There's a tech community slack in my area with dozens of vertical channels of discussion. I'm sure that at there's been many interesting conversations, but because the free version limits a server to 10,000 messages across all channels, the majority of chats are 'empty' until someone decides to pony up the $8,500(!) per month to fully unlock the community.

Hey, Zulip offers our Standard plan[1] for free for communities like yours. There is no restriction on message history. Plus the unique threading model of Zulip makes it easier to run communities[2]. If you folks are interested feel free to create an organisation in zulipchat.com and mail us at [email protected] for activating Zulip standard. We support exporting the data from Slack as well :)

[1] https://zulipchat.com/plans/

[2] https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/

Zulip rocks. Streams + topics are great when I can’t check chat constantly and need to later skim a large amount of activity.

Zulip not rocks at all. Maybe topics are handy buy overall user interface so clumsy, small fonts and so on. Tools like Slack spoiled us in terms of UI. Mattermost maybe closest one to slack slickness.

Without a hint of vitriol: any tech community that wants to use something like Slack is not the kind of tech community I want anything to do with. I'm glad they exist, I'm glad they like that kind of thing, and I'm glad to never have to touch it.

Concentrating on selling their product to companies with lots of money seems to be working out pretty well for them so far.

I've active in at least two free Slack communites. The limitation of message history isn't so bad; it's at least better than IRC. And one can still set up dozens of private chat rooms.

>The limitation of message history isn't so bad; it's at least better than IRC.

Many IRC channels have logs that go back decades.

> by exclusively targeting the enterprise market, Slack is leaving money on the table

No. By targeting the enterprise market, Slack is not leaving money on the table, it's not losing money. The claim that there's money in targeting regular users needs proof.

Maybe because casual users go to greath lengths to avoid paying for any kind of software tools, which leaves enterprise market as the only viable option for anyone wanting to sell tooling to developers.