We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.

Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!

Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...

Teaching coding to kids is a _bad_ thing for existing developers and software engineers.

At worst it makes developer jobs obsolete because a future manager doesn't need a developer to write him shitty python scripts or excel macros, at second worst it creates one new competitor for the shrinking amount of software engineer positions.

I believe there is no profession more masochistic than software engineers, with them wanting to teach all kids to code and burning out writing open source libraries that big business uses for free.

They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff.

I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI

Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).

This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.

Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.

I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.

I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.

This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.

https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...

Make sure to warn others of Slack/Salesforce, customers need to have a voice and this behavior must become prohibitly expensive for Salesforce.

The company was founded by an Oracle executive...

I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.

Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free as well as Free open source.

But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.

You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team?

Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux, which is why I use it.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...

Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.

I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but "<x> client sucks, use <y> client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.

(Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you give the app total permission to run in the background they should work.)

At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.

I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too

You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience is.

Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.

Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?

But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.

The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?

IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.

Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.

You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.

Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).

But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.

It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.

The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.

If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.

I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.

But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.

I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.

You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)

Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.

It's uh... not good? I have one client that uses it, and it's just painful. Threading doesn't work well, notifications are hard to configure, rich text entry is subtly broken...

Weirdly this part never actually happens.

Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion.

Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?

In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.

And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.

You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.

clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery

Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.

They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in their workplace.

Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front of those students.

See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling/documentation.

$50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business

If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy

No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused

This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.

> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.

those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.

I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.

Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.

I'm not sure why people would say they're not open source.

It's true there's no community-led edition, but that's because no one has taken the initiative to create one yet.

A self hosted version is better than nothing though.

And wasn’t the free version made kind of unusable through very limited retention like a decade ago?

But our experiences seem so vastly different: - UI is, with the exception of large media, snappy and pretty native feeling - no jumps (that I can recall)

The mobile app is okayish though its offline indication and notifications are a bit frustrating.

What machine are you running it on?

now my company „forces“ me to us Microsoft Teams and i’m thinking back to the good old days with Slack.

Tell that to project maintainers switching from old-school good forums to chat apps such as Discord...

If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.

I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like (Teams, IRC etc)

As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best keyboard etc

Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is "best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of communication tools I think the difference is huge.

Is this needed to do my work? nope It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes

The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).

I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.

Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?

Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?

We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?

I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us all to be kind; they're the first words in the "In Commemnts" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.

The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.

> Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, reducing staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees · CEO Marc Benioff linked layoffs to AI automating...