I've said this before:

At $company, we used an IRC server. Only the IT department used it.

Then we ran an ejabberd XMPP server. Some of the front end devs used it on occasion.

Now we run a Zulip server, and everybody uses it all the time.

Killer features:

- full function web client. No point in using the electron app. Mobile clients are usable, a little nicer than mobile view of the web client.

- self hosted, meets our security policy.

- channels and topics.

- markdown

- fast

- images. I thought this would add nothing, but it turns out that there are lots of non-cute-animal uses.

- each client can turn emojis off

> I'm strongly of the opinion these days that channel scrollback history is an anti-feature. Anything that depends on Slack Search to be found, is in formation that should be captured in "hard documentation" - markdown docs in a git repo, Notion,even Google Docs or whatever.

I am of the same opinion, but Slack's original advertising focused on how Slack could become a repository for information (rather than information being distributed over emails, Confluence, docs, Git, etc.)

Isn't hard capture the same as scrollback history?