[Siecje]

I wouldn't call it sane.

Why do I have to sign up for different Slack organizations and have a different password for each one?

Why can't I private message someone on Slack with just a username?

I think Discord does this much better.

[mudetroit]

So, I preface this by saying that I do feel like Slack could have better authentication mechanisms, decoupling the account from the networks. But I do think that some of this is by design as well.

I think it is worthwhile to think of each Slack organization as a completely independent and isolated network. This is one way that they can reasonably give some security to their corporate customers. I don't believe that there is any intention to ever lat you send a blind message to someone on another Slack organization, but maybe I am wrong there.

It would absolutely be nice however for me, as a user who is in multiple organizations, to be able to log in one time and have all of them be connected.

[ergothus]

I'm in multiple organizations, but some are against different email accounts, some use an external SSO and some don't. Were Slack to give a single login I would probably NOT be able to connect to the multiple workspaces I do now, which is a major benefit to me.

[aviv]

I'm guessing because of deep technical debt from some very early decisions made.

[kainosnoema]

Yes. As of a couple years ago at least, Slack was a monolithic PHP app that could support a few thousand users in a single team. Each “workspace” was assigned to a server and scaled vertically. LinkedIn notoriously had two Slack workspaces in order to support all of their users, and I’m guessing other large companies have had to do the same.

I’m sure Slack is using their vast resources and large team to solve these problems at this point, but it probably hasn’t been easy to create a horizontally scalable system from the early codebase, especially when the data model was designed for a single team of users.

[DividableMiddle]

I would assume so as well. Maybe a Slack engineer can chime in?

[aviv]

I got downvoted, I think one of them chimed in.

[ivm]

Discord also has amazing performance. I guess it's because gamers would be mad for something like Slack eating up all the computer's resources.