I've recently started using Zulip a lot more after the Changelog podcast soft migrated their community from Slack to Zulip. I've also been following along with Zulip's official dev group, and some other community groups.
And it's really good.
I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one.
But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of not paying attention, having that index of topics with new messages, lets me triage what I'm interested in, get up to date on those chats only, and "mark as read" the rest.
My old smartphone (Samsung galaxy A5) struggles to load heavy webpages (it is fine with HN); with Zulip, it gives up completely. Zulip never loads on my phone. Frustrating, since Zulip is where the Lean community decided to be.
I have to say, Facebook at work was probably the best thing I ever used for collaboration and knowledge sharing. It was so much better than slack, I never understood why people wanted this chat style for group communication.
I worked at Facebook for 5 years and agree. Though the culture was a big driver too. It’s not like switching to Workplace will magically transform company culture.
Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?).
But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work.
It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobbies/kids etc, so there was a loss there.
Although speaking as someone in EMEA, it was totally, totally worth it.
As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'm the one with the purchasing power in this company, I'd still need to get personal buy-in from a lot of people to pull that trigger. It's a shame, but this seems wildly overpriced to me. The article includes this line...
> It kills me every time we lose a customer saying “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t deal with the switching costs right now.”
Honestly, if this was priced anywhere near what Slack is, absolutely nobody would be saying that to you. They'd be switching and giving you money. You can effectively translate that to “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t justify tripling our costs right now.”
I’m a very active Campsite user (for the Campsite team, hi this is Ethan!)
I don’t think Campsite is overpriced at all. It functions as our internal wiki, our chat, and our video conferencing solution.
It makes asynchronous work actually functional, so to me this comes down to: if you want a high-functioning asynchronous team, Campsite is WELL worth the cost. If you just want to “replace Slack” for unknown (?) reasons or to just try something new (?) then yeah, it’s overpriced.
The integration of docs (or more generically long-lived evergreen content, b/c I’m not sure Docs are the right abstraction), calls w/ AI features integrated, posts, and DMs all together is huge. A lot of synergies to be had by having all of these things in a combined system that supports bidirectional linking between all of them.
I do think we deliver $16/user/mo of value fwiw: unrestricted posting, DMing, video calls with recording + transcripts + LLM summaries, API, and tons more. But we're not doing a good enough job:
1. Giving people an on-ramp to try posting on Campsite without committing to $20/u/mo. What's your take if we had a $10/u/mo "starter" tier?
2. Telling the story on how working the "Campsite way" is so much better than Slack, and the craft in the product justifies the price (in my strong, very biased opinion).
I'm not GP, but I also dislike Slack's lack of user focus and generally interrupt-driven workflow. Campsite sounds really great, and I may well be interested even at the $16/mo price point, but the website does a poor job of telling me much about the product aside from how great "posts" are. The big screenshot on the front page looks a lot like just a Slack clone.
The premise of better long-form discussion was intriguing enough that I went looking on YouTube for a review or demo of Campsite. No luck, I just got endless results for camping apps, even after many iterations on search terms.
Maybe you could post some videos or links on your page about how Campsite matches Slack features, and then how it exceeds them? There are so many issues with Slack, from blurry screen sharing to lack of syntax highlighting w/o snippets to the channel list mysteriously resorting itself constant, I would love something that could replace it that also made remote-first collaboration better.
Good questions. Firstly though, given llamaimperative's post above, I think I should clarify that I couldn't see triple the value of Slack just by browsing the website. And while Slack has a bazillion features, I'm also well aware that most of them are so badly thought through as to be worse than useless. For instance, nobody in our company even understands what Slack's "canvas" is, or why we would use it.
So, for your questions - yeah, I definitely think a $10 starter tier would help, but I guess that would depend on what gets left out. If the story you mention in question 2 is as good as you say, I'd imagine you'd convert a lot of those users to the fuller tier anyway.
So on question 2, definitely! I could only see on the site one screenshot of the entire UI (which looks lovely btw), so it's hard for someone coming in cold to see how it behaves - I've tried out a lot of collaboration apps over the last few months and there's been more than one that looked beautiful but actually interacting with it was suboptimal to say the least. Having agreed with every word you wrote in the OP, I suspect you've paid a lot more attention to the user experience than these apps had though.
The other thing I think that's possibly missing from the website is differentiators that set it apart from Slack - the better async comms angle is up front, but as a shopper looking for a Slack replacement I want to know if this is going to solve some of my pet-peeves with Slack, like, can I actually assign tasks to other users? Does it even have the concept of tasks? Am I going to be able to hook it up to GitHub in a way that's more useful than Slack does?
There's also not much on the site about the docs / wiki / evergreen content side of things - we use Notion as well as Slack, and in all honesty we only ever signed up to Notion because Slack is like an information black hole. The idea of both of those things in a single app is appealing, especially with the backlinks feature.
Thanks to both you and llamaimperative for engaging here, would have been easy to dismiss my comment as a grumpy edge-case.
Oh, and one last thing, some of our Slack usage actually is just team members chatting as we're mostly remote - is there a space inside Campfire for more disposable type conversations?
“Dictated” no, “highly influenced by,” yes. It’s insane someone could think otherwise.
If your organization communicated by carrier pigeon, it’d make some types of organizations and cultures and solutions possible while precluding others.
Obviously communication methods influence organizations :|
We switched to Campsite and our mode of thinking changed immediately. Suddenly we were able to have long-lived, complex conversations. Which is important to us as a company that has to solve complex problems over long periods of time.
I use Teams on the daily, and think it is a legit question.
On the one hand, the app crashes at least once a day. On the other, haven't seen this issue of distracting notifications or important discussions being drowned out by chatter. Those are constantly brought up with Slack.
I use Teams on a daily basis and it's fine. That said I've never really used any other chat software for a similar purpose so have nothing to compare it to.
It now has a thread view so you can replace tools like Slack with it, and entity-grouped notifications, so you can easily catch up on things if you are away for a few days. Plus it does a much better job of proper knowledge management, with references, proper relations, build a domain model of your business, per-entity and linked-entity permission models if you need that, etc. etc.
It provides integrations for existing tools, so migrating to it is much less big bang (sync in your JIRA tickets, Linear, Slack conversations, etc.).
Two-panel nested views on entities make navigating through status on task boards, projects, etc. a joy. You can build automations (create a new Slack channel and invite the assignees to it when I make an Incident, add a 'priority' labels when certain people comment or certain keywords are used", etc.).
Add meeting minutes, automatically convert the follow-up bullet points in those into Tasks for people and assign them, without ever leaving the same single page view.
You can use it a bit like e-mail, and a bit like JIRA, and a bit like Slack. And you can pick and choose those "bit like"s to best fit your needs.
We haven't completely replaced Slack with Fibery, but we've moved most of our more intentional communication into it. We no longer feel we need to "complete Slack" to catch up on the state of the world.
We love Fibery and are very happy customers. ♥ It's great.
And it's really good.
I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one.
But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of not paying attention, having that index of topics with new messages, lets me triage what I'm interested in, get up to date on those chats only, and "mark as read" the rest.