[anderspitman]

The cool thing about Slack (and Discord for that matter) is that it's essentially federated on a technical level. SlackHQ controls all the instances, but the UX is very achievable by an open source alternative. I'm bullish on federated chat in the next few years.

It would be awesome to have essentially the same experience as using Slack, but also a server running on our lab's hardware that we can reboot/debug ourselves.

[bengale]

They've got to nail the integrations. Anytime moving to slack alternatives is brought up with people I work with, it always comes down to everything integrating with slack.

[tomxor]

^This

We aren't even particularly dependent on slack, but the convenience of a few basic integrations like google calendar make moving to Discord or anything else a non starter.

The integrations, and chat itself needs an open protocol, otherwise it's just going to be more and more of slack in the future.

[rst]

Well, WRT Google Calendar in particular: https://www.discalbot.com/

I understand that's one of at least several, and that if Slack isn't actively making trouble, looking for alternatives is a switching cost that may itself be prohibitive -- but if Slack is becoming really troublesome, it might be easier than you think.

[anderspitman]

That's interesting. We've played with a couple integrations but don't use any. What sort of org are you in? We're an academic bioinformatics lab with 15-20 people.

[parkingrift]

Not OP, but we have numerous integrations. Technical, corporate, and fun. GitHub, Jira, Status Hero, Outlook Calendar, Asana, Conference Booking, polls, "water cooler" type apps, and more. I actually can't get a comprehensive list right now because Slack is down...

We could make do without many of these integrations if we had to but the integrations and webhooks are THE killer feature to me. Chat is easy to solve.

[rst]

FWIW, some of the hosted Slack alternatives, like Zulip, support at least versions of some of these -- see their integrations page here: https://zulip.com/integrations/

What would be ideal from this perspective would be if they could make the integrations somehow code-compatible with Slack, but that's tough. For example, Zulip's topic system is, IMHO, vastly superior to Slack's threads, but every public message is under some topic (within a stream -- there are two levels, not one), everything posting a public message has to supply one, and that alone might make it difficult to reuse a Slack integration unaltered.

[aftbit]

Element/Matrix is getting pretty close, and is federated at the protocol level.

[stjohnswarts]

I think "first comer's advantage" will win over for the really big outfits like apple, ibm, intel, etc because they've gone through integration pains with other services and don't want to go through that pain organization wide. However, I think small to mid-size businesses could find some migration from slack to matrix pretty advantageous.

[whalesalad]

https://mattermost.com

[anderspitman]

I'm pretty familiar with the various alternatives. Mattermost isn't federated, right? Anything without a strong inter-instance collaboration story can't replicate the experience of Slack/Discord.

[cguess]

Mattermost is not federated.

[feanaro]

If you want federation, I would suggest you don't use the "essentially federated" Slack, but the actually federated Matrix.

[anderspitman]

Tried with my friends a few years ago. We almost achieved escape velocity, but it wasn't ready. I've been keeping an eye on it, and my feeling is while it may be ready for what we needed then, it's not ready for what we need now, because now it has to be good enough to not just work but assuage my friends' bad feelings from the last time.

I think I'll probably try again once most people have switched to a server written in Go or Rust.