Slack just did something really bad. they tried to extort hackclub.com a non-profit, out of $50k and $200k a year or their entire slack would be deleted. they were on a contract for slack pro and they had agreed on $5k a year. Obviously hack club started migrating away (to mattermost). Slack then went into damage control when this went public reached hacker news no.1 and top post on r/slack. they said that this was all a mistake (likely a lie for damage control). Their CEO called the hack club co-founders and donated 5 years of enterprise plus for hack club for free.

the enshittification encroaches. Sounds like the crackdown phase once you know growth is over.

we all kinda know that it wasn't a mistake

Of course. Oracle did the same thing after they bought Sun

The universe is uncaring and we can't expect anything to last forever. What we can do is have some shared expectations as a community. In that spirit, let me share my sense as someone who's been trying to maintain archives of this community for several years now at https://akkartik.name/archives/foc (Aside: Thanks Ivan for not obsoleting that URL with the recent name change 😄) • If you send private messages here, expect them to be volatile. If they're important to you, save a copy for yourself. • Attachments are hard. I've mostly not archived them. I took a snapshot around a year ago when Slack announced they were deleting files, but haven't gotten around to making it available online. I also haven't refreshed it since. Like I said, I find this hard relative to my concern for it. I tend to be text-focused. So at least for my archives, don't expect any images or video or other files to persist more than a few months. • Outside of those two caveats, I'm fairly confident my archive of public text utterances is robust to data vandalism by Slack. Sometimes people delete their posts; these may or may not still be in the archives. (This is advertised as a public record, so don't expect deletions to be guaranteed.) But I periodically spot check for Slack's data deletions. I have retained every zip file I've ever downloaded for this group, so if my scripts have a bug we can fix it.

I’m not deeply involved in the question, but there is surely a good deal to be said for groups like this just using IRC.

I've tried hanging out in an IRC room, but nary a person here has joined me.

First of all, this is a good occasion to say thanks to @Kartik Agaram for his archive, which I consult regularly, whenever I have vague memories of some past discussion. Next, IRC. There are communities that still use IRC to good effect, but I guess that anyone used to Slack will be disappointed. XMPP is one step up in features, but still quite minimalist. Which is fine with me, but it seems I am the exception. The next step up in my opinion is Matrix, and then we get to the Slack clones (Mattermost, Zulip, Rocket Chat, etc.). I'd say the first decision to make for anyone wanting to leave Slack is to define their preferences on this scale. And then consider the dependencies, in terms of (1) Who can mess with the community through the communication tool? (2) Who has an incentive to do so? (3) Who might do so involuntarily, e.g. for lack of means for maintenance? It's on point (3) that IRC and XMPP shine. There are multiple options for both client and server software, all of which are manageable for people with moderate tech competence.