Comment by throwaway17_17
8 hours ago
Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…
Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.
We use a custom in-house sync engine (similar to how Git works) to propagate messages between peers, but the "source of truth" is local first and a sync server.
This gives you full ownership of your data, instant search (even offline), and naturally supports the kind of privacy/custody requirements you're describing.
As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?