Pretty much no one who uses Slack, chooses Slack. The companies we work for do. I despise Slack, yet I use it all day, every week day. It's quite the predicament.
Yep, basically don't have a choice and discussing alternatives is hopeless. We had better, once. Now we have this, in a full-blown browser runtime that doesn't integrate with the OS very well.
Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.
In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.
I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).
For me this was different years ago, when Slack helped our company's people (consultancy) to find each other and share knowledge much more effectively than the previous method, mailing lists.
In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.
I disagree - in a lot of corporate environments, it once snuck in as shadow IT to work around the then incumbent, infosec certified approved solution of less usable.
Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.
I am in the happy situation, that my employer values employee opinions. We use zulip. It's not perfect, but clearly more useful than Slack. The one complaining most is our CEO. But he is smart enough to understand that happy coders are more essential for a small SW company than a happy CEO.
The main failure of IT or computer science is the lack of open standards and federation. 40 year old Email was the last somewhat succesful one. You can use various clients like Emacs, Thunderbird, mutt, Gmail web UI and there is no need that sender and recipient share either provider or client.
In communism it was the central planning commission that decided what products consumers want to buy. Today it's Slack that decides how people do IM at work. And Google or Apple how people use mobile apps. Facebook how you interact with your friends. I hope that these monpolies/duopolies would share the fate of communism. How do we get there?
Interesting that things have gone this way. Wasn't Slack one of the services that started out spreading via guerrilla Shadow IT, with users spinning up free Slack instances on their own and feeding penetration throughout organizations?
Having tried Rocket, Riot, and Mattermost before, it's of my opinion as well as everyone that I work with that Discord blows them away. It's so much more polished.
Discord is good. But there are a couple of things that prevent my team to use it seriously:
- Message threads
- Ability to share screens when multiple people are in audio conference
- ability to "draw" over the screen while sharing
One thing I wish slack or others had that discord has is ability to select FPS for screen share: when I'm sharing the screen or camera (showing a whiteboard) I usually care more that the image looks with better detail even if it refreshes once every 20 seconds. Almost all screen sharing always introduce compression artifacts.
Discord is good but it has a bunch of drawbacks. The ones that matter the most to me:
* Can't leave a channel (without custom bot shenanigans, which doesn't scale well to having a lot of channels).
* No control of notification sounds on mobile. All notifications get the same sound and there's no option to deliver quietly.
* No threading.
* Can't collapse embeds.
* No back/forward navigation. The closest it gets is in the quickswitcher it offers the last channel you were in, but that's it.
* Their support is awful. Everything except extremely obvious bugs get the response "please vote it up at feedback.discordapp.com", and even bugs often get that response.
* No "do not disturb" settings. If notifications are on, they're on 24 hours a day.
Speaking as the project lead for Riot, I agree... for now :) The difference (relative to Discord) is that Riot is FOSS and the sky is the limit in terms of how fast it evolves. These days Riot/Web, Riot/iOS and RiotX/Android are both straightforward and fun to hack on - and we do everything we can to encourage and merge good contributions and features from the community. As per the 2020 section at the end of https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-u..., our top priority for next year is to get the UX of Riot to be as mainstream as possible (ie as good or better than Discord), and we need all the help we can get. The company which funds most of Riot’s development (vector.im) is also hiring currently for UX Designers and developers to work fulltime on this.
TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
Yeah imo, discord is the only conceivable competitor to slack in this space and anyone who thinks Microsoft teams is their competitor just doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.
There are some features that aren't available on basic IRC, such as search, history, message emoji responses, message reminders, threading, rich integrations (eg. actionable notifications, polls, etc.) and so on.
It's not the end user features. It's the admin features. You can very easily read everyone's messages, see stats on who's talking to whom the most, control who has access to what channels. The customer is the business ownership, and the product is control.
Does anyone know why Slack would have done this? I can certainly understand Slack not providing a specific mobile-web experience, but that is not what is going on here. The user specifically switched their mobile browser to "Desktop Site" (one of my favorite features of Android Chrome by the way for sites that mysteriously provide dumbed down versions for mobile that are missing all the content I actually need - looking at you, Square), so the server should just serve them desktop-optimized content. Slack has to go out of their way to prevent this. Why would they care? It has to be a very small portion of their users in any case.
"Does anyone know why Slack would have done this?"
"App installs" is a key metric driving valuations for SaaS/PaaS/etc. businesses.
Trading a useful product for dollars isn't that interesting. Collecting an open-ended, continuous stream of intel on a large population is fascinating - at least until it become generally accepted that this "intel", and the levers for manipulating people based on it, are really not that useful or effective (which is my own prediction).
Slack has the attention today, but the real poster child for this kind of behavior is Sonos - nowhere do you see such a stark juxtaposition between an actually useful product that people pay premium dollars for and pivoting the business model towards shady, sneaky, anti-customer patterns.
Eh, web traffic can be measured too. App installs aren't all that interesting if people install the app and never use it. Therefore, valuation metrics should be driven by usage (regardless of platform).
* customers might have complained that the site didn't work on mobile when the desktop site was requested; this may have led to a burden on their support team, and a manager might have decided to block usage instead of fielding support requests
* a team internally might have been spending a lot of time chasing down bugs for desktop on mobile, and a manager decided to officially not support desktop on mobile; instead of just stopping support or carefully triaging tickets (e.g. distinguishing desktop on mobile from desktop), they just decided to block desktop on mobile access
* a team might have been burdened by being required to fix all bugs that came in; instead of dealing with the problem properly (e.g. continuing to allow desktop on mobile but not officially supporting it), they officially killed support to avoid having to work on it
* there could be some KPM to reduce bug reports over some period of time; they killed access to the non-supported use-case of desktop on mobile to make numbers look better
Not really a smart decision in any of these cases, kind of stupid, honestly; but not really nefarious either and the kind of decision that can be made sometimes at a larger place with politics.
I actually think all these problems could actually be fixed more easily but just showing a "we really think you should download our app" banner in this case. Let the user know they're going off the reservation but don't explicitly block them.
As someone who once used Slack's website on mobile, I can assure you they didn't have a team spending a lot of time chasing down bugs with that configuration.
As mentioned above, this has to be a very small number of users who are sophisticated enough to bother instructing chrome to request the desktop site. So the bug burden would be small on an absolute scale, and could be ignored entirely by simply telling these advanced users the desktop-on-mobile was "as is" and not supported.
Benefit of the dobut Reasoning: Engineering determined that the cost of supporting a mobile site outweighs the benefit given they have a great mobile app. Then, someone decided to disable mobile access, because it better communicates that they don't support mobile web; cusutomers may still use the broken, unsupported experience, and then they'll complain about it to their support. Thus, raising the cost of maintenance while lowering customer experience.
Keeping mobile web but adding a banner that the experience isn't supported: Doesn't Work. Most people are total idiots when it comes to tech; this is 250% more true in the B2B space; this is a further 250% more true in a bottom-up corporate sales model like what Slack deploys. Unsurprisingly, but likely; many of their workspaces are shadow-IT operations created by some do-gooder who knows Excel and thus he's a "tech expert", on an isolated team within a large company who's IT department really wishes everyone would just use Teams and Sharepoint. This person is going to dodge the company's frontline IT support with any issues they run into. This person probably has a company-issued phone and thus doesn't want to, or can't, install the app.
The issue isn't about a mobile site. It's about desktop site. Mobile browsers like Chrome and Firefox have a "request desktop site" switch that makes them fetch the site meant for desktops. It introduces zero support burden if you're already supporting a desktop site, and you have to go out of your way to break this feature.
It would potentially allow them to forgo the need to limit their UI to phone based with desktop upscaling. Make an app for the "best" small screen experience and the web site for the "best" large screen experience.
This strategy probably mitigates what might be a much more common complaint in the future that their "UI" sucks on mobile if they were to design for only larger screens.
This is the argument that I don't think is valid, though. When folks switch on "Desktop Site" in an Android browser, they expect that things will be squished, and that the site isn't optimized for the screen size. They just do it (or rather I just do it) because I want the full set of features, even if I need to do a bunch of zooming and scrolling around.
That is, Slack should still focus on making the website for the best large screen experience, but they shouldn't go out of their way to do somewhat sneaky stuff to detect my "Desktop" browser is really coming from my phone.
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
I see a common pattern among utility providing IT companies, that despite the core functionality can be supported by tens of people, it goes ahead and hires thousand anyways, which give raise to features that are neither core nor that anyone wanted. The company then go under as the business can’t generate enough revenue to feed the thousands of developer and management that has been brought in.
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
This is a problem with the current financing model of tech in NA; the product didn't arise strictly from user-sourced revenue growth, but from the hopes and dreams of investors who are attracted to the user growth. Revenue sourced from user demand is tied to features users almost certainly want, whereas investors want features that will continue growth. That's not always useful to existing users.
I don’t think they’re panicking about the stock price — why should they? They have plenty of runway and shouldn’t need to raise capital any time soon. I’d worry about their stock price at $10 or $5. At $20+, they’re still trading at large multiples above revenue.
Recently I found a bug in Slack, and I was communicating with their support over it. They asked me to check on the web in addition to the electron app. Now, the number of people who actually care enough to do this are a very small minority, but they are also very significant because they're happy to give Slack free QA. And as a member of this small minority that will reproduce a bug on multiple platforms and communicate back, I can say this seems pretty hostile to me and anyone else willing to pay money to do free QA for them.
> Yet another service that forces you to use the app for no reason
For sure there is a reason behind. It's just not a user-focused reason but a business one instead. One guess would be that the browser is a environment the user can kind of control, so they can block tracking and so on. When you're using the app, you don't have the same control anymore, so the business can receive more metrics from people that they wouldn't before.
Not saying this is good/bad, just that there is most probably a reason behind the choices they make.
Not trying to be too glib here, but we get it. That’s the problem. HN is pretty tuned in to the trend of walled gardens and creeping control popular apps and platforms exert on their users. It’s kind of the point of this article. Of course it’s helpful for the business for many reasons.
> One guess would be that the browser is a environment the user can kind of control, so they can block tracking and so on.
Someone in the twitter thread says it still works on firefox for android, which means it's really only broken on chrome. Chrome doesn't have adblock, so it's not like this move results in less of their telemetry getting blocked.
Apps have been turned into a disease. So many different services keep obnoxiously pushing their app. Delivery services are extra annoying. I tried searching for a service that delivers alcohol, and found a few, but some are app-only and I couldn't type in my address to see if I was within their delivery area. Why would I download an app, and probably create an account, only to find that they won't even deliver to me?
The nagging on Reddit is extreme. And now that I have the Reddit app, if I'm viewing a Reddit thread in the browser then certain actions (but not all) will open it in the app without a prompt.
This is a bad move, especially given the constraints of their mobile app.
For example, their iOS app requires iOS 11 or later which means people with a 5c, 5, 4s and iPad 4th gen will not be able to use Slack. These may be deemed 'older devices' by the tech forward folks like those on here but you would be shocked how many are out there still today. It only presents more resistance to adopt the app at team scale, as they will probably realize soon.
Sometimes old APIs are dropped server-side and thus older versions of the apps stop working. I have an old iPad at home where I can watch YouTube from the browser but not from the app (though Safari is so old that I don't really trust that device for anything that requires any kind of security).
Thanks for confirming. I was more responding to the title claim, which seems incorrect - the desktop site option clearly still works for others. It may be a bug, or a new policy but time will tell.
I found that you have to enable desktop mode before entering slack on mobile. If you have visited slack with a mobile user agent, it will force you to download the app even if you enable desktop mode.
yeah - I read their response at the time, but it occurred to me it may have been a response in haste or a misreading (it's the desktop option on mobile browsers; mobile browsing per se isn't supported for a long time I think), or a pragmatic implied "until we've investigated" as it worked for me on testing, and others, and its probably a skeleton support crew over Xmas.
They won’t, at least not for now, I assume. They can put far more intrusive tracking inside an app compared to a web browser. There is also no way to do content blocking or ad blocking inside apps, at least not on iOS. I use Facebook in Safari - can’t be happier (well, I mean it’s Facebook, but I am not able to pursue all my friends to cancel it).
Back in the late 1990s I used to have all sorts of software in my computer which I downloaded and installed. Some of it was purchased and other free or open source.
As the time passed, more and more services became "web based" including mail, music, calendar, note taking, etc.
I was part of a small group that did not like that. My reasoning was that there was no need to hack all that functionality in the web browser as it was highly inefficient. That it was better to code the network features into the desktop clients.
Web caught on and nowadays seldomly you get a client program in the desktop.
But now in mobile, we are returning to the clinet software first approach. And for some reason we resist the installation of client software and prefer browser based functionality.
> But now in mobile, we are returning to the clinet software first approach. And for some reason we resist the installation of client software and prefer browser based functionality.
IMO for any given program or 'app' today, the better it functions offline directly correlates with the desire I have to use it natively on a given platform, as opposed to web access.
Slack is just about useless offline, hence my strong preference to use it in the browser.
Back in the 1990's you installed those applications when you wanted, upgraded them when you wanted, moved whatever data you wanted between them and in and out of the computer as you wished. Also, you were pretty certain those applications were not spying on you.
You can reverse each of those statements for a current mobile app.
The height of the desktop era was before surveillance capitalism was a thing. With web came the on-line ads, which, being a cancer[0], infected the business models of increasing amount of software. Then the mobile exploded, and the new breed of native software - apps - were designed to be user-hostile pretty much from the start, and continue to be so.
There seems to be a lot of angry nerds in here, and that basically describes me too. Hoping I can get a response from somebody with a broader perspective:
I'm in a position to switch my company over to one of the many alternatives mentioned in this thread. Has anybody here actually done that, and if I do it how angry is that likely to make my non-technical staff? If I don't want my marketing guy and my customer support team to hate me, can I still switch my company over to riot.im or mattermost?
Probably just stick with slack. Discord would be the other viable alternative (which I actually prefer).
Remember, you lose the ecosystem when you switch away, too. There are lots of plugins for slack that won’t be there on the alternatives. Even little things like seeing GitHub commits is nice.
Mattermost CEO here, to the extent it's helpful, here's a demo video of how it looks and feels importing a Slack team into Mattermost from 2017: https://youtu.be/AKqHWqrAgpk?t=249
This is when we were largely just an open source project and before raising $70M in venture capital, which has been accelerating development: https://mattermost.com/blog/category/releases/
Readit News
Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/
Rocket: https://rocket.chat/
Riot: https://about.riot.im/
Mattermost: https://mattermost.org/
Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.
In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.
I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).
In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.
Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.
The main failure of IT or computer science is the lack of open standards and federation. 40 year old Email was the last somewhat succesful one. You can use various clients like Emacs, Thunderbird, mutt, Gmail web UI and there is no need that sender and recipient share either provider or client.
In communism it was the central planning commission that decided what products consumers want to buy. Today it's Slack that decides how people do IM at work. And Google or Apple how people use mobile apps. Facebook how you interact with your friends. I hope that these monpolies/duopolies would share the fate of communism. How do we get there?
- Message threads
- Ability to share screens when multiple people are in audio conference
- ability to "draw" over the screen while sharing
One thing I wish slack or others had that discord has is ability to select FPS for screen share: when I'm sharing the screen or camera (showing a whiteboard) I usually care more that the image looks with better detail even if it refreshes once every 20 seconds. Almost all screen sharing always introduce compression artifacts.
* Can't leave a channel (without custom bot shenanigans, which doesn't scale well to having a lot of channels).
* No control of notification sounds on mobile. All notifications get the same sound and there's no option to deliver quietly.
* No threading.
* Can't collapse embeds.
* No back/forward navigation. The closest it gets is in the quickswitcher it offers the last channel you were in, but that's it.
* Their support is awful. Everything except extremely obvious bugs get the response "please vote it up at feedback.discordapp.com", and even bugs often get that response.
* No "do not disturb" settings. If notifications are on, they're on 24 hours a day.
TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client)
https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)
1. If you are logged out you miss the history of conversations
2. Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.
... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.
"App installs" is a key metric driving valuations for SaaS/PaaS/etc. businesses.
Trading a useful product for dollars isn't that interesting. Collecting an open-ended, continuous stream of intel on a large population is fascinating - at least until it become generally accepted that this "intel", and the levers for manipulating people based on it, are really not that useful or effective (which is my own prediction).
Slack has the attention today, but the real poster child for this kind of behavior is Sonos - nowhere do you see such a stark juxtaposition between an actually useful product that people pay premium dollars for and pivoting the business model towards shady, sneaky, anti-customer patterns.
* customers might have complained that the site didn't work on mobile when the desktop site was requested; this may have led to a burden on their support team, and a manager might have decided to block usage instead of fielding support requests
* a team internally might have been spending a lot of time chasing down bugs for desktop on mobile, and a manager decided to officially not support desktop on mobile; instead of just stopping support or carefully triaging tickets (e.g. distinguishing desktop on mobile from desktop), they just decided to block desktop on mobile access
* a team might have been burdened by being required to fix all bugs that came in; instead of dealing with the problem properly (e.g. continuing to allow desktop on mobile but not officially supporting it), they officially killed support to avoid having to work on it
* there could be some KPM to reduce bug reports over some period of time; they killed access to the non-supported use-case of desktop on mobile to make numbers look better
Not really a smart decision in any of these cases, kind of stupid, honestly; but not really nefarious either and the kind of decision that can be made sometimes at a larger place with politics.
Keeping mobile web but adding a banner that the experience isn't supported: Doesn't Work. Most people are total idiots when it comes to tech; this is 250% more true in the B2B space; this is a further 250% more true in a bottom-up corporate sales model like what Slack deploys. Unsurprisingly, but likely; many of their workspaces are shadow-IT operations created by some do-gooder who knows Excel and thus he's a "tech expert", on an isolated team within a large company who's IT department really wishes everyone would just use Teams and Sharepoint. This person is going to dodge the company's frontline IT support with any issues they run into. This person probably has a company-issued phone and thus doesn't want to, or can't, install the app.
You can scrape way more data from Android's APIs than you can from some cookies on a web page. Grabbing data like "other apps installed", for example.
And for stickiness, you can push notify a user to re-engage them. Plus they have to manually uninstall the app to completely "Unsubscribe".
It's a better position for a company if they can get you into the mobile app.
Mobile apps let you collect more of your users' private data than a web browser does.
This strategy probably mitigates what might be a much more common complaint in the future that their "UI" sucks on mobile if they were to design for only larger screens.
That is, Slack should still focus on making the website for the best large screen experience, but they shouldn't go out of their way to do somewhat sneaky stuff to detect my "Desktop" browser is really coming from my phone.
Depending on the company, you may not want to install an app that accesses corporate data in your phone.
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
Maybe can also be called the Snap-Way??
For sure there is a reason behind. It's just not a user-focused reason but a business one instead. One guess would be that the browser is a environment the user can kind of control, so they can block tracking and so on. When you're using the app, you don't have the same control anymore, so the business can receive more metrics from people that they wouldn't before.
Not saying this is good/bad, just that there is most probably a reason behind the choices they make.
Someone in the twitter thread says it still works on firefox for android, which means it's really only broken on chrome. Chrome doesn't have adblock, so it's not like this move results in less of their telemetry getting blocked.
How could it not be bad to impose these restrictions for anyone other than the company? You can use the app if you want.
https://m.facebookcorewwwi.onion
For example, their iOS app requires iOS 11 or later which means people with a 5c, 5, 4s and iPad 4th gen will not be able to use Slack. These may be deemed 'older devices' by the tech forward folks like those on here but you would be shocked how many are out there still today. It only presents more resistance to adopt the app at team scale, as they will probably realize soon.
AFAIK App Store allows you to download an older version if the current one isn't supported by your OS.
Otherwise it appears to be premature or unresearched, or Slack have quickly backpedalled or fixed a bug.
There are reports in the Twitter thread of mobile browser access (using show desktop site), and I'm having no problems on mine.
It doesn't block everything, but almost nothing is getting through for me.
Back in the late 1990s I used to have all sorts of software in my computer which I downloaded and installed. Some of it was purchased and other free or open source.
As the time passed, more and more services became "web based" including mail, music, calendar, note taking, etc.
I was part of a small group that did not like that. My reasoning was that there was no need to hack all that functionality in the web browser as it was highly inefficient. That it was better to code the network features into the desktop clients.
Web caught on and nowadays seldomly you get a client program in the desktop.
But now in mobile, we are returning to the clinet software first approach. And for some reason we resist the installation of client software and prefer browser based functionality.
IMO for any given program or 'app' today, the better it functions offline directly correlates with the desire I have to use it natively on a given platform, as opposed to web access.
Slack is just about useless offline, hence my strong preference to use it in the browser.
You can reverse each of those statements for a current mobile app.
--
[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
I'm in a position to switch my company over to one of the many alternatives mentioned in this thread. Has anybody here actually done that, and if I do it how angry is that likely to make my non-technical staff? If I don't want my marketing guy and my customer support team to hate me, can I still switch my company over to riot.im or mattermost?
Remember, you lose the ecosystem when you switch away, too. There are lots of plugins for slack that won’t be there on the alternatives. Even little things like seeing GitHub commits is nice.
Most of this is just transient outrage.
This is when we were largely just an open source project and before raising $70M in venture capital, which has been accelerating development: https://mattermost.com/blog/category/releases/