Slack updates retention policy for free workspaces

Irrationally, this seems preferable to me to simply holding it hostage indefinitely. It always bothered me that they just stored all my old messages, but held them for ransom at a price I could not possibly afford to pay (something like $12k a year for my stupid little chat board that has $0 a year in revenue). It's better in my mind for them to delete my messages to free up space, because at least that's a reason I can wrap my brain around.

They probably realized after all these years that most teams on their free plan have no intention of ever upgrading, especially if they haven't done so after a full year of use. No point in taking on the costs to store all their data forever.

> Starting 26th August 2024, we’ll begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis.

Also note that you already can’t see messages older than 90 days on a free workspace, but they’re there if you upgrade. This change means if you do upgrade, data older than 1 year will be gone.

At larger companies, data retention policies that delete old data are pretty standard for platforms like this. A lot of them can harbor conversations that can be taken out of context or were never meant to be public, so it makes sense from a liability standpoint.

That said, there can also be a large body of fruitful technical knowledge sharing that happens on these platforms that should be retained for the good of the company.

The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares.

What are the best slack alternatives these days? Surely in 2024 live chat is really a commodity

Automatic infinite retention is a social failing, we should be selective about what we choose to keep because the rate at which we're creating it is so large.

It's not that hard to click 'save'. The old needs to make room for the new.

My understanding was the Slack only allowed you to access X days back of content on a free plan (this page seems to indicate it was 90 days?). IIRC that’s a change (happened a while back) from when they used to allow access to the last 10K messages (which of course meant your time-based access depended on the number of messages you sent).

On the surface this just looks like Slack saying “we used to keep everything in case you upgraded but now we just keep a year back”.

Functionally it’s no different if you never planned on paying. If you did plan on paying then now you won’t get all your messages from the past back, just a year.

Have I misunderstood this?

I wonder if Discord will ever do something like this. We're coming up on them storing messages from 10 years ago, and they're all still accessible and searchable(!) including attachments.

I don’t see a problem. Things like slack or discord should only be used for chat, primarily. Trying to find old messages is painful. It’s the wrong it for such job.

Why not include this data in their AI training models? Personally, I was irritated after that quiet 'opt-out' via email to prevent your corporate slack from being used in their ai training models change, recently. I guess they can double dip? Have you pay the pennies for data retention and use your corporate communications to train the next things they will sell you?

Pretty annoying. They are just proven they cannot be relied on.

I get deleting them for little used workspaces, but if they are free and used, this should not happen.

Is there a good tool to export everything (public channels, private messages, images, etc.) if I sign up for premium for a short period?

I'm one of those people who constantly delete all their messages and data held on third-party services, so automating the removal of this actually appeals to me, but I know many will be upset by a change like this. I wonder how much money this is really going to save them, and at what cost in (potential) customer goodwill.

I'm actually surprised Slack isn't actively harvesting unused free instances, to be honest. I know of at least one group that would create a free instance per-event that would then sit idle after (presumably to avoid having to deal with security issues/key admins deciding to not participate).

I always want something like that as a feature. For a hobby project on a free plan I prefer have an auto delete feature and choose the timeframe.

You get what you pay for... I hope we soon learn that we should not have any expectations for free services.

Another victim to the end of the ZIRP era.