How does the memory usage of my Slack clients in any way impact the utility of the tool? Private and public communities that are active, relevant, and directly impact my livelihood are on Slack, so I'm also on Slack.
The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship.
In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself).
It is a zero-sum game. And Slack has done the embrace, they done the extend, and they've started the extinguish (by cutting off IRC bridges).
Because the last thing organizations eant to do is host their own infra for a chat, implement their own search for a chat, re-implement the bits, the hooks, the integrations for a chat etc.?
Hosting things on their own infrastructure is very popular for large companies. They tend to take security a lot more serious that the average startup.
Listen, you want to convince my boss to spend more on the infra. For in house chat w/ drag and drop file hosting, and boost my pay for now having responsibility to manage that, be my guest :)
I wish there was a way to ignore certain users / bots, this is such a pain for me, it makes slack too spammy and noisy for me so I only ever read private messages.
Kind of like HN. When someone is commenting on HN I automatically have more interest than eg Facebook vs. Twitter as the primitive experience of HN (Which I personally love) filters out a lot of "noise".
There's great communities out there on IRC.
Just head to #postgres on freenode and see how helpful they are over there.
I'm also on IRC, Discord, and Telegram.
This isn't a zero-sum game.