I don't understand the big deal with Slack. It's a glorified web-based IRC-like thing? And yet another centralized, privately owned, third-party service. This is always the big turn-off here. Are there good self-hosted or federated slack alternatives?
We had a perfectly working internal IRC system at work. For some managerial reasons, the decision was made to 'keep up with the trend and adapt to new softwares, firstly by moving on to Slack'.
I am young, in my mid-twenties. I like new. I like Slack too. But I honestly couldn't see any reason why we moved to it. We pay slack probably more than what we needed to maintain our own old tiny IRC box. But money aside, there are real issues with Slack that are just not there with hosting your own IRC.
The major one being privacy. For a field that is almost religiously against abuse of privacy, we sure as heck don't seem to have an issue with all of our work conversations being stored on another company's server.
Another quip I noticed was archiving. While my IRC allowed archiving without any limits, there are limits imposed on how much archives you can have access to on Slack. Of course, its customizable, but for that first time you're looking for something said 6 months ago by an ex-employee, you realize that there is no way to go back. You set your preference and learn to move on, cause well, its a different company after all. And you're paying for it.
