281–290 of 1001 posts
but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway
developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one
it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.
IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available.
I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal…
Because microsoft would never do such a thing
Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.
We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
Note that Mattermost is fake open source cosplay, and keeps important features in their non-foss application. If you want these table stakes features (like SSO or message expiry) you’ll find yourself maintaining your own fork or janky scaffolding (I have cronjobs that run SQL directly against the db). They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their proprietary enterprise software product. It’s still…
A self hosted version is better than nothing though.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids.... https://hackclub.com/ (They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.