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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

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

#281
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…

It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.

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

#282

OpenSource projects who relied on “free” slack were told by many, many people they were being stupid. And here is why.

I don't get this attitude. For an open source projects, especially ones not funded, properly utilizing free tools is key to success.

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

#285
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

Discord is way better than Slack for B2C if you're reaching that demographic. I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too. For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.

My experience is that discord is basically just a vector for scammers to directly message me.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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? Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow. They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.

I found that my Discourse instance consistently took ~250 milliseconds to display the forum post list (according to the little box at the top left corner). After getting annoyed with Discourse, I went back to Invision Forum and I see about ~95 ms for the same thing, including sending the response to my browser.

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

#287
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

I wish we used Discord for work. It’s superior to Slack, MS Teams and googles chat thing by far.

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

#288
post #219

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 als…

I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you choose providers or clients, any recommendations?

Element [0] is the main/most popular client. FluffyChat [1] is also good. They both have web, Android, iOS, and desktop (Electron) apps. There are at least a dozen other clients but those are the only two I've tried so far.

For hosting, I believe the flagship host is Element Matrix Services [2]. It's made by the same organization that leads development (it is all FOSS) of Element and the reference server Synapse.

You can also self-host. Synapse is pretty slow and memory-hungry (it's written in Python), but for a small group it still fits pretty comfortably on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS. That's what I'm doing. It took less than an afternoon to set up (`apt install synapse` and then setting some config, mainly—there are a bunch of good guides online) and has been happily running ever since. Matrix is federated, so as long as you set up federation properly, you can seamlessly message anyone on any federated Matrix server. (Federation is opt-in.)

There's also Dendrite and Conduit, Matrix servers written in Go and Rust respectively, which are much leaner and faster. Both are still in beta and missing some features, but are definitely usable.

If you want to mess around with bots, I've had a lot of fun with both the Matrix Rust SDK [3] and JavaScript bot SDK [4]. Both are quite easy to get started with, and as of a few months ago both support E2EE pretty painlessly too (not totally pain-free though lol), which is cool.

Overall, the ecosystem is still maturing imo, but I've been using self-hosted Synapse and Element "in production"—it's me and my girlfriend's primary method of communication—for over a year now with only some minor UX hiccups (mostly issues decrypting E2EE messages in Element). I definitely encourage giving it a shot as long as you're willing to tolerate a few remaining growing pains.

[0]: https://fluffychat.im/

[1]: https://element.io/get-started

[2]: https://element.io/matrix-services

[3]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

[4]: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX. Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. - But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model... The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also m…

> Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of p…

I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES.

I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.

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

#290
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?

The Ancient Roman one.

The one most people use. SWIFT.

And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of the world's business is happening there and like the crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-banked".

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