Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:

"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."

So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.

Makes some sense to me.

In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.

And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.

You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.

Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing

Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?

And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.

In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?

Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive.

I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.

For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.

Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?

Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.

Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...

Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads

95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.

In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.

Nice! I’d say most of the knowledge can be preserved that way then.

(But I would also start making backups regularly, because who knows if how long this would last)

Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across the world.

As such, you need to be able to review the legal status of every pairing or group of people's private chats.

At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.

>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search

It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.

Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415

> Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across the world.

In a single legal entity?

> At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.

What case law are you considering when you insinuate that Slack must review the retention of records between users of a Slack business customer?

The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.

In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.

I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.

Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.

I miss the old Internet.

And get off my lawn!

The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.

We use Slack extensively and I'm searching for info in conversations from months or even years ago regularly.

You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.

I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.

Plenty of communities kept IRC archives.

Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/

> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements

clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery

The EU user's messages are governed by the GDPR, regardless of jurisdiction, surely?

Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.

In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.