[vertis]

It really is time to start a push to move open communities to open source software. Running a whole bunch of open communities out of slack and discord has always surprised me.

Slack is particularly bad with making anything longer than 10k messages inaccessible. The amount of internet history being lost in these groups is boggling.

[cobbzilla]

Zulip [1] is free/open source and arguably has better usability. Bubble [2] runs our day-to-day chat on Zulip and it's worked really well.

[1] https://zulip.org/

[2] https://git.bubblev.org/bubblev/bubble

[james_pm]

The message history is all there, held hostage by Slack. Clearly it's not a burden for them to store it or they would simply delete everything past 10,000 messages rather than still storing it and reminding me frequently that they have it if I ever decide to pay.

[RyJones]

If you’re an owner of a slack instance, you can export all of the history without paying.

[ReactiveJelly]

Export to what? Can I import it into Matrix?

I assumed all these SaaSS products are built like carnivorous plants - The spikes only point in.

I tried the data export from Asana once and it was useless.

[maccard]

Here [0] is a link to the slack export documentation. Slack not providing an export to the provider of your choice isn't necessarily slacks issue, it's Matrix's issue.

> I tried the data export from Asana once and it was useless.

I don't think you can infer that all SAAS platforms lock your data because you had a failed attempt with another such tool once.

[0] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/201658943-Export-...

[notatoad]

I don't know about matrix, but you can import your slack archive into mattermost. So whatever the export is clearly well-structured enough to be useful.

https://docs.mattermost.com/administration/migrating.html?hi...

[RyJones]

JSON[0]. Here is the export I did for my employer, Hyperledger.

[0]: https://github.com/hyperledger-archives/slack-archive

[RyJones]

JSON: https://github.com/hyperledger-archives/slack-archive

[dmitriid]

There are very few, if any, opensource alternatives that provide the same level of convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093106 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093556

[himujjal]

What are the good open source alternatives out there?

DuckDuckGo'd a few ones. But not convincing ones.

[BiteCode_dev]

I was surprised how much I liked zulip. The threading model and the policy of few notifications by default speaks to me.

The UI is not the most modern but the software is productive and friendly for a chat application, particularly when you look for an old information burried in the history.

[adioe3]

I've used https://rocket.chat/ in one company and it was perfectly fine.

[ikbenkenobi]

Self-hosted Mattermost?

[encom]

IRC.