141–150 of 264 posts
Use Zulip. The migration out of Slack is actually quite easy and preserves all messages, files, etc. Even the user migration is straightforward, keeping Google or whoever as the identity provider if you prefer.
Zulip is not even close to Slack. It keeps crashing.
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>> "almost no competition" >> "costs way too much" >> "It's not like chat is a hard problem" Surely these statements can't all be true. Since Slack is expensive and has little competition, I think chat is a harder problem than you think.
Its not hard. Its capital intensive with a low profit margin. So it doesn't attract a lot of competition because you can make more money in other ways that have moats. There are at least a dozen other chat apps, some of which are decades old. To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute)…
I think that's probably what makes it hard.
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Is it really so different than asking the search company back in '01 to make a mail client, a browser, a maps app, ...?
They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing... I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constra…
> chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
that's all taking risks means
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work. Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they ar…
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they dont let you extract messages via the API. Keeping Slack message data in their walled garden
Doesn't the conversation.history permission let a Slack bot extract all messages? https://docs.slack.dev/reference/methods/conversations.histo...
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Wasn't Slack a gaming company that accidentally became a chat company?
Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch. When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack. I saw an in…
This is just crazy. Lets ask the power company to build some trains for us. They transport electricity, they _must_ know about transporting people. They can power the lines themselves! If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/
I ended up building my own alternative and was going to OSS it but like… there’s already a bunch out there.
Anyway, Mattermost might not be the choice these days. With that stunt I was annoyed enough to spend a weekend to replace what they were to me.
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How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me. The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it. It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and…
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.