[Sir_Cmpwn]

To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.

[jacquesm]

So, I long for the days of the ITU when communications interoperability was mandatory, not optional.

[outime]

I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands.

Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example:

* Use Slack on an ancient computer

* Use TTS systems

* Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel)

* Not have link previews

* Use keyboard only

* Get a less distracting experience

I'm also an IRC user and I like it but I just wanted to point out the post isn't fair with Slack if only one client is evaluated.

Edit: list formatting

[est31]

They can crack down on alternative clients at any time they want. You are living on borrowed time. A guest who is wild camping in their gated community walled garden private property.

[outime]

I also agree with you. It was painful when e.g. Twitter basically killed 3rd party apps.

What happens here is that I don’t see any significant portion of Slack users moving to IRC anytime soon. Therefore, if you’re forced to use Slack, you should know that alternative clients are available as of today.

[eeZah7Ux]

You just described 6 use cases for IRC. Then I'll just stay on IRC.

[outime]

I’m just trying to show that there are alternative ways to use Slack for those who are forced to use it. If you and/or your company actively use IRC then my suggestions obviously don’t apply to you.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

>I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands.

I kind of feel like the second-to-last paragraph of my article does address this.

[walrus01]

And even more so to the point, you can't self host slack and have absolute root level to the OS it's running on admin control. For somebody who knows what's they're doing it takes maybe 45 minutes to set up a basic ircd-hybrid daemon on Debian or centos.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

If you use a high level language like Python you could almost write an IRC server in 45 minutes.