[reilly3000]

Slack is hard to leave. I work on a 100% remote team- it is our office. Few of us have met in person, there just isn't budget for travel. Therefore all of our emotional connections with each, all of our work-life are built atop the Slack (and Zoom) UI. That's a hard thing to replatform.

Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast, the search is fast and faceted, and they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives. 'Instant' editing and deleting your malformed message is a killer app.

Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter, which is a persistent battlefield. If I slip up in front of my colleagues, it happens in context and can be sorted out among the tribe, but if I do so on a public social network, it could invite angry mobs or end my career, now or years into the future.

That said, I don't love Slack. I hate how it dominates my day. I hate how I find myself checking it in the car. I hate how I get into it while I'm running a build, post something funny and suck everybody's attention. I truly despise how their DM and notification read system means that have to check everything at all times to feel up to date. I'm in a half dozen public channels, and the blue alert in my tray shows that I have something to look at.

I want control of the UI. Its my workplace, but Slack can change it to their liking, not me to mine. Sometimes if we're lucky we'll get a feature flag, otherwise, its all up to them. There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

I want more nuanced prioritization.

I want my life back.

[_-___________-_]

> they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives

I recently deployed workplace chat for ~100 people using XMPP. People use whatever clients they want (but we have a list of recommended clients, and in practice everyone is using one of those). With the modern extensions (SMACKS, carbons, MAM, push service integration) cross-device notifications are totally seamless. A bunch of the users are non-technical and they have had no trouble.

Slack has a lot of advantages over the likes of XMPP but I don't think technical superiority is one of them.

[rauhl]

> There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

There’s also emacs-slack, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It means that I control my Slack experience.

[ken]

> Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter

Facebook has private groups, too. (I assume Twitter has something similar.) At worst, this is a great demonstration that defaults matter. I often hear people speak as though Facebook/Twitter/Slack/IRC/etc are only usable in their default mode, even though most people I know don't actually use them that way.

> Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast

I feel like the chat software I used to use called "Slack" was completely different than what I hear other people talk about by that name.

[brianush1]

There's also https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ which is pretty good.

[hiccuphippo]

There's another, unofficial, client for slack that I know of but I've never tried it: https://volt-app.com/

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> What language is Volt written in? V. It's a new language I created to develop Volt. You can read about it here.

What could possibly go wrong.