Comment by donatj
8 months ago
> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable
Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.
Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.
For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
We use a lot of Slack specific features, especially bots, and it's more of a pain to move thousands of users and channels than to just pay up.
Doesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.
This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.
I did not know about IRCv3! These are the HN insights I love. I wonder if IRCv3 is still semi-usable from a raw telnet session like old IRC is? I remember using that in the early 2000s when I wanted to get on IRC but didn't have a real client.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You're still free to connect a logging bot.
The sibling comment talks about IRCv3 features that show a limited amount of context from immediately before you joined, which is not the same as the infinite history seen in Slack and Discord.
That's reasonable and personally I hate it when all the helpful details I need are buried in Slack history. But also it's a lot more effort. When someone has an immediate question they need help on, real time chat is an appropriate place to get help.
It takes additional effort and overhead to then go capture the pertinent details that exchange and write them in a wiki. With infinite Slack history you get a janky high noise knowledge base for "free". Huge downsides of course, but clearly it's a very popular approach.
$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.