[6c696e7578]

> What an unnecessarily hostile take.

I like to defend as much as the next person, but the defence from Slack ignores the approach.

"It was a mistake" isn't enough to gloss over the trouble, as a service provider, they caused. What a rug pull, and to then perhaps blame it on a sales person isn't right. They saw a lot of users and tried to extort, no negotiation.

Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?

[tomnipotent]

So in other words you've never worked at a large org, or been in a leadership position over hundreds of people. So rather than acknowledge that things like this can happen, you'd rather jump to the least charitable conclusion. Clearly the Slack senior leadership sat in a dark room smoking cigars while laughing evil about all the cash they were going to get raising the bills on non-profits. Got it. That explains 0 other non-profits that have had this issue and gone public.

[6c696e7578]

Large organisations have less excuse, not more. I've worked across the industry, at various levels. The bigger the org, the more layers of compliance that have to be adhered to. A competent and compliant sales team would not be pulling figures at random to extort with. The sales team is normally bonus motivated, normally that type of reward system ensures they're not just chair warming.

[stevage]

> Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?

No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.

And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.

[6c696e7578]

> No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.

Really? People of any age will use whatever the group is using to talk with, because that's where the talk is happening. Most teenagers don't use Slack either, but will if the group notes say use this. There might be some "no one uses" argument because usage has dropped off almost everything since web searching got a lot better. There are fewer lingering people because most answers are readily available. Remember TLDP days? Search is so much better now.

We're not on about general IRC though, just for semi-private use where Slack would have been an IM tool.

> And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.

How is email not a real time chat platform? I see plenty of chat happening on mail lists, and I certainly can't out-type email delivery. Sure, mail sometimes needs a DNS lookup, sometimes has anti-virus/spam filtering too. Maybe that's better for public chat systems anyway.

Thinking more about it, I'd rather have maillists than a web/electron client.

I'm not on about using email for all IM (but it could be), I'm on about more useful messages that you'd want searched later. "Hey, I'm doing X on Y day, here's what you need to know", most of the time this sort of thing gets missed in a IM flood channel.

I don't see much difference between Slack/Teams etc and IRC or maillists, just the tools that existed before are much lighter and have so many more clients you can use the one you know already most of the time.

[johnisgood]

> Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?

I wish. It is common for communities to switch from Slack to Discord. I would rather prefer a self-hosted Mattermost server or Matrix but eh...

[6c696e7578]

Maybe. Not deliberately playing the contrarian, but consider perhaps one of the largest, and longest running software projects, the Linux Kernel, which has existed for a long time now using mail lists and IRC. Most mail clients can filter mail quite well, and everything is in one place, easily searched etc and has open protocols.

Using something browser bases puts you into a position where you have to choose between one or two browser engines and suffer however they manage the CPU and RAM.

Teams hogged the RAM and CPU when I used it in the browser, for what wasn't much more than IRC, and a terrible message archive. Mattermost isn't much better at searching either, and it's mostly glorified IRC channels. The only niche is perhaps mobile users, who, could arguably also use an IRC client or browser based one at that.