Comment by fn-mote
8 months ago
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....
(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.)
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
Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!
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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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Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in they've created.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
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How about https://once.com/campfire
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Sure, so 5 years from now they will be in the exact same situation.
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I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.
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.
[1] https://revolt.chat/
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I was going to suggest the same. Why would it not be free? I would expect it to be free. I don't think running a server costs anything.
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Going from a greedy corporation to another greedy corporation is not a good idea.
Discord is pretty horrible when compared to Slack… can’t change the tiny font size for starters
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> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...
I am a teenager and I approve this statement!
Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>
They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.
Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is done, but do check our website: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
Slack used to allow you to connect your own clients using open standards. And then they suddenly didn't.
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
Not being funny, but I can migrate from Zulip SaaS to Zulip Self-hosted in about 45 minutes. The limitation is the speed of my internet.
I know this, because I've done it.
Similarly a migration from self-hosted to SaaS gitlab (though, not back).
Perfect is the enemy of good, but man, it can be pretty close to perfect if you choose your vendors properly.
Discord server it is! /s (but not really)
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.
Noshareholder would be more honest.
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Looks like it's time for them to sponsor an open source Slack-killer.
The revenue is from contributions
Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
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.
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Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
If you scare a bunch of kiddos gonna take over your job, maybe your job is not that important.
This is not zero sum.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
We know a fun and interesting thing and we want to share it.
You could use the same argument to stop teaching many other useful skills to kids. It's a bad argument.
this is called gatekeeping by the way and it's very annoying when you're conscious that it's happening and it's against you
Are you comfortable sharing a little information on your background and such? Adding a little context
(the comment you made surprised me)
Surely that comment is sarcasm.
If you are willing to mess with kids how is your behaviour with coworkers?
Programming is much, much bigger than writing and maintaining stuff for businesses.
It's a way to create many forms of art, solve everyday problems and automate a plethora of machines in our homes.
You sound like an accountant whining about kids learning about calculators and statistics.