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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

#261

Post by mythz »

tabbott wrote: post #61
JadoJodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)

My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.

Having their free self hosting plan linked on their pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to expect companies should the devote the same valuable realestate promoting their free offering as their commercial products which sponsors development.

[1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing

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

#262

Post by SXX »

getcrunk wrote: post #176
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.

Discourse can be hosted on $15-20 VPS since it's need docker and fsr more disk space due to using containers.

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

#263

Post by h0l0cube »

gernb wrote: post #223
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.

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

#264

Post by muglug »

gernb wrote: post #223
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced

I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/

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

#265

Post by frxx »

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…

Makes me remember flattr. That was great and I still miss it.

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

#266

Post by zacharybk »

Slack was, and is, a business tool; It was never intended for communities (though they clearly didn’t discourage this type of usage).

In Lenny’s podcast (link below), you can listen to Slack’s former head of product and growth, Merci Grace, talk about why they never implemented a block feature. The answer, like this 90 day limitation, is obvious once you look at it from the lens of a business tool.

When you mistakenly look at Slack as a community tool, this change is bound to upset you. On a personal level, loss aversion sucks, and I’m sorry to lose all of the slack history that my wife and I had.

https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1546515666420649984?s=21...

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

#267

Post by ThunderSizzle »

gernb wrote: post #223
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?

It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.

I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.

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

#268

Post by neovive »

JadoJodo wrote: post #21

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/c…

Flarum (https://flarum.org/) is an interesting option.

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

#270

Post by icelancer »

armchairhacker wrote: post #200
icelancer wrote: post #162

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah for…

Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-wh... ). They're also a lot faster and have less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots, though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a lo…

I use Discord for some personal stuff where the groups use it, and I don't think it's anywhere close to as usable as Slack for a small business unfortunately.
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