Trying and walking away from Slack

History

The local FabLab (sorry, they still haven't managed to roll out basic SSL support for their website) had a very limited, internal forum for members.
That was replaced by Slack. A corporate chat enriched with features commonly found in forum software.

TL:DR

Aparently they thought, they could use it as a moderated, persistent forum instead of the temporary chat it was.
I tried it for a few month and looked at the dynamics of how it could be used and how it was used.
In the end, I found it too slow and organized for a sensible chat and too temporary and feature-limited for a forum.
So I decided to deactivate my Slack account again.

Why not a chat?

Many channels for different areas of the FabLab break up the (already very limited) audience into tiny sub-groups.
Conversations (answers to postings are grouped below that posting and no longer apear in the main feed) hide many things.
Being able to edit postings and being moderated reduces the number of new lines in the feed to almost zero.
It was the slowest going chat I've ever seen.

Why not a forum?

Conversation make it work much like a forum. However most features the initial poster has (such as images) are not possible in answers to that posting.
These features are not even allowed when editing your own posting. So e.g. adding a images that failed to upload is impossible.