[lwhalen]

I think some of it is a branding fail on Mattermost's part (or a branding win on Slack's). Case in point - I was recently in talks with a non-tech company who are HUGE users of freemium Slack. They don't want to actually spend money on it, but they have a person whose (partial) job description is to monitor all 15+ Slack channels for 'anything that looks important, and archive the conversation wholesale into the company wiki'. If they paid for Slack, their annual cost would be $10k+. I proposed to build them a Mattermost server for a flat rate of $5k and they're responsible for the hosting costs (~$20/mo for a VM somewhere). For a small recurring fee I would handle regular updates, etc, to the server. CEO's response was "Nope, we like Slack", with no further explanation or elaboration. The rest of the teams had been demo'd on Mattermost, agreed it did All The Things(tm), agreed it was the superior solution because then Jim in shipping wasn't tasked with copy/pasting convos into the wiki, etc, but in the words of the CFO, "<CEO> is irrationally attached to being a 'Slack user'". Not so much that they'd be willing to pay money for it though.

tl; dr - people are strange.

[tedivm]

This is changing though- the lack of attention giving to the freemium slack is causing a lot of problems for the communities I'm in, and the majority of them are exploring other options.

For instance, I reported a DoS bug that can cripple freemium communities and they basically told me "oh well". For obvious reasons I'm not going to go into details here, but I've got a script I can point at a slack freemium slack community to wipe out a lot of it's functionality that I built as a proof of concept and they just don't seem to care.

There are also huge issues with moderation and harassment on the freemium Slack. Since there is no way to block or ignore a user it gives trolls an insane amount of power (and before someone tells me that you can mute notifications from a person, I'll mention that all the troll needs to do is create a new chat room, force invite the person to it, and continue trolling to bypass it).

Personally I find it really frustrating that slack has kind of destroyed a bunch of IRC communities, but is refusing to build the tools needed to manage these replacements. As more and more freemium communities are figuring this out and migrating I imagine the people pushing Slack because it's what they are familiar with is going to drop.

[empath75]

If you have a problem user on slack, you ban them from the team. If the team has gotten so large that it's impossible to moderate in that way, you shouldn't be using slack, imo.

[tedivm]

Agreed, completely. Slack is very much an inappropriate tool for most communities that aren't using a paid plan. That was in fact the point of my post- for lots of people using the freemium version to manage communities does not actually make any sense.