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What's bad about Slack

Slack, often chosen by companies for its convenience and features, has notable drawbacks including its proprietary nature with embedded trackers, the shutdown of its XMPP/IRC bridge pushing users to its closed client, and privacy concerns due to administrative access to user messages, leading to viable alternatives like IRC, Matrix, Rocket, and Mattermost.

More often than not companies and other institutions seem to use Slack for internal communications. They often cite convenience and feature the many features their software provides. Rarely do I hear any of the negative aspects of Slack.

Reasons to not use Slack

  • All of their software is proprietary and contains trackers. The android application contains at least 3 trackers. It is safe to assume their clients for other platforms contain similiar malicious code.
  • Their XMPP/IRC bridge closed down earlier this year. Citing features such as threads, shared channels and emojis as reasons to effectively force users into using their closed and proprietary client.
  • They let company administrators snoop on their users. This includes private messages (even previously deleted messages).

Alternatives to Slack