This is true of everything, not just centralizing communications. Any VC-funded free service will eventually be forced to find ways to monetize, and open access channels are usually one of the first things to be killed off. Twitter did the same thing with the firehose.

I suppose most companies use Slack for ephemeral communication. If it blows up, you can just move somewhere else. It was still probably worth it as it is dead simple to set up.

Why is it a bad idea?

And I doubt _any_ business has centralized their communications with Slack. I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.

> I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.

Slack's rise continues to baffle me. It's not good or widespread enough to replace email, Skype messenging, SMS or phone calls - so it's yet another thing I have to stay on top of at work. My life would honestly be easier without Slack.

It is better than E-mail for instant and group communication, it is better in everything except audio/video calling that Skype. SMS and phone calls are not even in the same ballpark in terms of solving group communication problems.

Disregarding the technical side of things, Slack is a great tool and it is quite understandable why it stuck: people like it.

Well, it replaces all those things when you want async messaging with a decent UX.

I'm not sure how serious to take you when you think Skype is better.

Especially when Skype in this context probably means "Skype for Business". Oh, that user just went offline and Skype wasn't aware? Well, you'll be informed, nicely, that the message couldn't be delivered. Will it be delivered? Oh, of course not, this is 2018, we don't do that.

Or you're signed into Skype for Business on multiple devices. You wouldn't expect to receive instant messages on all your devices at the same time, would you? Because that's really asking for a bit much in 2018. We're not wizards, you know.

And planes didn't replace boats, trains, or automobiles.

Baffling that so many people still use it as yet another mode of transportation.

You are in one mode of transport at a time, but your phone can receive multiple forms of communication at a time. All of them with their own notifications, badge icons, and alert sounds, and behind those, some person demanding your attention and only the most minimal cultural etiquette about when to use which and when, if any etiquette is present and pervasive enough through your social and business circles at all.

The ~600 person distributed company I work for doesn't use phone or email and obviously doesn't do anything face to face. We relied on IRC for years before switching to Slack so yes, all of our real-time communication is via Slack. We have internal blogs for threaded important async discussion though, but Slack is where our high bandwidth talk done.

How come you don't use Rocket.Chat or Mattermost or Matrix?

no care for privacy I guess.

Might it be because Slack is free and hosted for you?

Unfortunately, a lot of startups - including successful ones - do use slack to mitigate the need for email, phone, and in-person communication. It baffles the mind but I think it speaks to the relative naivete and inexperience many managers at startups have when it comes to communication in the workplace.

Every time I have seen Slack as the primary communication vessel, I have seen a company that fails to ship on time and has a hard time with knowledge sharing. The medium is the message!

Phones? It's been 10 years since I worked at a company that gave me a desk phone, and it was archaic and useless then. Email is mostly a dumpster fire because of inflexible clients like gmail or outlook with terrible filtering and clumsy rules engines.

At my current company, the main way to reach someone is Hipchat. We have a large percentage of remote workers, so face to face works for some people, but not everyone. You have to be on chat, and you have to be checking it regularly. We still use github, JIRA and confluence for work, but almost everything passes through chat.

> Email is mostly a dumpster fire because of inflexible clients like gmail or outlook with terrible filtering and clumsy rules engines.

Then why don't you switch to a good client? The reason email works so well is that you have that freedom!

Nothing is new man. People are not gonna learn.

Can't wait to use the term "AIMd" on "Slack" (what a stupid name BTW) in 10 years.

Relay is an alternative to slack.

Relay is open source, built on top of Mattermost. This means you can host Relay yourself. https://relay-chat.com/

Why would one want to use Relay instead of Mattermost?

Relay is actually hosted mattermost. Just a means to offload maintenance and uptime to someone working on it full time.

The part of software in Relay that makes mattermost SaSS is open source too.

Tell your team to stop spamming it around then please. Spam mattermost if you must.

They're not the team though.