Hi, I’m 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. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re 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 Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 – 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 – 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."
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.
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from this egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Juicero™.
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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 today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
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?
“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”
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 weren’t given longer notice?
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
> Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end?
How many more times must we see it?
When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision.
If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it.
For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.
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 them—people are capable of behaving decently—but 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.
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
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?
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but 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).
(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.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t 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
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: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Please don’t 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.
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
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
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.
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.
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.
This case was different from hackclub’s 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 Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
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.
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.
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.
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 it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
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.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
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.
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.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.
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.
Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
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.
> 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)
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?
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 I’m 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 it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.
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
> Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
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: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.
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.
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.
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.
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".
They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
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?
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.
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...
> UPDATE: We’ve 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.
+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.
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.
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.
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 OP’s situation.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven’t 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
I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now.
It really hasn’t 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 it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
I don’t 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re 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..
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d 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.
I’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others.
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work.
I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
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.
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.
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 “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
Where’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t 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.
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.
>It doesn’t 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.
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.
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.
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.
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t 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 you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll 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. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
- 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.
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
I can’t 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. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s 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.
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.
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 we’re 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.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re 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 it’s 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. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people
would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 I’ve heard it happen with other products too.
We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) 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.
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
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. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
> 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 “open core” catch — 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.
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
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 https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ 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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
>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 don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS company. Unless you’re a very large customer it’s 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 you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.
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.
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.
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.
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
I’m 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 don’t 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, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
"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 software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is 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.
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.
Yeah that’s what I thought I said - that sometimes it’s legitimate need, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s...complicated.
I don’t 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 - it’s just what it is
We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s 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 doesn’t work reliably.
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.
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!?!
I think it’s 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 aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
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.
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.
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.
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 “lock you in” 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 don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” 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.
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.)
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t 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 don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
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
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 there’s 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?
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.
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?
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.
>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]
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.
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.
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 don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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) you’ll 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.
It’s still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. 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).
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!!!
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).
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.
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
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.
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. Who’s distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "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.
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
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.
It’s 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 they’ve 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?
I’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale.
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
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.
* 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.
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
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 they’re 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 “hidden champions” 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. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
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.
>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.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
It did happen, at least from the perspective of a one year member. We had zero warning, and even core staff were caught off guard. Our migration basically began now.
I agree. If this was Oracle I might not have too difficult of a time believing this is all of the story. But I do think in this case there is more to the story.
I am willing to believe these things do happen. Different vendor, but I have experienced a price jumping 3x with one month notice before the annual renewal.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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)
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.
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.
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Hi, I’m 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. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re 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 Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t 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
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
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.
And that if you don't fight it when everybody is telling you to, you end up with Bari Weiss running CBS news.
Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.
Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.
Hey, I think we agree on something.
Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.
Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?
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.
Makes me filthy rich doesn’t imply I like it.
Margin Call is a great movie.
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.
It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.
Hush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to serve a simple status page.
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.
Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.
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...
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.
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.
My sales people love it.
Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?
I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 – 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 – 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."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies
>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.
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.
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
You’d think they failed based on the description given earlier. But that doesn’t sound like failure to me…
This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from this egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
Salesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s 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.
What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.
Just seems more efficient to me.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
coders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that has worked on writing code for it hates it
Just wait till they learn about Broadcom!
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.
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.
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 Juicero™.
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...
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.
Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.
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.
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.
https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?
Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.
So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).
Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.
why the extra step of making them into PDFs?
Human readable format at rest, I assume.
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.
this is what we're doing :)
Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?
See discussions below in this HN thread.[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...
[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again
Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"
It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P
Zulip is awesome too. On prem.
Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.
Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?
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.
> 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.
The special rate was charity.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.
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.
You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
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.
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.
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 today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?
is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?
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?
“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”
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 weren’t given longer notice?
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: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
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.
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.
I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.
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).
What does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?
It's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral paragon.
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.
[flagged]
Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
> Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end?
How many more times must we see it?
When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision.
If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it.
For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.
Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element https://element.io/, I don't know why more people don't do this.
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 them—people are capable of behaving decently—but 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.
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?
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
It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.
That sounds quite a bit like fraud.
Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.
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?
Anyone except an American judge can see that this is intentional.
Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but 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).
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....
https://hackclub.com/
(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.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t 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
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: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!
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.
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.
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.
Please don’t 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.
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
Framework?
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...
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.
>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.
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.
This case was different from hackclub’s 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 Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
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.
Bro. Just let the kid have his MacBook.
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.
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.
Sure, so 5 years from now they will be in the exact same situation.
How about https://once.com/campfire
Second this. I'm fond of just enough principle, and this is exactly that.
Or better this: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
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.
[1] https://revolt.chat/
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 it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm from 1987, are you sure? And I was talking about Jabber, not IRC.
is... was it Ellis island?
Going from a greedy corporation to another greedy corporation is not a good idea.
Discord is pretty horrible when compared to Slack… can’t change the tiny font size for starters
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
Of course you can change the font and font size.
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.
Yet.
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
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.
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.
> 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!
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]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...
> 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.
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.
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.
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: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
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.
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.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.
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.
Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
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.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t 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.
The revenue is from contributions
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.
[flagged]
Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
This is not zero sum.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
If you scare a bunch of kiddos gonna take over your job, maybe your job is not that important.
We know a fun and interesting thing and we want to share it.
You could use the same argument to stop teaching many other useful skills to kids. It's a bad argument.
this is called gatekeeping by the way and it's very annoying when you're conscious that it's happening and it's against you
Are you comfortable sharing a little information on your background and such? Adding a little context
(the comment you made surprised me)
Surely that comment is sarcasm.
If you are willing to mess with kids how is your behaviour with coworkers?
Programming is much, much bigger than writing and maintaining stuff for businesses.
It's a way to create many forms of art, solve everyday problems and automate a plethora of machines in our homes.
You sound like an accountant whining about kids learning about calculators and statistics.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
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.
Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me.
¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/
> 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)
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.
I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
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?
You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you control your data much more.
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 I’m 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 it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.
Mattermost is AGPLv3. You can deploy the whole stack and own your data without paying a cent to Mattermost the company.
How are you expecting the devs to get paid with zero incentive for customers to do so?
Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.
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
That's how they describe themselves: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost
> Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
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: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.
Notably, they do have some "source-available" code that goes into the enterprise release, at https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/server/...
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.
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'.
Matrix would be a better alternative
mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
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.
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.
What about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?
I've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost. Where do you see it?
Not much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the newest versions?
> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable
I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..
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.
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".
Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?
I'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.
Zulip is great
The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.
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.
They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
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?
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.
Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this
It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
What? No? Why?
I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.
Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.
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.
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...
Funny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you have any references where I can read more? I didn’t hear about that
Best place for info is probably the announcements channel on Kubernetes slack. that’s a link which is a good place to start https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p17500871180...
Here is the public announcement: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kubernetes-...
> UPDATE: We’ve 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.
+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.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.
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.
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.
Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.
Why?
To what? What is the alternative?
Expo/RN TBH.
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 OP’s situation.
It's just react native tooling
Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.
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
Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.
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).
Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.
What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice anything bad.
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.
Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.
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.
Yeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Can’t imagine there’s many people still left using it now.
> 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
Hundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet it’s a downward trend with no hope of a turnaround.
We just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago. Good riddance.
what did you migrate to?
Not OP, but we originally migrated to Digital Ocean. But now, all complex stuff is on AWS and dual-stack stuff is on Replit.
I still have old personal projects on there
Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over
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. https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
That discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"
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.
It also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may 2024 ? https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own fork.
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.
In what way is it crippling?
(I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)
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!"
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.
Not sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.
there exists a fork that is basically limitless https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter so if that ever becomes a problem you just swap server binary
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.
Once enough people do that, they'll fix this
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.
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: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser
I haven’t 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
Mattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages
https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...
I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now.
It really hasn’t 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 it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.
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.
From one walled garden to another?
You can self-host it.
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.
Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable alternative.
Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue stream from users or they don’t want the overhead of maintaining those users.
From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.
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.
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.
Because microsoft would never do such a thing
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
That was until someone decided to start strong arming people with dissenting opinions via compromised companies.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...
Not overnight but I remember sql server licensing having a huge increase when they decided to pursue rent seeking via azure.
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.
I don’t 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.
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.
O365 pretty much always includes a Teams license, so if you're paying for O365 anyway...
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
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.
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] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
> the company started as the anti-Oracle.
The company was founded by an Oracle executive...
I mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they want to mow lawns.
For the young people who might be reading this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
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.
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?
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.
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment?
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.
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!
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.
Exactly what you’d expect from a sales department at risk of missing their arr target this quarter.
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.
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.
We'll let you know how we like Mattermost once we've had a chance to actually use it :')
My teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst case we're reading directly from the PG database.
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.
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.
If you’re 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..
This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.
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.
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.
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)
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.
welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
This is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.
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.
Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?
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.
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.
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.
Or didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion target".
> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d 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.
Don't need a decade, I rarely if ever see Teams not malfunctioning daily...
Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
I’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others.
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work.
I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
You could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage chat for just this amount of money
Or an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.
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.
Cory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.
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?
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.
We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!
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.
https://matrix.org/
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.
Campfire is solid: https://once.com/campfire
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
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.
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.
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 “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t 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?
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.
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.
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.
https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login
So on the up side about matrix is if you don't like you can roll your own.
(unfortunately Hydrogen is no longer being developed; nobody funded it. Instead, focus is on Aurora, aka Element X Web: https://element.io/blog/hacking-for-a-sovereign-digital-euro... etc)
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.
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
If you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service
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.
> 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.
For docs, there is cryptpad.fr
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.
> 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 http://github.com/element-hq/sydent (formerly http://github.com/matrix-org/sydent).
> 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.
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
Very shameless promotion but if you really enjoy threaded chat we're building https://cushion.so which keeps everything threaded by default.
You can create DM groups with yourselves if you like private chats in groups also.
Integrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and provide an off ramp in the meantime
0: https://www.linen.dev/
Where’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t 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.
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.
>It doesn’t 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.
>Anyway, we’re 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.
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.
[1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai
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] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t 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 you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
Oh, they know, that's why they have banned all other AI from interacting with Slack.
The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll 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. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because implementing _useful_ AI features is hard.
What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack needs to do to enable this feature?
Useful summarization of long dialogues is harder than it looks.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option
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
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.
Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
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.
It's well documented and very easy to follow, just need to run a few Ansible scripts
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)
Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.
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).
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.
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.
The Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.
Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...
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.
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
I can’t 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. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s 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.
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.
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.
The responses you're getting perfectly encapsulate the problem.
I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but "<x> client sucks, use <y> client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.
I recommend Matrix, and it works well for me. I'm using Element (old) on Android though, not Element X.
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.
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 we’re 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.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re 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 it’s 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. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
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.
I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.
Maybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and landed at: https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/
…Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
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.
I suspect that the same applies to discord.
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.
“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.
Indeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.
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.
VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.
No. Also VMWare moved perpetual licenses to subscriptions, not the other way around.
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.
And archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace… very aggressive move to destroy free and non enterprise tier
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?
EU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to roll out.
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.
what kind of joke is this...
I personally would’ve gone for matrix since it’s free and open source, but I’m sure this license will be better..
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.
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.
Not unpopular at all. That’s the way
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 I’ve heard it happen with other products too.
From Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher well.
So many stories like this about Slack.
We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) 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.
I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!
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
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. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
Oh, so I was missing something!
That was not very obvious from their landing page!
Well in that case, carry on!
> 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 Zulip’s 100% open-source software"
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.
> 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.
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
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 “open core” catch — 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.
That's exciting! I didn't catch that from the pricing page, thank you for clarifying :)
See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...
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
It is open source and you can self host it.
Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?
I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.
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 https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ 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.)
Sounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this headache.
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).
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.
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.
Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?
Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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 <https://stallman.org/slack.html>
Convenience is king, and unfortunately Matrix is not very convenient. Way too cumbersome to get going from a user perspective.
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.
The cloud is other people's computers.
It's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is high enough
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.
New projects in that genre keep popping up, for example eIRC: An Enterprise Chat System Based on IRC https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
> Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack
Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? That’s some big city mobster tactics right there
>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 don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll 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.
What details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.
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.
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.
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS company. Unless you’re a very large customer it’s 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 you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.
Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.
A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...
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.
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.
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.
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
I’m 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 don’t 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, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
"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 software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is 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.
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.
Yeah that’s what I thought I said - that sometimes it’s legitimate need, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s...complicated.
I don’t 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 - it’s just what it is
"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.
We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s 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 doesn’t work reliably.
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.
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!?!
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.
I think it’s 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 aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people + using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.
I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
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.
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.
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.
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 “lock you in” 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 don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” 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.
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.)
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"
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.
Do not use Slack.
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.
That’s salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.
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.
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.
switch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go proprietary again!
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.
Are there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot comprehend.
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
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.
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.
Let's revisit this assessment in a few years.
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.
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.
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.
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 “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t 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 don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
Please consider IRC or something open protocol instead.
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
If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
Set it up earlier than late, if you're expecting 7 days notice before deletion
I'd get off ASAP.
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 there’s 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?
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.
What a dick move to do that.
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?
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
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.
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.
>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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415
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!
Plenty of communities kept IRC archives.
Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
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.
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 don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
The EU user's messages are governed by the GDPR, regardless of jurisdiction, surely?
Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
Nice! I’d 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)
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.
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.
> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements
clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery
The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
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.
Adding on to this, a lot of people don't want their personal chats deleted either!
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.
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
We use Slack extensively and I'm searching for info in conversations from months or even years ago regularly.
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.
You would be surprised how many companies use bookmarked Slack posts as their wiki!
> so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
Weirdly this part never actually happens.
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.
I mean, yeah, but frankly the link to a source is a big step up from someplaces. Its a culture thing.
There are a few rare folks that love writing wiki pages, the catch is getting one on the team.
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.
First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article
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
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
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.
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.
And the self hosted is, effectively, just `docker up`. Saved us $1000s
We used Mattermost but eventually started getting annoyed by the nags to upgrade in the free version. Zulip is has been far better.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yea. The reply feature in Discord is way better and their introduction of "threads" makes everything worse.
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.
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.
Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.
Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min 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.
It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe Zulip is better?
Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.
Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?
yep! Hard, but possible.
Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?
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.
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.
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
Agreed, it's bizarre. $5,000/yr > $0/yr. There's no way the operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000/yr.
Because the calculation is that if:
N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K
Then its a profitable operation for slack.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
they could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.
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.
Wonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.
Maybe Mattermost is solution?
If only they'd written they're moving to Mattermost in TFA.
Edit: oh wait there it is:
"Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost."
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...
not only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps
We switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more consistency.
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.
Nothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.
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!
https://www.discourse.org/
https://flarum.org/
https://www.simplemachines.org/
This is remarkably familiar.
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.
Tell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform that the teens and kids already use: Discord.
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.
I'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.
This when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible software !
I guess history repeat.
Campfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.
Move to Zulip already...
Please frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues" with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".
Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.
should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
Just more of the same
No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
It is free, as I understand it, not 200k per year.
It is free, for now.
It already gives kinda creepy "You use this server, why not support it … or else" vibe all over interface.
How about not relying on a third party for your organization...
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.
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) you’ll 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.
It’s still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
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.
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.
Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.
i wish discord worked better for work
I wish it worked worse and people stopped used it as a replacement for forums.
it has forums now :)
skulk thats only for fun and games sob
> 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.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. 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).
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.
A nonprofit is also a business. This particular one makes $11M+ a year in revenue, so in the 0.01%.
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!!!
This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.
Even $50,000/yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind to just stave them off for a week.
I agree, my point was that you and the author of the post seem to be in agreement. I don’t think they’re being flippant about the amount.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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.
In other words a billionaire has a distorted perception of money. Also, water is wet.
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. Who’s distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?
Everything is relative.
Not distorted. It’s a billionaire perspective, but it’s very real and 100% true to the billionaire. Look up the concept of marginal utility of money.
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!
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.
Time to switch to Mattermost.
Did you read the article?
Narrator: they did not.
Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!
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
Slack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force migration.
Hasn’t Slack had per user pricing for a very long time?
And wasn’t the free version made kind of unusable through very limited retention like a decade ago?
expensive IRC with history
Nowadays even the history ain't a feature...
great article and I really hope that hack club continues on without slack, and maybe even do better.
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.
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.
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 https://irctoday.com/ uses, for example. Call support would have to be done by integrating Jitsi, but it's been done before as seen in https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference and https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support
Join us now and share the software. You’ll be free.
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.
<nelson>Ha-Ha!</nelson> That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first place....
Make your own Slack?
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.
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?
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.
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.
never used the web app, but never noticed any sluggishness with the desktop app.
now my company „forces“ me to us Microsoft Teams and i’m thinking back to the good old days with Slack.
I run the desktop app also, but since it's just the electron packaged webapp, I expect no real difference between the two.
the extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going
At a 2.5% success rate this breaks even
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
Welcome to Microsoft Teams
Bring back IRC lol
That’s not what extortion means.
> $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
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] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...
[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...
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.
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.
it seems your concerns are addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
why has this post been taken off the front page, and why has the title been editorialized?
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "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.
Oh, please!
> why has the title been editorialized
Indeed, the HN guidelines:
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284260
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TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
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I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.
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.
Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.
It’s 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 they’ve 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?
> 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.
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I’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale.
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
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.
> 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.
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
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 they’re 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 “hidden champions” 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. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42z87
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.
https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
>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.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
What is preventing you from competing with Slack and doing “good things at scale”?
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.
37signals?
It's pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.
That seems like a pretty tough argument to make, to be honest.
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It did happen, at least from the perspective of a one year member. We had zero warning, and even core staff were caught off guard. Our migration basically began now.
I agree. If this was Oracle I might not have too difficult of a time believing this is all of the story. But I do think in this case there is more to the story.
I am willing to believe these things do happen. Different vendor, but I have experienced a price jumping 3x with one month notice before the annual renewal.
Did you miss this news?
> Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, reducing staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees · CEO Marc Benioff linked layoffs to AI automating...
Yes that was two weeks ago, but what is the relevance of that to this post?
Fired account managers aren't sending any emails to their customers.
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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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.
What does grief have to do with it?
why would you not be sad about something great you lost ? Even if it was "just a freebie" ?
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...
[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro
> 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.
Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.
Would make much more sense to use Discord.
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.
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.
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
You need to send them a legal notice asserting that. At minimum it will get you another month or two to plan your exit.
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.
>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.
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)
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.
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]: https://preventcancer.org/about-us/team/
The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So instead of doing one thing well, it does a bunch of things poorly?
What are your experienced differences?
Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.
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.
Have you tried IRC?
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 :)