Comment by nateguchi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nateguchi | Hacker News Reader

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> Slack's business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations.

Whilst this is partially true, One of the key features enterprises need and that Slack supplies is the ability to fully export messages for transfer and compliance purposes.

One of the main differentiators between paid and unpaid slack is message retention. To my knowledge, I don't think the XMPP and IRC were used by anyone to overcome this limit but I'm pretty sure it's been done using their API.

They haven't shut of usage of their API for this purpose so I'm pretty sure that lost sales is the motivation behind this change.

The OP talks about the relevant ways Slack can implement features into their XMPP and IRC endpoints to allow new features. But this probably generates a lot of technical debt for a feature that isn't used by many people. (Also, anecdotally, I've found very few XMPP clients that actually support any of the proposed extensions).

My biggest issue with Slack is that on the free plan they store everything forever, but only allow you to access the last 10,000 messages.

I'm fine with limits, but the users should be free to delete messages beyond the limit. It's my data that I entered in and they are preenting me from deleting it which is a pretty nasty thing to do.

I suspect this will all change in May when the GDPR comes into play. The policy is clearly not compliant. They will likely either need to allow for deletion, or give users access to the data (even on free accounts).

Existing EU data protection law since the mid 90s gives people the right to get a copy of their personal data, with big players, like Facebook, supporting it for years.

I don't know if Slack has any offices or entity in the EU, but you could try making an access request today./

They take money from EU clients, in Euros, so they are bound by EU law. GDPR will tighten the net around this sort of business models.

> One of the main differentiators between paid and unpaid slack is message retention. To my knowledge, I don't think the XMPP and IRC were used by anyone to overcome this limit but I'm pretty sure it's been done using their API.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that you don't know about any message retention facilities for IRC. irclogger and logbot do that.

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