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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

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Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#211

Post by oblio »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #186
jmull wrote: post #163

People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way…

Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction! Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card. Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an…

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#212

Post by oblio »

rdbell wrote: post #209
quickthrower2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction! Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card. Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an…

> without the cryptocurrency or blockchain If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.

That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser.

Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#213

Post by verdverm »

stavros wrote: post #185
verdverm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's improved and is now resizable, still much much better than discord The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots, and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least that is the impression

Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the integrations than the much improved communication.

I think the real problem is that people can only really support having one chat application open continuously at a time. Maybe two for some, if you account for the non-chat things like text & email. Notification / source burnout. I have to use slack professionally, I'm not going to add another tool.

That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms and gives you a single tool

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#214

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

joshspankit wrote: post #208
jmull wrote: post #163

People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way…

True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies): Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Sla…

There's not many ways to know many things with 100% certainty, but you can have a decent probability of knowing the impact the free tier has.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#215

Post by Arcorann »

piperswe wrote: post #139
nerdponx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.

There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.

Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#216

Post by vel0city »

kelsolaar wrote: post #14
vel0city wrote: post #6

So many people talking about how extremely valuable it is to them and yet they won't bother paying for it.

If you are running a small Open Source community, it is close to impossible to pay for it.

A cheap VPS could run something like Zulip or Mattermost or phpBB or other ways to communicate. Then that open source community would be in control of their own data.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#217

Post by funOtter »

esprehn wrote: post #115

My wife and I have used slack for years for our personal chat. The multiple channels made categorizing the messages easy (ex. #house, #kid1, #kid2, #coding, etc). The change in free retention meant we'd lose important messages so we've given up on slack and moved to a different service. I'm sure our small usage of it won't matter to slack, but the money grab and their insistence that this change was somehow better fo…

Element (Matrix) might be a good alternative!

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#218

Post by stavros »

verdverm wrote: post #213
stavros wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the integrations than the much improved communication.

I think the real problem is that people can only really support having one chat application open continuously at a time. Maybe two for some, if you account for the non-chat things like text & email. Notification / source burnout. I have to use slack professionally, I'm not going to add another tool. That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms and g…

Hmm, what do you mean? I'm talking about using Zulip instead of Slack. If I'm going to use another similar service, I might as well use Slack itself. Zulip is miles ahead.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#219

Post by _8j50 »

No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much.

Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel.

This is why I don't support any platform that does not also use an interoperable protocol. This includes Signal which won't let 3rd party clients connect to its servers. Protocol is a foundational element of communication. If you are designing a communication system that others that are strangers to your system can't talk to your users because you don't have a protocol, your system isolates users and is hostile to its very purpose:communication.

I mean really, I rant here a bit but have all these smart people never heard of adversarial compatibility?

For Matrix, I really wish they didn't associate with their flagship client, others who build clients have to also compete with the protocol authors, this should be a lesson to future communications systems designers.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#220

Post by Arcorann »

chx wrote: post #57
joe-collins wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server , but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find t…

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations).

[1] https://miraheze.org/

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