We have a small team, and chose Quill over Slack because it seemed like the client felt more lightweight, and the product team would actually solicit feedback from us in DMs.
It very much sucks that I have to drop everything to move to an alternative. We'll probably go with Slack. I'm hoping you can still sideload their iPad app on an M1 Mac.
In the end, I don't think Quill was significantly better. Search in chat history was nearly useless, and a reason we were already reconsidering alternatives. But those issues aside, it was never better enough that I'd go out and tell people, "You need to try Quill! It's so much better than Slack!"
It's a shame that people will draw the wrong lesson from this. They'll think that Slack and Teams have deeply entrenched network effects, which might be true at large enterprises, but small teams like mine will gladly use a competitor that provides a significantly better experience. There might not be enough of us to justify raising $14.5 Million, but I suspect you could bootstrap something quite nice.
Our small company when with a hosted[1] Matrix Synapse server with federation turned off. Have been quite happy with it.
We use the Element client, which is yet another Electron application, but there are several other clients out there, so you would have some options to explore.
Maybe something has changed in the last few years, but the last time I used it, I found their Electron app to be a resource hogging pile of garbage. But that's just my opinion.
It was a great fit for us. The thread management was what slack was missing. We loved the promise that the system was going to develop even-better features for suggesting message groups using ML. The groups-of-channels was also a relief to the complexity of so many channels through the org. We were willing to put up with the incomplete look/feel compared to Slack. We struggled to get the whole team to switch, and now the product is closing. Sad
Yeah, this is the shortest export window I've ever seen by a long margin. There's a high chance that there will be customers who won't notice this before the end date.
Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have. Quill was early stage, trying to get into a competitive market, and they've exited in what looks like an acquihire. From this I'd interpret that they had low enough traction that the business couldn't continue. They may only have 10s of active teams, and it's fairly possible that they are in good contact with all of them and helping them do manual exports.
>> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)?
> No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.
As for this, this is very much in the "feature" category rather than the "bug" category. As much as communication on a company provided platform may not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, people still use these chats for private communication that they don't necessarily want all their coworkers knowing. Well done to Quill for taking this design approach. It may not even be technically possible if they're doing E2E encryption with DM participants.
> Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have.
Even if they had only 1 single customer, that's not an excuse to close the service and allow exporting with just a 4 day notice. People and companies have lots of priorities, and now they've been forced to focus on this instead of whatever they were planning on doing. There should be at least 30 more days of service running, with another 30 days with the service offline but data exporting still available.
Which may help explain why they're shutting down less than a year after launching. 10% improvements aren't enough to drive switching, especially against network-effect products like Slack. But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder.
I have no idea what makes people use Slack. We demoed it at our company, and most people hated it. I guess it's one of those things people start using when there's a handful of employees and then they just get stuck with it.
The worst feature about Slack is its "threads" feature. You're effectively manically thread chasing or you just have to learn to not care about past conversations.
The other annoying thing was input lag when typing sometimes. It was completely unpredictable when it happens (wasn't pc load, browser wasn't that busy, but i didn't check the profiler; internet was fine). It would come and go on its own. Not everyone had it either, and it seemed to be isolated to Linux machines.
We demoed Zulip, but some people didn't like that one because the UI is... It looks like brutalist design applied to UI. Most of us were ok with it even if it's a bit "ugly" (it's not ugly, but I'd call it an acquired taste). Quill was supposed to fill this gap for us, but the CTO said that the $15/user/month price is too steep. Lol.
We settled for the mediocre of both worlds: Mattermost. It's not great, but it's not shit either. You can't scroll in it (well you can, but you don't want to because it's buggy) and the search is crappy, bite you can usually find what you're looki for after a few tries.
Odd. We generally love Slack. I think you have to use it a little while for everyone to adopt sane norms for it, though. Among them is being quick to join and leave channels. A sales person has a question for me? They summon me to their channel where we chat for a bit. All done? I leave it so that I don’t see the rest of their chats. By now, if I see a conversation at all, there’s a 90% chance it’s relevant to me.
Not saying that it’s the best possible solution, just that we’ve been pretty happy with it for the last several years.
Mattermost and Slack are at least in the same class. Slack proved their market by being light-years ahead of Outlook, and Lynq. They took "the nerds who love their little private IRC server" to the masses.
It's crap but it's better than email for remote team communication. And once you're in it's a pain in the arse to change to a different service, so people don't.
I have used Slack at a few companies and it has worked fine for us. No reason it should work for you as well, of course; everybody's different.
FWIW, the thread-chasing thing is not a problem for me because toward the top there's a sidebar element that says "Threads" that lights up when there are new comments in threads.
I've used it only on Linux and haven't experienced input lag. Not sure what the story is there.
It's not an area where I would want to try to claw out a niche, when the 9000 pound gorilla is essentially giving away their product to everyone with an Office 365 subscription.
For sure. It's very much "where elephants dance" territory. Heck, I heard Slack's founder, Stewart Butterfield, on a podcast where he talks about the rich-get-richer dynamic that made doing Slack pretty easy once things got rolling. I can't imagine trying to compete against two competent companies with ~infinite money and a desire to own the space.
This happened with another Twitter acquisition Smyte, where in that case they shut down the api immediately [1]. It seems like it’s some property of Twitter’s acquisition process?
The modern SV startup treats users the way that a coal miner treats a mountain or an LBO guy treats a middle market company. Just a resource to be exploited as they go from Engineering Manager at Salesforce to VP at Twitter and given nothing but the middle finger for their troubles.
I have known both EMs at Salesforce and VPs at Twitter, and believe me they return the favor.
The idea that SV startups aren't staffed by ruthless business people is one of the sillier thoughts still percolating around. YC/HN and similar orgs are the child soldiers/shields of VCs. There isn't anything edgy or innovative about it, and hasn't been since the 90s.
Yes it does. You don’t necessarily have a right to the other side of the conversation, but your messages are your own data and you have a right to export them.
That said, gdpr is untested in the context of data being deleted before it can be retrieved.
I find it amusing that the page title is, "Twitter + Quill - Quill - Messaging for teams that focus". So the result is just Twitter, without Quill or messaging for teams that focus? That seems to be accurate.
First Sphere (https://www.sphere.me), now Quill.
Twitter is obviously planning something in this space, but to me, Twitter's magic is in the ability to really consume a lot, from experts, in a short space of time (240 character brevity!).
In depth conversation, spaces, voice, don't really belong on Twitter in my opinion, but I'm sure Twitter knows better than me... I have no skin in that game!
Idk maybe I'm still sour after they killed "We are hunted" 10y ago, but I feel Twitter acquired a number of companies and yet remained virtually unchanged for years.
They acquired WAH to merge it into Twitter Music that they later killed. They bought Vine and wasted its potential, idk if Periscope is still alive or not (also acquired).
Maybe this time it'll be different - their recent acquisitions of Revue and Chroma Labs (which I guess became Twitter Spaces) seems to be kind of working so far
A lot of people use Twitter DMs and complain about that experience having room to improve (e.g. being able to search DMs). Maybe some of these acqui-hires (and that's what they seem to be) will be toward improving DMs?
We had looked into Quill but decided to use Threads.com. Considering how inconsiderate Quill's shut down was, it was a good decision for that reason alone.
For anyone looking at alternative for threaded messages and find Slack's threads insufficient, our team loves Threads. We looked at a few others (Zulip, Twist) and landed on Threads about 2 years ago. Since then, the product has gotten better and better.
Also, haven't posted to HN much -- is this an appropriate thing to post on a thread like this?
Readit News
It very much sucks that I have to drop everything to move to an alternative. We'll probably go with Slack. I'm hoping you can still sideload their iPad app on an M1 Mac.
In the end, I don't think Quill was significantly better. Search in chat history was nearly useless, and a reason we were already reconsidering alternatives. But those issues aside, it was never better enough that I'd go out and tell people, "You need to try Quill! It's so much better than Slack!"
It's a shame that people will draw the wrong lesson from this. They'll think that Slack and Teams have deeply entrenched network effects, which might be true at large enterprises, but small teams like mine will gladly use a competitor that provides a significantly better experience. There might not be enough of us to justify raising $14.5 Million, but I suspect you could bootstrap something quite nice.
We use the Element client, which is yet another Electron application, but there are several other clients out there, so you would have some options to explore.
[1] https://element.io/matrix-services
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379
>> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)? > No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.
As for this, this is very much in the "feature" category rather than the "bug" category. As much as communication on a company provided platform may not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, people still use these chats for private communication that they don't necessarily want all their coworkers knowing. Well done to Quill for taking this design approach. It may not even be technically possible if they're doing E2E encryption with DM participants.
Even if they had only 1 single customer, that's not an excuse to close the service and allow exporting with just a 4 day notice. People and companies have lots of priorities, and now they've been forced to focus on this instead of whatever they were planning on doing. There should be at least 30 more days of service running, with another 30 days with the service offline but data exporting still available.
Let's say they have a couple customers... that should be even easier to maintain for a while.
Looking at that page, I guess it's Slack with some small twists? And this seems to confirm that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/
Which may help explain why they're shutting down less than a year after launching. 10% improvements aren't enough to drive switching, especially against network-effect products like Slack. But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder.
The worst feature about Slack is its "threads" feature. You're effectively manically thread chasing or you just have to learn to not care about past conversations.
The other annoying thing was input lag when typing sometimes. It was completely unpredictable when it happens (wasn't pc load, browser wasn't that busy, but i didn't check the profiler; internet was fine). It would come and go on its own. Not everyone had it either, and it seemed to be isolated to Linux machines.
We demoed Zulip, but some people didn't like that one because the UI is... It looks like brutalist design applied to UI. Most of us were ok with it even if it's a bit "ugly" (it's not ugly, but I'd call it an acquired taste). Quill was supposed to fill this gap for us, but the CTO said that the $15/user/month price is too steep. Lol.
We settled for the mediocre of both worlds: Mattermost. It's not great, but it's not shit either. You can't scroll in it (well you can, but you don't want to because it's buggy) and the search is crappy, bite you can usually find what you're looki for after a few tries.
Not saying that it’s the best possible solution, just that we’ve been pretty happy with it for the last several years.
FWIW, the thread-chasing thing is not a problem for me because toward the top there's a sidebar element that says "Threads" that lights up when there are new comments in threads.
I've used it only on Linux and haven't experienced input lag. Not sure what the story is there.
I thought this was how startups work? Rake in some VC cash with empty promises, sell off to some big company, execs retire, everyone's happy.
Everyone but the users who need to scramble to export their data -- without tools -- by Saturday.
> No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.
>> If I don’t export, will you delete my data?
> Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not you’ve exported it.
Fantastic service.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/a...
The idea that SV startups aren't staffed by ruthless business people is one of the sillier thoughts still percolating around. YC/HN and similar orgs are the child soldiers/shields of VCs. There isn't anything edgy or innovative about it, and hasn't been since the 90s.
That said, gdpr is untested in the context of data being deleted before it can be retrieved.
In depth conversation, spaces, voice, don't really belong on Twitter in my opinion, but I'm sure Twitter knows better than me... I have no skin in that game!
They acquired WAH to merge it into Twitter Music that they later killed. They bought Vine and wasted its potential, idk if Periscope is still alive or not (also acquired).
Maybe this time it'll be different - their recent acquisitions of Revue and Chroma Labs (which I guess became Twitter Spaces) seems to be kind of working so far
For anyone looking at alternative for threaded messages and find Slack's threads insufficient, our team loves Threads. We looked at a few others (Zulip, Twist) and landed on Threads about 2 years ago. Since then, the product has gotten better and better.
Also, haven't posted to HN much -- is this an appropriate thing to post on a thread like this?