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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#292
post #70

Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)

I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost (integration) in a couple of days.

I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#293
post #273
post #262

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 found worse mobile apps was good because it put boundaries around our interactions and kept us using it in a focused way during work hours.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#294
post #262

Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.

I set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try again though.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#295
post #134

PSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.

IRC would not be useful for Hack Club as it's only text. Hack Club requires software that allows us to upload images, create canvases and most importantly, call with others.

Not saying there's a turnkey solution at the moment for your exact needs, but even with your current $5k/year budget something interesting could be built with the "modern IRC stack" that https://irctoday.com/ uses, for example. Call support would have to be done by integrating Jitsi, but it's been done before as seen in https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference and https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#296
Personally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative.

There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/slack.html>

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#298
Slack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#299
post #57

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.)

Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#300

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

I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish open source people would have opted to get him something more free than a MacBook.
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