Hey g3rv4 sorry to hear the news. Although I personally don't use slack, when I saw your last post (congrats on the double front page btw) I was super impressed by the stuff you'd added, sorry to see it go.
So this seems rather unfortunate now but the first thought I had on reading your initial post was "wow, I wish he'd come and do some similar stuff for riot[1], but unless slack shut him down there's no chance." However lo and behold here we are, so I thought I might as well reach out. If you haven't heard of it, Riot can be described as "an open source slack" although I think that's unfair on it, it certainly lacks certain features that slack has (although with its current rate of development this gap is shrinking) but also can do things slack just can't.
Full disclaimer I'm not a developer on riot (or matrix[2] the open protocol it implements), just a happy user so I can't speak with true authority but I think they'd be happy for you to make these sorts of changes to riot.
So I invite you to come check it out, I hope you find it compelling. At the very least riot has a means of bridging to slack (along with irc, gitter and more) which you might find helpful in dealing with slack (I know I do).
Hope your future endeavors so smoother, I look forward to seeing whatever you create next.
I am a very happy Riot/Matrix user. Commercial software has a place. I think for things like Photoshop it can make sense. It's a complicated and powerful system. I just can't justify closed source software for a chat application. They are fundamentally simple systems. We CAN build competitive open source alternatives. Eventually companies have to make money, and all the approaches I've seen for that go against the user.
Speaking as someone working on matrix and riot, we would love you to come and do BetterSlack style things to Riot - we are getting tantalisingly close to being “as good as Slack” (except entirely FOSS, decentralised, standards based and with E2E encryption) - and positively encourage folks to customise the apps as long as they don’t introduce bugs or harm the security model. Plus we can just accept changes straight into the app rather than injecting via an extension. Pleeease come help us make it better - #riot-dev:matrix.org would be the place to come :) And yes, we have bridging to slack too.
I'll be honest, I don't have a huge amount of experience using it, never to a company slack sort of thing and there may be some company policy about this sort of thing (security and all that) so I'd encourage checking there but I hope it works out!
So this seems rather unfortunate now but the first thought I had on reading your initial post was "wow, I wish he'd come and do some similar stuff for riot[1], but unless slack shut him down there's no chance." However lo and behold here we are, so I thought I might as well reach out. If you haven't heard of it, Riot can be described as "an open source slack" although I think that's unfair on it, it certainly lacks certain features that slack has (although with its current rate of development this gap is shrinking) but also can do things slack just can't.
Full disclaimer I'm not a developer on riot (or matrix[2] the open protocol it implements), just a happy user so I can't speak with true authority but I think they'd be happy for you to make these sorts of changes to riot.
So I invite you to come check it out, I hope you find it compelling. At the very least riot has a means of bridging to slack (along with irc, gitter and more) which you might find helpful in dealing with slack (I know I do).
Hope your future endeavors so smoother, I look forward to seeing whatever you create next.
[1]https://riot.im/ [2]https://matrix.org/blog/home/