PSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP
isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.
okcoder1 wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
IRC would not be useful for Hack Club as it's only text. Hack Club
requires software that allows us to upload images, create canvases
and most importantly, call with others.
buovjaga wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
Not saying there's a turnkey solution at the moment for your exact
needs, but even with your current $5k/year budget something
interesting could be built with the "modern IRC stack" that [1]
uses, for example. Call support would have to be done by
integrating Jitsi, but it's been done before as seen in [2] and
URI [1]: https://irctoday.com/
URI [2]: https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference
URI [3]: https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support
cmckn wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
Iâm not familiar with this organization. For those curious: [1] In
2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and
spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.
URI [1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/81290...
casq wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
Hi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack
Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we
also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of
all the groups that we sponsor.
Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise
between $3m-$7m a year in donations.
sqs wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
It's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things
together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and
hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all
around the world.
You can see full financial and donor information at [1] as well.
Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would
support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)
URI [1]: https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/
cmckn wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
Sounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this
headache.
scooter_y wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
I'm a hack clubber who is extremely active and has sent over 55K
messages in the slack (talk about insanity!). I've been part of
Hack Club for about 3 years now, and it's changed my life in ways
you couldn't have imagined. Porting over from Slack is super
stressful for me + all of the HC staff having to pull
all-nighters for the next week :). Hopefully this can all be
figured out, and we can finally have a proper FOSS software to
allow for lots of additions via PR's! Also, all the finances are
available too at hcb.hackclub.com/hq (guess what, this is 99%
coded by teenagers too, and open source... woah).
kragen wrote 12 hours 1 min ago:
Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most
critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the
business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got
better at making backups.
You probably should expect large bill increases over time from
ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of themâpeople
are capable of behaving decentlyâbut probably the nature of the
category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit
for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack
presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients'
businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it
approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some
of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by
the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
jrochkind1 wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero"
means. Typo?
erikerikson wrote 48 min ago:
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to
"difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll
understand their intended meaning.
octo888 wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS
bell-cot wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not
all of themâpeople are capable of behaving decentlyâbut probably
[...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs
determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for
fully exploiting ransomware is).
dwedge wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click
to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and
they will lose access to them.
They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another
checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for
other staff.
I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only
member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI
heavyset_go wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the
dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.
Barbing wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you,
Slack*
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
chaboud wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
That sounds quite a bit like fraud.
nottorp wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.
wongarsu wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
They are verifiably false statements made for the purpose of
monetary gain. I guess the question would hinge on intent: did
they just forget to check if anyone is using those features and
if there is anyone who would be disrupted, or are they
intentionally deceiving users by purposefully not checking?
fluoridation wrote 22 min ago:
By the spirit of the law, yes, it likely is fraud. I doubt
you could argue it is by the letter of it, though. Normally
fraud involves lying to someone to get them to enter into a
business relationship with you, not to keep one. Besides,
regardless of how many people were using specific features of
it, the service is what it is. This wouldn't be unlike you
calling your ISP to cancel your subscription and they asking
you if you're sure you want to cancel such a great service.
If the service factually sucks ass compared to other
providers wouldn't make it fraud. All that matters is that it
meets the specifications that were sold to you.
pests wrote 6 min ago:
Theyâre not telling you its great tho. To continue your
analogy, you call your ISP to cancel and they say âare
you sure? Two other people are using it as we speak!â and
you live alone knowing thatâs impossible.
gpvos wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Anyone except an American judge can see that this is
intentional.
layman51 wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out
here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about
offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount,
could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the
people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as
"active members" of their Slack instance?
I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair
Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any
discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid
annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think
that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which
does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
[0]: [1]:
URI [1]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-...
URI [2]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro
galaxy_gas wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's
Suppafly wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
>maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving
help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of
their Slack instance?
I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs
I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per
'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a
bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra
people that are only tangentially related to the day to day
operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users
of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in
the program.
swiftcoder wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid
charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each
test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up
flow)
belthesar wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count
isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a
bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small
non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive
non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also
receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
layman51 wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how
non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but
typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would
depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the
Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets
per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a
"small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of
employees.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://preventcancer.org/about-us/team/
creativeSlumber wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
> Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month
This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to
teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users
(remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while.
having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is
essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary
purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.
> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in
their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying
to help.
tantalor wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.
Would make much more sense to use Discord.
sadeshmukh wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
Discord has a terrible permissions model. In Slack, anybody can
create bots and channels without Workspace Admin. Slack worked
best for the usecase, by far.
layman51 wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
Well now I'm convinced that this confusion is the root of the
billing issue. Is there not a way that the clients (i.e. the
students they are helping) could be added as some kind of
"customer" instead of an "internal employee". If not, then yes I
could see why it would be expensive.
SigmaEpsilonChi wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
The issue isn't really with being moved to a higher tier of
billing. Slack doesn't owe us their service for cheap forever.
The problem is that we signed a contract with them earlier this
year for our current rate, then suddenly today we were told that
we have to pay $50k immediately or all of our 11 years of data
will be deleted. That's an absurd demand. It's a shakedown
phonon wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
You need to send them a legal notice asserting that. At minimum
it will get you another month or two to plan your exit.
raxxorraxor wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
Requiring a legal notice at any point should disqualify a
chat software immediately. Good on them to make the move and
other users of Slack should be wary.
Perhaps there is more to the story, but my surprise about the
business culture of Salesforce isn't too pronounced to be
honest. Had do happen at some point in my opinion.
system2 wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
I pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don't need to be "cutting
edge" all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing
after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.
sciencesama wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
This when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible
software !
robotburrito wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Join us now and share the software. Youâll be free.
ThinkBeat wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
If you are going the way to self-host it
so you own all your won data.
all you have to do is run mattermost
in production on hardware you control
at 99.9% Or 80% or whatever uptime
is deemed necessary.
Or you can use an out of the box
host, but then your data is
not in your direct control.
freediver wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
We are using a hosted Zulip instance for company chats at Kagi, not
just to prevent scenarios like this but also for data privacy reasons.
giveita wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
Can obe simply export all the data and dump that in Dropbox (for
interim).
Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no
lost data that way.
rr808 wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
Campfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.
novatea wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us
since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we
now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great,
especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is
a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have
homework while doing this)
hiccuphippo wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Another good lesson here: at the end of the day, these are just
websites. Don't lose sleep over it. If it's broken for a couple of
days, that's ok.
Simran-B wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?
gschizas wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost
(integration) in a couple of days.
I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure
than Mattermost was.
lazystar wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience
that youll need in the industry
elnerd wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience
you need. It happens, but should not be in the curriculum for kids.
I am sure that being forced to spend time on this steals time from
more interesting projects.
lelanthran wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
> Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an
experience you need.
I disagree; this is the best time to unlearn "companies selling
proprietary software are our friends"
Arguably it's a more valuable lesson than any technical lesson:
ignoring existing open source projects in favour of proprietary
stuff should hurt.
The more it hurts the better the lesson sticks.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
Skyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're
running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the
wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's
fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.
JustSkyfall wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before
starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable
assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill
with a week's notice!
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment
on this post? For how long have you been in communication
with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been
months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th
Aug).
I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the
wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a
disservice.
Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's
already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on
behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out
piecemeal.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 2 min ago:
Change "Skyfall" to "Hack Club". It's a bit confusing who
is who!
ayoreis wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
> Then this spring they changed the terms to every single
user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then
ignored our outreach and delayed us and *told us to ignore
the bill and not to pay* as late as Aug 29
From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it
and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 46 min ago:
"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to
not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce
sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling
you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go
very sideways.
p-t wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
This is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Informed of the final cut-off date, sure!
How long have they had the bill mentioned in the top comment
on this post? At the very least it's 3 weeks, and the comment
suggests it is months.
sarlalian wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
It wasnât slack, but Iâve had multiple vendors that I
was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes
in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never
quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8
business days before the renewal was due.
Both times Iâve paid the new price for 1 year and
cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next
year when we didnât renew.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan
bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment
on this post).
I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in
this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue
crash into a wall and then complaining online about it
doesn't help anyone.
jppope wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything
I think the timeline is pretty rough.
To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most
pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In
the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were
trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is
good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce
doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the
market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over
maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are
trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like
Patagonia bought slack or something.
The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the
companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about
Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what
investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from
a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the
end state.
komali2 wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
Cory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a
universal process across the tech industry.
donatj wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year
arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable
Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.
Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.
For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
novatea wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly
all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens
interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical
teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations
around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a
VPS through a Slack bot.
varenc wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Doesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really
comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating
their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating
users, etc, that is the hard part.
belthesar wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on
specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days
for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing
protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack,
Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history
support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to
ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service
your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible
to connect and receive scrollback.
sadeshmukh wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
We use a lot of Slack specific features, especially bots, and it's
more of a pain to move thousands of users and channels than to just
pay up.
tomrod wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching
costs are real.
fn-mote wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I
read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....
[1] (They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do
have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a
veritable army of student interns.)
URI [1]: https://hackclub.com/
deeringc wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like
this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their
thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of
actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young
developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start
working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools
to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very
likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt
that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the
medium term.
troyvit wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the
decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.
whywhywhywhy wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this
they'd charge more
URI [1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Looks like it's time for them to sponsor an open source
Slack-killer.
dmqctx wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched
earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club
their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing
consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep
tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them
for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
whywhywhywhy wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
The word ânonprofitâ shouldnât really be used for these
organizations anyway because you can see right there the people
in charge of it are literally profiting.
Noshareholder would be more honest.
markdown wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
The revenue is from contributions
steezeburger wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my
default.
kaladin-jasnah wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the
most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month).
That was a long time ago.
enriquto wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy.
Prefer always open standards!
addandsubtract wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Discord server it is! /s (but not really)
zelphirkalt wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat
options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible
deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly
available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in
ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost
significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost
per user.
[1]
URI [1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/sr...
ketzu wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy.
Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your
provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd
say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take
time.
dijit wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Not being funny, but I can migrate from Zulip SaaS to Zulip
Self-hosted in about 45 minutes. The limitation is the speed of
my internet.
I know this, because I've done it.
Similarly a migration from self-hosted to SaaS gitlab (though,
not back).
Perfect is the enemy of good, but man, it can be pretty close to
perfect if you choose your vendors properly.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
I am a teenager and I approve this statement!
Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would
love to apply :>
They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.
Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a
literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
ayoreis wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs
currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is
done, but do check our website: [1] (we have/had 100k people in
the Slack)
URI [1]: https://hackclub.com
jrubinovitz wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing
called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your
non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw
hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay
for that non-profit status.
chrisasquith wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel
stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We donât charge 7
percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal
sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to
make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
ugh123 wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free
for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
linhns wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
Going from a greedy corporation to another greedy corporation is
not a good idea.
youngtaff wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
Discord is pretty horrible when compared to Slack⦠canât
change the tiny font size for starters
esseph wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
Of course you can change the font and font size.
Zekio wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
you can literally change the font size to up to 24px and then
double it again if that isn't enough using zoom level in
discord
dns_snek wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait,
especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's
bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy
there.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an
organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own
solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an
eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There
are many more solutions in this space though.
URI [1]: https://revolt.chat/
omneity wrote 5 hours 47 min ago:
I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year,
along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram
and the new TeamSpeak.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level
of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great
job, but itâs still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group
calls in a casual setting.
ilidur wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most
requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used
by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)
darkwater wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
Sure, so 5 years from now they will be in the exact same
situation.
self_awareness wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because
Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in
they've created.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on.
That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
anthk wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre
protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled
garden against another one... good luck with that.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at
least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there
are pretty fine clients for every OS.
gwd wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on
IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC
does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL
open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19
years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the
payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going
to convince people to move to free solutions without being
able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so
attractive in the first place.
nottorp wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
> in terms of engagement
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it
makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ...
well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
anthk wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
I'm from 1987, are you sure? And I was talking about
Jabber, not IRC.
gwd wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
> And I was talking about Jabber, not IRC.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took
you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber
since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now
understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks',
which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have
been around since the early 00's."
mleonarde-opv wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
is... was it Ellis island?
jstummbillig wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
How about
URI [1]: https://once.com/campfire
lsaferite wrote 1 min ago:
[delayed]
linhns wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Second this. I'm fond of just enough principle, and this is
exactly that.
wltr wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Or better this:
URI [1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
N-Krause wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my
communication data in the hands of a company that could just do
the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
viccis wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I
would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.
sfn42 wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I was going to suggest the same. Why would it not be free? I
would expect it to be free. I don't think running a server costs
anything.
worthless-trash wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
Yet.
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly
you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
keithnz wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the
things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord
has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the
servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible
so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to
users.
jon-wood wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high
quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an
organisation like this could legitimately need.
commandersaki wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in
Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile
phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a
macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points:
URI [1]: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
squigz wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish
open source people would have opted to get him something more
free than a MacBook.
Sayrus wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
He choose the laptop for durability because he can't get it
repaired in Bangladesh. People didn't pick a non-free laptop
without consulting him.
Ray20 wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
>he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is
roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should
be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should
be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops
for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be
about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
meindnoch wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Bro. Just let the kid have his MacBook.
spoctrial wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids
so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure.
These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where
you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a
i-know-best kind of way.
srik wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
This case was different from hackclubâs usual donations.
Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev,
coding on his phone and shared it with the community.
People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and
hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a
small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for
him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice
because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a
hassle and Appleâs service process is a dream in
comparison.
hirako2000 wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across
my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop
the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix
about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is
where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I
can't recall more than once in south east asia the words
"you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the
"west".
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a
Macbook. However not because all the other models are
complicated to fix in his land.
KronisLV wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
A ThinkPad might have also been an excellent choice, but hope
the MacBook serves him well!
Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of
something others might find useful.
Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6,
they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note
taking and stuff.
wltr wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Please donât downvote this advice into oblivion. As a
person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something
more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can
buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually
valuable.
scyzoryk_xyz wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop
purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where
NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong
free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on
what brand of computer you can buy
wltr wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
Yes, fair, itâs off-topic in here.
FirmwareBurner wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
Framework?
stockresearcher wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Not available in Bangladesh. Thereâs every reason to
believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of
everything available locally before deciding on the
Apple product.
URI [1]: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countrie...
Fade_Dance wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case.
Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced,
aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the
EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design
goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more
general purpose laptop that everyone at the company
fell in love with, which led to it actually going to
production.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that
can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd
ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple
keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a
durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk
setup for dev.
cskartikey wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!
aramsh wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have
the capacity to apply for nonprofit status ( [1] ). The 7% income
covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to
help it kept running.
URI [1]: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/
michabyte wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover
the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee
does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost.
It just helps offset it a little.
yuvguy wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
great article and I really hope that hack club continues on without
slack, and maybe even do better.
djmips wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Make your own Slack?
realityfactchex wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time
to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using
chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps
consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever
it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other
appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why
serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
[0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS)
[1] https://zulip.com
BeefySwain wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
Campfire is definitely not FOSS:
URI [1]: https://once.com/license
hardwaresofton wrote 39 min ago:
Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no
mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't
seem to be anywhere in the software repository.
URI [1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
p-t wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be
using chat wrong.
A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history,
because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people
things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and
more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not
official hack club hq)
otherme123 wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
I'm selfhosting rocket for a small team ( [1] ). I think they have a
limited number of users, but the license is MIT.
URI [1]: https://www.rocket.chat/install
hliyan wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software
back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license).
The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every
company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue
of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
NetMageSCW wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Perpetual licenses arenât a panacea given that old software
doesnât have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of
support is lacking.
GrinningFool wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would
give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?
dizhn wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly.
Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its
requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is
the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer
but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is
their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such
good alternatives exist.
wltr wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag.
Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of
self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like âweâre
business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our
success for freeâ instead of âweâre business and weâre
contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community
helps us back.â
detaro wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
The problem with push notifications is that they need to go
through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not
really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go
through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it
behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance
seems fair.
If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of
the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay
Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through
Zulip.
subscribed wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really
great for me.
¹
URI [1]: https://docs.ntfy.sh/
wellthisisgreat wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Zulip is great
ioulian wrote 8 hours 53 min ago:
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be
using chat wrong.
This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to
discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for
this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not
a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines
to search that.
mihaaly wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good
way to handle documentation
I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written
down explicitly and finally.
Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and
accurate information about a feature of a product because it was
scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data
(out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong
suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it
(Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official
support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use
against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious
shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the
lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
criley2 wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the
actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages
are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of
being able to ask them personally.
So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a
notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?
Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so
we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is
always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have
to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business
successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack
of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation
are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a
frantic slack message.
The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the
standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.
renewiltord wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of
the same.
realityfactchex wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
Yeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence,
which is buried at the very end, after all the images.
If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's
not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be
Slack.
renewiltord wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: âAs you have
probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermostâ. But not here
to litigate it. Itâs easy to miss if you skim.
novatea wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
I'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted
Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things
though.
shaky-carrousel wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
devoutsalsa wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their
site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does
Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than
$195K/year?
actionfromafar wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you
control your data much more.
wltr wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
Last time I checked they cripple the self-hosted version,
asking to subscribe for enterprise plan here and there. Source:
deployed their chat locally a couple of weekends ago. Overall,
I liked their Slack clone, they this one was a red flag to me.
Now Iâm not sure we want to deploy this, but I know very
little alternatives. Zulip, but it cripples its self-hosted
version too. It allows just 10 mobile users (notifications).
Maybe Matrix it is then, but itâs not very suitable for
airgapped company-wide deployment.
jamespo wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
How are you expecting the devs to get paid with zero
incentive for customers to do so?
Arathorn wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but itâs not very suitable for
airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide
deployments - this is precisely what [1] is? It was
originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been
airgap-first since day 1.
URI [1]: https://element.io/server-suite
wltr wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Hi Matthew, thanks for the clarification. Then, Matrix is
the only player who does not cripple self-hosted instances,
I assume.
adastra22 wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
Mattermost is AGPLv3. You can deploy the whole stack and own
your data without paying a cent to Mattermost the company.
ForHackernews wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they
can't turn you off or raise the price.
pcthrowaway wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
What's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is
AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally
being usable under Apache 2 terms
ForHackernews wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
That's how they describe themselves: [1] > Mattermost is an
open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers
chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and
AI integration
URI [1]: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost
pcthrowaway wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
Interesting. Notably, they also call themselves "open
source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of
any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change
you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit
that gives no explanation: [1] , and the discussion there
is private.
Notably, they do have some "source-available" code that
goes into the enterprise release, at [2] This mainly seems
to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible
more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a
relatively recent development). Until recently they also
had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now
seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise
feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use
postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search)
So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving
to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to
create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and
almost all features, are currently still open source.
URI [1]: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/3124...
URI [2]: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/mast...
jrochkind1 wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
It sounds like the enterprise release is not open source?
When someone above says "The whole thing is AGPLv3," I'm
not sure everyone is talking about the same "whole
thing"?
gregoriol wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
Matrix would be a better alternative
_zoltan_ wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's
free...
fransje26 wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable
I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..
_zoltan_ wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
yawn
it's very, very old to tell people "do it better else shut up",
which is exactly what you did.
people can have an opinion you know. this is my opinion.
Freak_NL wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
Is it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with
GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very
pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just
works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a
sensible manner).
Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made
with regards to our tools.
Simran-B wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
Funny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky,
especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in
comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality
and the search just works for about everything.
wltr wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
What about the software nudging you to subscribe to their
enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or
just ignore?
adastra22 wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
I've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost.
Where do you see it?
wltr wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
I afraid I nuked my installation already. There were
insignificant features, like for their Playbook (or what
the name is), where you are offered some extra feature,
that goes with the enterprise plan. If I chose my
self-hosted instance for some reason, I donât really need
that advertising in my interface all the time. I can
understand the reason itâs there, but I donât like it
still.
Freak_NL wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Not much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the
newest versions?
wltr wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
First time I tested a self-hosted instance was a couple of
weeks back. It was their official testing docker container.
So perhaps there are versions without that, I donât know.
I assume you should be able to compile this without them,
or at least fork the original project. Hence, Iâm asking
whatâs about those banners in real world scenario.
mobilemidget wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
Does give you more things to 'hack' for the club. Not all bad I
guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some 'new
projects'.
nextworddev wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of
Slack?
scooter_y wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
yep! Hard, but possible.
thiagoperes wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Weâve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite,
and weâve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI
you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom,
and the ecosystem integration is nice.
dafelst wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams,
they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at
a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired
and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.
dismalpedigree wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for
the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying.
Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your
throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as
possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get
notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them
randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost.
We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the
lock in.
Krssst wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to
force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why
is it ignoring user choices by default?
JackMorgan wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I
use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection,
simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My
teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the
entire day last week.
jayknight wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it
doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically
everyone I work with.
margalabargala wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
What are your experienced differences?
Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since
before Covid.
tuesdaynight wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
I had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I
see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've
been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and
the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using
Teams was a daily battle.
mdorazio wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
Chat? No. But the strength of Teams is that it lets you do
everything else you want in an integrated communications app -
voice, video calls, calendars, viewing (and editing) documents,
etc. At a reasonable price that Microsoft isn't going to crank to
the moon.
s0sa wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
So instead of doing one thing well, it does a bunch of things
poorly?
leoh wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Man, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one
has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I
tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to
see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out
loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.
randyrand wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats.
WTF. Found this:
"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export
all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your
company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the
request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered
automatically."
So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who
would use this piece of garbage?
Cort3z wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every
conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the
world.
bux93 wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors
who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered
by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't
spell it out but also requires business continuity planning.
Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data
portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability
provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks
require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data.
Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not
quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions
such clauses would be found unenforceable.
nbngeorcjhe wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements
clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in
discovery
cj wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't
have a high bar for being accepted.
coder543 wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago:
URI [1]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
Kirth wrote 12 hours 18 min ago:
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than
2-3 weeks still have value?
insane_dreamer wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
We use Slack extensively and I'm searching for info in
conversations from months or even years ago regularly.
layman51 wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free
plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is
actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable
message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste
it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about
the same thing.
novatea wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months
and have very valuable messages for a long time.
p-t wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
Adding on to this, a lot of people don't want their personal
chats deleted either!
mitthrowaway2 wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project
documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
joshstrange wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, itâs
just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
JambalayaJimbo wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I
frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
dzhiurgis wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in
proper places.
artursapek wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. Itâs pretty depressing
smelendez wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
Makes some sense to me.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log
employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal
restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all
probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that
use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random
open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They
might pay for a business license for various features, but it's
probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set
up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's
correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT
guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading
through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access
confidential information.
ejstronge wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on
reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from
employer-owned communication media) be denied to the
employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
zdragnar wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current
client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across
the world.
As such, you need to be able to review the legal status of every
pairing or group of people's private chats.
At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based
customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is
irrelevant.
ejstronge wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
> Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current
client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across
the world.
In a single legal entity?
> At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU
based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is
irrelevant.
What case law are you considering when you insinuate that Slack
must review the retention of records between users of a Slack
business customer?
swiftcoder wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
The EU user's messages are governed by the GDPR, regardless
of jurisdiction, surely?
notpushkin wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldnât be a problem, no?
smelendez wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
And that's allowed under all plans:
URI [1]: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-wo...
notpushkin wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
Nice! Iâd say most of the knowledge can be preserved that way
then.
(But I would also start making backups regularly, because who
knows if how long this would last)
userbinator wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access.
Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place
that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which
was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any
results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember
making.
edoceo wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive.
I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat
questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased)
feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better
than paid.
MontyCarloHall wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to
search
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the
only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in
the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you
weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up
on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away.
But I never saw any centralized logging à la
Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by
any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that
logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never
saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a
feature, not a bug." [0]
[0]
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415
userbinator wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
Plenty of communities kept IRC archives.
Here's Ubuntu:
URI [1]: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
madaxe_again wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for
archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you
to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and
another which complained about severe errors in the critical
environments.
I still donât understand what slack can do that IRC and a few
bots canât.
edoceo wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived.
I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google
(pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could
find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a
personal connection.
I miss the old Internet.
And get off my lawn!
skydhash wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be
saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is
the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a
recorder to have everything on file.
flunhat wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI
excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to
be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).
A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x
more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result
of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in
charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is
getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure.
And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in
the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.
URI [1]: https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai
Hobadee wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got
the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased
the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features
still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.
Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.
MontyCarloHall wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where
AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet
despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you
barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most
universally-used products.
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...
URI [2]: https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
Schnitz wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
They have AI features in Slack but they just arenât that useful.
The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of
solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo
(Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across
Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so youâll buy that instead of the
Slack AI addon.
milkshakes wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
Oh, they know, that's why they have banned all other AI from
interacting with Slack.
Schnitz wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
The API changes are scummy, I agree. Itâll generate some ARR
short term but ultimately people will be looking elsewhere, new
companies will start on alternatives and others switch when the
opportunity arises. Itâs also not like Slack is a beloved
product.
aurareturn wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine
as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was
made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on
why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How
powerful is that?
Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.
paxys wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
Slack does have this. Basic AI summaries are included in all paid
plans, and AI search and other features are part of the $20/mo
plan.
atemerev wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Because implementing _useful_ AI features is hard.
aurareturn wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack
needs to do to enable this feature?
atemerev wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
Useful summarization of long dialogues is harder than it
looks.
SchemaLoad wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Has any company got this feature? Sounds like the kind of thing
that sounds good in theory but is hard to actually pull off. To
complete this query you'd have to process almost the entirety of
the chat history in every channel. Which sounds extremely
expensive, and we know LLMs start to go off the rails when you
give them too much context.
paxys wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no
surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple
fancy marketing campaigns.
Twirrim wrote 10 hours 5 min ago:
I know a few engineers in different companies within Salesforce.
They're under lots of pressure to integrate AI everywhere, and
leverage it. The way they've talked about it gives me strong
"flailing around desperately" vibes, when the smarter money is on
making more minimal but targeted efforts, or at least waiting to
see what happens the other side of the bubble.
delfinom wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting
harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are
just hitting market maturity.
tomrod wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as
far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's
integrations are poor generally.
junar wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
I really wish this post had more details.
How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this
organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more
favorable in pricing?
If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to
it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they
shutting it down in general?
sadeshmukh wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique
agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific
nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a
week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience
- I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after
eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much
larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to
end this way.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment?
mcv wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
I find this absolutely ridiculous and I question how this can even
be legal. Surely a contract cannot be unilaterally changed on such
short notice?
Imagine your landlord increased the rent by 4000% and it's due in 5
days or you're out on the street.
Sure, they have the right to increase their prices, but there
should be at least a month notice for something like this.
48terry wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure
Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they
knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!
3eb7988a1663 wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a
$50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational
failure / bully negotiating tactic.
baq wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
Exactly what youâd expect from a sales department at risk of
missing their arr target this quarter.
jacobr1 wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
Almost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its
many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They
also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and
account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated
process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A
jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call
to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has
some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits.
Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some
kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number
number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem
to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal
they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my
contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some
form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a
standard playbook.
junar wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
What I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more
interesting to me than a story with fewer ones.
They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave
Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing
praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
SigmaEpsilonChi wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
We'll let you know how we like Mattermost once we've had a chance
to actually use it :')
edoceo wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
My teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst
case we're reading directly from the PG database.
Spivak wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
I genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They
were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all
but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small
potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see
if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and
getting nothing.
Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle
would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
omcnoe wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
It's a sign of a really poor decision making process.
They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in
front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who
hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in
their workplace.
Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit
can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front
of those students.
See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next
generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all
their developer tooling/documentation.
rchaud wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
They're not an independent business, their pricing is probably
decided by Salesforce. It's probably bundled in free for Salesforce
customers who buy a minimum of X seats.
3eb7988a1663 wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
Maybe they were running the math expecting that the customer would
bail before the year renewal, but would pay the short term extortion
to migrate their data.
$50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business
If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy
nkrisc wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
Agreed, it's bizarre. $5,000/yr > $0/yr. There's no way the
operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000/yr.
LunaSea wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
Because the calculation is that if:
N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K
Then its a profitable operation for slack.
armada651 wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
> a pretty massive sum of money
I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me
$10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000
represents a life-changing amount of money.
cmckn wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack
demanded in the next few days.
armada651 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Even $50,000/yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind
to just stave them off for a week.
cmckn wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
I agree, my point was that you and the author of the post seem to
be in agreement. I donât think theyâre being flippant about
the amount.
syntaxing wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. Itâs just the âcost
of businessâ. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for
barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff
(looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
margalabargala wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
In the article, this isn't a business. It's a nonprofit.
For 99.9% of nonprofits, their annual budgets are in the single
digit thousands or less. A sudden $250k bill is fatal.
paxys wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
A nonprofit is also a business. This particular one makes $11M+ a
year in revenue, so in the 0.01%.
casparvitch wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve
otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever
being worth $200k a year!!!
andrewstuart2 wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
It's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not
for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra
$500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend
that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can
afford it (or borrow it).
armada651 wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
I'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it
makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted
perception of money is limited to tech.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the
exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty
big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of
inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
fn-mote wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area,
you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much
money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You
can call it distortion if you want.
I understand that you could also take that money and move
somewhere it would last for a long long time.
Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me.
That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could
buy with that money are the same everywhere.
stouset wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
> value of money is quite absolute
You are conflating price and the value. I assure you that to a
billionaire, $250,000 is of nearly no value at all.
armada651 wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
In other words a billionaire has a distorted perception of
money. Also, water is wet.
baq wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
Not distorted. Itâs a billionaire perspective, but itâs
very real and 100% true to the billionaire. Look up the
concept of marginal utility of money.
throwaway-0001 wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
To someone in Nigeria on 50usd per month, 1usd is a lot. To a
guy earning 10k per month in California, 1 usd is nothing.
Whoâs distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?
Everything is relative.
amarant wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
Everything is relative.
My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10
million.
$250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that
lost in their couch.
Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small
expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the
equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt
cozzyd wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up
some Mattermost instances...
leoh wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
I'd get off ASAP.
hopelite wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Frankly, not having an alternative identified for all hosted
corporate services and maybe even at the ready with regularly
maintained deployment and transition plans is and long has been
reckless at this point.
Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from
this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the
impact is major, considering thereâs a short decision fuse on the
extortion.
Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition,
restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your
institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
3eb7988a1663 wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
That seems an unreasonable bar for all services. Even if you have
identified say, Gogs to replace your Github instance, there are so
many practical realities of porting a large installation that your
simulacra instance is offering nothing.
dmbche wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
Set it up earlier than late, if you're expecting 7 days notice before
deletion
wpm wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps.
Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge
and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and
crank the price up.
It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your
hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince
you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.
Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes
the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the
database and export to whatever format you want.
ainiriand wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then
you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
micw wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and
performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are
fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid
management included.
baq wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.
Iâve nothing against self hosting, but it isnât necessarily
cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of
hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
pessimizer wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Most of this stuff runs on autopilot once it's set up, which is
why these companies have such huge margins.
That rounding error in accounting is also a monthly charge, and
it sometimes happens that you get a spontaneous demand for $50K
in a week and $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough
hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the
world, and a sysadmin to manage it.
SilverElfin wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
I think itâs more than export. Once you export your data you have
to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be
useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export
everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old
conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for
it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online
applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point.
We need better regulations for data portability.
The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no
moat whatsoever if they arenât allowed to be anti competitive.
scooter_y wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people +
using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!
brookst wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth
$X/year to you or your business.
If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or
âlock you inâ if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized
ride for some time.
I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers
should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.
But ultimately I donât have a ton of sympathy for the âsuddenly
this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to
charge what I think itâs worthâ position.
I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company
should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and
take that consumer surplus right back.
swiftcoder wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to
raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight,
and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
brookst wrote 13 min ago:
Yeah, thatâs fair. It is reasonable to expect companies to not
be complete jerks.
jrockway wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price
discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high.
Someone then has to say "no".
Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a
"no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful
to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this
is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot
for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs
them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the
business model.)
gregmac wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
> refuse to let them export it
Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to
use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and
then getting burned by it.
You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned
down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened
to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit
you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.
Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people
doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are
not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing
for us tech people to admit!).
But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe
that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer
this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk
and just pray your house doesn't burn down.
rectang wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad
deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies
with the sucker.
gregmac wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not
my intent at all.
Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan
-- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is
you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think
of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it.
It's a harsh lesson when something this happens.
Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes
(or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but
you can't control what they do. You can only control your
choices.
BrenBarn wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on
unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every
Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email
provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same
thing you're at risk.
It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I
don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is
one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of
multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in
such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may
decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
blackoil wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted
solution.
RajT88 wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.
A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it
all...
sadeshmukh wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
Rate limits are bad (2/min for channel history). We've explicitly
been told not to scrape API, since admins are working on
exporting the data into Mattermost.
trhway wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the
daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to
(and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure
situation of voting with your dollar.
Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for
monopolies.
phire wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
A law would be better, otherwise companies will start with low
prices and data export functionality when attracting customers,
then quietly remove it right when they switch to extracting
maximum value.
Even a daily export won't save you from the export functionality
disappearing with zero notice, because it's really disruptive to
try and stop using a service with zero notice. Your company will
be left with several weeks if not months of un-exported data.
They can be sneaky about the removal, just let it "break" and it
might be months before you are sure they aren't going to fix it.
Fernicia wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in
a contract, should be law"
Retric wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS
company. Unless youâre a very large customer itâs simply not
worth their time. Such imbalances regularly give rise to
regulations in other parts of the economy see automotive lemon
laws etc.
Most SaaS companies can disable data exports at any time. Even
if youâre regularly backing up that data when they disable it
you need to instantly move to a new service or thereâs going to
be a gap.
onetimeusename wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom
made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud
providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting
apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money
and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons
given for this were kind of strange.
It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for
non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are
old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the
other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar
is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the
reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between
sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked
a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that
the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
gxs wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I
can tell you that believe it or not, users across different
companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty
software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as
real power users that technical users may not see - there really
might be a better way to do something and they may have already
seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks
really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad
impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just
throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but
they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
Iâm dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI
tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and
everyone feels like they are falling behind if they donât go out
and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred
to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from
the business to understand, itâs not a knock on you, it happens.
Itâs also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The
pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I canât imagine
forcing people off of slack, for example
nine_k wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
This is pretty sad. It sounds like emotion-driven FOMO than
reason-driven decision-making. Or maybe CYA-driven
decision-making ("migrated infrastructure to AWS", nobody ever
was fired for buying AWS!).
I would very much understand it if the reasons given were like
"We miss the following capabilities that our competitors have:
...", or "We have trouble interoperating with key partners", etc.
These would be actually good reasons to pay more, and risk more.
gxs wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
Yeah thatâs what I thought I said - that sometimes itâs
legitimate need, sometimes itâs not, and sometimes
itâs...complicated.
I donât think this phenomenon is unique to software - there
are people who redo their kitchens every year because they can
and people who are doing it for the first time in 30 years -
itâs just what it is
kragen wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
"Eventually" often means 30 years later. Computer Associates was
a pure customer abuse house for 20 years; many Oracle products
have been that way for 35 years.
Enterprise softwareâsoftware bought by people who don't have to
use itâis as a rule abysmal. My model of how this happens is
that there are large barriers to entry, and actually working well
is not one of them, because the guy signing the PO doesn't have
visibility into whether they work well or not. I don't know what
the barriers are, but I suspect they include hiring people who
already know CTOs, bribing ignorant shills like the Gartner
Group, and having a convincing appear you'll still be in business
in 10 years.
calvinmorrison wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
"we want something that is standard".
Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across
non-cool companies.
Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
ant6n wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
We use Microsoft at our startup because itâs so cheap - 12$ for
storage, chat, Video Call, Office, email.
Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025,
MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery
still doesnât work reliably.
netsharc wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
I was adding a calendar event on Teams (or was it
"JS"-Outlook). I wanted to copy from another area in the app,
but since it was a modal dialog, I couldn't. There's a button
to pop up the "add event" dialog to be its own window. I
clicked it, the add event window is now detached. But if course
all the stuff I previously entered disappeared, what did I
expect, that someone would bother to add code to prevent them
from disappearing!?!
nine_k wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
Google Suite is $14 at the Standard level: 2 TB per user,
email, custom domain, video calls, docs / sheets, etc.
Approximately 15% more expensive, but, really, it's two dollars
more expensive, and I'd say the quality is better.
NetMageSCW wrote 32 min ago:
The problem with Google is that it is impossible to ever talk
to anyone when you need support.
calvinmorrison wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
yeah its kind of annoying.
its not the amazing stack when i worked at $startup, but also
we dont really spend any time futzing with it.
Microsoft releases a new feature, we get it. cool.
leoh wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut
deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack
doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1
infrastructure.
kfogel wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
So many stories like this about Slack.
We use Zulip ( [1] ) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked
back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but
paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
URI [1]: https://zulip.org/
robotburrito wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a
large company that moved us to teams. Great software!
amarant wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same?
That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable
alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their
prices......yet.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one
described above should probably consider something they'll have more
control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that
needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other
alternatives out there too
dathinab wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
go to product > self-hosting
you might notice it's 100% free software
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g.
just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general",
"food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage,
including video conferences, channels for every
squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very
relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a
work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a
clear focus on the later
sweettea wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most
joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using.
URI [1]: https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
Kirth wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Sadly as with many such products, if you want SSO and the like,
you'll still end up paying per user per month. That gets stupid
expensive quick
coder543 wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
Or not.
> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our
Zulip Cloud customers.
> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML
authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions.
There is no âopen coreâ catch â just freely available
world-class software.
The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are
buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but
I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on
self-hosted Zulip.
Kirth wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
That's exciting! I didn't catch that from the pricing page,
thank you for clarifying :)
amarant wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
Oh, so I was missing something!
That was not very obvious from their landing page!
Well in that case, carry on!
nh2 wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
> That was not very obvious from their landing page!
It says in bold letters:
"Your data is yours!
For ultimate control and compliance, self-host Zulipâs 100%
open-source software"
amarant wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site.
In this case they apparently meant it, but to me that just
registers as marketing speech.
I guess I've been on the internet too long, my brain
automatically blacks certain language out, like a biological
spam filter.
48terry wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
> Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their
site.
...You could go to the Slack website right now and see?
We're on the internet. It's all on the internet. We can
literally just check.
Doesn't seem to mention anything about being open source,
anything privacy-related, data, or hosting.
burkaman wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
It is open source and you can self host it.
davidcollantes wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
See:
URI [1]: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install....
boxerab wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Time to switch to Mattermost.
stevage wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
Did you read the article?
orphea wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
Narrator: they did not.
arp242 wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can
just increase the price with a few days notice?
sadeshmukh wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
It was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and
there was a special contract drawn with HC (that's the 5000/yr
mentioned in the original post).
aramsh wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to
a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now
the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Why did they switch? Given the information provided, it seems that
paying anything, if you're on a grandfathered free plan, is a bad
deal.
jrochkind1 wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
There is no obligation to provide the "grandfathered" free plan
forever, they could have taken that away too. Presumably they
switched to get some features they wanted that weren't on their
old plan. Slack can take away the old deal as easy as the new,
staying on the old is no guarantee Slack will let you keep it
forever.
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
Right - there is so much context missing. Extrapolating just a
little, it looks like the story is something more like "We had
too many users for our existing free plan, so we switched to a
paid plan that had a first-year discount of 97%. We didn't
really pay attention to the fine print, and now we've got a
nasty letter demanding lots of money."
Not defending Slack / Salesforce. You just can't deal with them
with that level of naivety.
galaxy_gas wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this
URI [1]: https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
Illniyar wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
So it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan.
That's a different story altogether and makes more sense for the
timeline involved.
If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the
nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not
as bad
dwedge wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
The article says slack took them off the non profit plan, set the
price at $5000/year and they paid it and were happy to. It's not
a long article.
Vegenoid wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
I can't imagine any scenario that justifies an out-of-the blue
demand of $50k within a week or your data is deleted. The only
way this isn't an awful thing to inflict on a teen education
nonprofit is if there have been conversations happening that
weren't disclosed in the post - conversations that would have
illuminated this possibility.
Although frankly this is a good lesson for a bunch of young
hackers to learn.
Illniyar wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
Not saying this is the case, or that slack thinks it is, but -
If slack found out that the company isn't really a non-profit,
or that it violated the requirements in the non-profit
agreement (such as promoting discrimination) it would justify a
demand for immediate payment in my opinion.
m3kw9 wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
the extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going
giveita wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
At a 2.5% success rate this breaks even
htrp wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
Slack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all
accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force
migration.
lysace wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
Hasnât Slack had per user pricing for a very long time?
And wasnât the free version made kind of unusable through very
limited retention like a decade ago?
nextworddev wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article
preisschild wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe
Zulip is better?
boxed wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've
used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you
could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone.
We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the
suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool
so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in
Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to
get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just
devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be
found again.
squigz wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies
in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the
thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies
which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages
can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current
threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
boxed wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
Yea. The reply feature in Discord is way better and their
introduction of "threads" makes everything worse.
squigz wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
What happens in Mattermost if you open up a thread and send a
message in it without replying to a message? Does it still show
up outside of the thread? I can see how that might be
confusing.
pcthrowaway wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
If you make the reply in the thread it will go in the thread.
Threads in Mattermost are single-tiered (you can't do
sub-threads). So they're somewhat limited, and sure, people
will occasionally respond to thread conversations
out-of-thread. That's a user issue more than anything else.
They're not perfect, but they are very useful.
boxed wrote 46 min ago:
Hmm, I don't remember it like that. Isn't that exactly how
Discord and Slack does it?
squigz wrote 34 min ago:
I've never used Mattermost, so I'm only going off my
reading of what you said, but the difference is that, if
you're not actually in a thread when you reply to a
message on Discord, it doesn't get put into that thread,
whereas on Mattermost, IIUC, you're saying that you can
reply to a message outside of a thread and be able to
click into a thread made of all those replies.
My question (and pcthrowaway's) response is about what
happens when you send a message inside a thread without
replying to a message. I was wondering if it would be
sent into the main channel, with no context, which would
be confusing.
squigz wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Yeah that makes sense. Still loads better than the way
Discord does it currently.
bigtones wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not
look promising.
usef- wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min ago)
privatelypublic wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
Off topic, but this reminds me of apples worst UI sin in my book:
holding the refresh circle bo longer dumps the cache foe the
page.
murukesh_s wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess
what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications
everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to
the free version of Slack
getpokedagain wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs
in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start
behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky
dependency
mindwok wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
Anything you can self-host is mostly safe, because at the very
least you have access to the raw data and can move elsewhere if
you need to.
twarge wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
We used Mattermost but eventually started getting annoyed by the
nags to upgrade in the free version. Zulip is has been far
better.
3eb7988a1663 wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
It always felt weird to me that glorified IRC could command such
a price premium. Admittedly, a bunch of engineering was put in
place to make things work, but it was still just humans chatting
with each other for what is probably tiny amounts of data
storage.
dinkleberg wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
You can self-host Mattermost. It seems that is likely what they
are going to be doing from the article since they talked about
how important it is to own your data.
p2detar wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
I missed that part in the article, but yeah - self-host or
nothing. We are self-hosting as well, although our group is not
a large one.
edoceo wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
And the self hosted is, effectively, just `docker up`. Saved us
$1000s
rowanG077 wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you
really, really shouldn't rely on them.
hopelite wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
Itâs not even really just large companies, even though the
extortion, predation, and vulture tactics tend to be rolled out once
market capture and network effect has been achieved, which tends to
correlate with being larger companies.
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example
of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure
the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool
offering and then violate us once theyâve slammed the doors shut
and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of
becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness?
After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are
these types of things? We know the predators will predate ⦠Why do
we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is
it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
greyface- wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
> What makes us so foolish?
High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain
will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.
greyface- wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company
with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009
with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B
Salesforce acquisition.
stevage wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.
Waterluvian wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
Iâm sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels
like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where thereâs really no
room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at
scale.
Iâm curious now, whatâs the largest company thatâs clearly
passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, ânah
weâre good. The current business model makes us enough money.â
mr_tristan wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book
_Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book,
but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these
companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses,
and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating
their niche with razor focus.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd
like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these
places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
Agraillo wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
Thanks for sharing. Two companies come to mind: Strix for kettle
controllers and Shimano for bike gears. Maybe they don't fit
exactly to the Hidden champions category because theyâre not
very hidden from the public (many manufacturers mention their
names on final products, assuming consumers might take that into
account). So the criteria for âhidden championsâ could be
more flexible imo
Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The
Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty
of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a
great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the
context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a
second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit
fails. Thatâs probably why we never hear of fires or other
incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42z87
gary_0 wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a
good or service with a customer for a fair market price.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national
scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now,
where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all
recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a
customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in
the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame
the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
buzzerbetrayed wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
What is preventing you from competing with Slack and doing âgood
things at scaleâ?
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.
smithcoin wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
37signals?
krackers wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
[1] >By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods.
Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential,
especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made
automation more appealing.
>âFor what these machines can do today, they should cost USD
300â400,â he said. âThatâs already the cap. Anything higher
is just an âIQ tax,â unless the cleaning function actually gets
significantly better.â
URI [1]: https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-s...
desultir wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
I feel like any time a company goes public they lose the ability to
pass up on revenue. The C-suite report to the board, who have a
fiduciary duty to maximize profits.
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the
C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a
group of people with only good intentions.
triceratops wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
> who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits
* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not
the same thing as "maximize profits".
Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the
C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.
The board designs their compensation package that way because
they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're
acting in shareholders' interests.
DangitBobby wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
It's pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you
could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.
pcl wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
That seems like a pretty tough argument to make, to be honest.
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