Photo by Daniel Hansen on Unsplash

A few days ago, I posted this tweet after discovering that yet another open source project I am using has that funny Heroku app to join their chat:

Thanks to a few lucky mentions I got down the road, it got liked and retweeted handsomely. Nothing spectacular but it showed that this message resonated with many people. (Of course, there were people who disagreed with me, that’s fine — and expected).

I thought it might make sense to unpack the message and perhaps explain some of the fundamental concerns I have.

While I was triggered to tweet by that “request your invite” shim app, my actual feelings about Slack are deeper than that. I’ve been an early Slack user when it was invite-only-ish and tried to use it in my company — which was neither a success nor a failure. Since then, however, I’ve been only using it if I really needed to — collaborating with others on projects I was paid to work on, joining existing projects or chat rooms. Every time I’d grumble quietly but accept my fate.