They probably realized after all these years that most teams on their free plan have no intention of ever upgrading, especially if they haven't done so after a full year of use. No point in taking on the costs to store all their data forever.
The pricing is insane. Maybe it makes sense for some businesses (we have it at work for sure), but I'm in 9 Slack workspaces currently, and only 3 of those are connected to any sort of business use.
Slack doesn't seem to have any pricing options for a general community, only for clearly defined business groups with clear onboarding/offboarding procedures. They charge by the user, by the month, so any kind of publicly open group seems impossible to fund.
Slack has never been a solution for hobby groups and open source communities and the like, but people love to keep using it as such and then blame the pricing model for not working for them.
Plenty of people use Discord, for better or worse. There are lots of slack communities that have little to no activity as well, so that’s an unfair judgement.
