Totally, the lack of self-hosting/open platform with Slack just might be their mis-step that cuts off their growth.

I though their growth was just fine. I think the fact that you do not need to host it yourself is a force and it also lets them concentrate on exactly one product. I can imagine that providing a supported on premises platform must increase your support team size considerably.

From what we've seen at Mattermost (open source Slack-alternative, https://mattermost.com/) supporting on-premises deployments with an open source community is actually pretty awesome.

We have over a thousand people on our forums helping each other out, people are building installers for Mattermost in Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, etc. (just web search to find them).

We're also getting help writing and updating our deployment docs (https://docs.mattermost.com/).

They're referring to an open 3rd Party API platform - not giving away their secret sauce.

Providing APIs for third-party integration is what Microsoft is almost too good at (hence why Word and Excel are so scarey). The idea that Slack would be so dumb as to believe that Microsoft will do poorly at this is shocking.

Slack is a chat application, one of a vast multitude. There's not all that much secret sauce to give away.

Their secret sauce seems to be in how they can convince so many people to use it despite similar products existing for decades. I really wish I knew the answer to this question, I admire it a lot.

The UX is top notch. Not only is the UI polished, but big details like mentioning someone and an invite link appearing is awesome. Or force-pinging someone on DnD because of an emergency.

Slack is seriously user-centric, all the way down to how they run their Twitter.

Have you used it on an under powered laptop? It's dog slow and gets exponentially worse the longer you have it open. Don't even thinking about scrolling back through the history.

They didn't start with all that, but somehow amassed a lot of users anyway. I believe it's more about the personal networks of the original team, but that's just a guess.

Well, what deep secrets could a chatapp possibly have thats unreplicable.

Can you explain the difference between an open and a closed 3rd party API?

To develop an app using the Slack API, you do not need to register with Slack and download an API key for your app. Anyone can just develop whatever they like without having to ask permission first and there's no easy way to selectively shut down apps that Slack doesn't like.

I guess here the split is between a closed source 3rd party API and no API at all.

Indeed. Slack thinks they're an "open platform" because they have an "open API" that lets people contribute more data to their closed silo.

Slack really needs to gift open source projects with a large userbase who use Slack 100% free, with the catch being no private rooms or something, fully web searchable.

Slack has said they do not want open source projects to use it.

It is the single most annoying thing about some projects - I get it, IRC doesn't show your emojis, but it just works.

Yeah, I wish they didn't either, but certain projects are mainly slack it seems. I hate it so much for this purpose.

I guess I'm also apart of the problem. :P

Come back to IRC, FOSS!

We recently started using Matrix with riot.im seamlessly bridged to our IRC channels. Seems pretty usable for our needs.

yeah - i do work on 2 projects right now, one on freenode, one on slack. guess which one I look at regularly?

I remember an article about not using slack for FOSS projects, but it was not from Slack. Would you happen to have a link for your claim? I would be quite interested why they would not want to be used by somebody.

That being said I do believe that Slack is a poor choice of medium for a free project, mainly because of the limited history and no publicly searchable transcripts.

And the fact that it costs them a fair amount of money to host large instances of slack.

Can't seem to find the link, but you can see they will give discounts for non profits, up to 250 users. - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833

Its a poor medium, as it locks projects into a walled garden ecosystem.

Despite Slack being more polished (particularly on mobile), gitter.im seems like a much better choice for open source projects.

"ironic" is one word for it, "hypocritical" also came to mind, along with "shameless lying" and "disgustingly misleading"

I've written stuff to send notifications to slack channels and to XMPP. Slack was distinctly easier, so IMO they have a decent argument that Slack's more open than XMPP.

(You might consider other aspects of openness more important, of course.)

(I did an CMD-F and searched for mattermost, nothing found.)