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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

#61

Post by tabbott »

JadoJodo wrote: post #51
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...

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.

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

#63

Post by danpalmer »

While this is a slimy tactic from Slack, I doubt that organisations significantly under the 10k message limit over 90 days are actually benefitting from it.

That’s 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack. Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long enough form that email or documents would be a better option.

Slack is a lot of overhead to read just a few messages, and is definitely best when multiple channels become necessary, and when not using it for email-length messages.

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

#64

Post by CobrastanJorji »

This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click.

I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."

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

#65

Post by ddingus »

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…

I really am missing forums. One area of interest of mine has a good one and it has a solid population. I value it increasingly highly.

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

#66

Post by insightcheck »

bfung wrote: post #13

According to the analytics of number of message, those infrequent and long running slack channels and users probably can just use email. Outrage for outrage sake. #2020s

It's a normal, universal human response to protest when something you're used to is no longer there. Even though I don't share the outrage, there's nothing 'current year'/particularly contemporary about it.

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

#67

Post by systemvoltage »

layoric wrote: post #26
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…

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...

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.

PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

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

#68

Post by carom »

insightcheck wrote: post #5

My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't changed. However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is supporting the headline's…

I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you instructions on some process then the next time you need it, it's gone.

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

#69

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

> The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire.

Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche.

How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...

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

#70

Post by macintux »

jimvdv wrote: post #53
aeturnum wrote: post #46

This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history. To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase re…

> pay or lose months or years of history. You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history. Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.

You can’t download private messages, however.
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