can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations? stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?
[dead]
Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
21–30 of 180 posts
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#22Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option? I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.
This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#23Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor. I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams. Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord. Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid versio…
[dead]
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#24can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations? stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?
matrix, element.. too confusing i use slack with one other person. we've been using it for 10 years. we pay every once in a while and download our archives. but i haven't found anything that's as useful, media-friendly, preview-friendly, and thread friendly as slack. we keep looking, but we always stay on slack.
I'm in a similar boat but with Telegram.
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#25I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the…
> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings. Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck. Give me Teams Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where…
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#26[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#27[dead]
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#28it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...
e2ee makes it hard to do things like “search” which is important for working with teams. For personal messengers usually search is all on device w an encrypted index, once an org grows beyond 50 people that sort of thing breaks down.
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#29From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap...
> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.
...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.
Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.
Re: Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
#30I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the…
> Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.