There are many OSS alternatives to Slack. Some are clones and some are different approaches and many of them are quite good.<p>The thing these and all other similar efforts miss is the importance of network effects. Everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack.<p>The real problem that needs to be tackled is one layer down: providing an open, distributed alternative for authentication, identity management, and data interchange that is secure and robust enough to provide a backplane for things like this and that is easy enough for <i>anyone</i> to use that it can be pushed out to the mass market. I can&#x27;t stress the last point enough. It must be stupid simple easy to use or it will fail. It also must offer a good and simple <i>developer experience</i> (DX) or it will fail. DX is part of UX. Things like XMPP are nightmares for devs and sysadmins and fail badly here.<p>This is a huge missing piece of the web.