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Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features (github.com)

76 points by meetbryce ↗ HN
The official Slack AI product looks great, but with limited access and add-on pricing, I decided to open-source the version I built. Especially for all the communities on Slack that would have to convert to paid and buy the upgrade to access the official SlackAI product/add-on which is not going to be financially viable in most cases.

There's no plan to sell anything, just something I built as a way to learn some new tools that I thought others might get use out of.

The repo is a ready-to-run slack app that provides thread summaries and channel overviews on demand using OpenAI (heavy lifting done by gpt-3.5-turbo and a touch of gpt-4) and some standard NLP analysis. Anyone technical could easily swap in Claude or Ollama (and i'd welcome the pull request, it's been on my to do list!).

There's a link in the readme to a blog post I wrote sharing more about the how/why if you're interested.

I'm a product manager by day, so it's been fun to do some real coding again.

21 comments

[ 59.7 ms ] story [ 1289 ms ] thread
gliptic
> I decided to open-source the version I built in September 2024.

I think this is the most impressive part!

meetbryce
oh no... my time travel secrets!

i better fix that

nadermx
Why did you not show up to Hawking's time traveller party?
tithe
As far as "Show HN" goes, this is called "burying the lede".
pants2
This is great, congrats on open-sourcing. The (now $20/user/mo we've been told) Slack AI is really not all that good in my experience, so it shouldn't be hard for you to do better by just spending a little extra $ in API credits.

That said, the Slack API limits third party apps from accessing chat history of private messages, so any implementations like this are artificially limited. In addition, if you're hosting something for your company to use, it would realistically need to take into account user permissions to make sure the AI isn't sending them data they shouldn't have access to. That could be tricky to implement correctly.

meetbryce
thanks @pants2!

oh wow. i should have guessed taking it off the pricing page meant the price went up, not down.

this works in private channels, but not in DMs. i think that's okay given the likelihood of things getting to much for manual parsing in a 1:1 context.

if you've got the time/inclination, I'm interested to hear more about what you're getting at with the permissions & access piece

toomuchtodo
Is Mattermost more flexible in this regard vs Slack?
godelski
Kinda off topic, but I know a lot of people here use keybase for verification, but don't they have a slack alternative that's both free and private? (Assuming zoom didn't kill either of those aspects) Anyone use it as an actual slack replacement?
freeqaz
Is anybody using Zoom as a Slack alternative? Or Keybase as an alternative? Or are you asking if there is something else?

Perhaps I'm lacking context but I couldn't figure out your question and I'd like to help you find an answer!

dewey
Key base had a chat product (wouldn’t call it a Slack competitor though)
godelski
A sibling comment responded to me saying that it was pretty much dead, but that I was thinking of this[0]. You'll notice it looks a lot like Slack and that there's full teams support with full E2EE. And unlike slack you keep your history and other stuff. But I guess it is Open Source so maybe someone could revive it?

[0] https://book.keybase.io/chat

meetbryce
definitely off topic haha. i've got no idea though
mdaniel
I believe you're thinking of https://book.keybase.io/chat and its https://github.com/keybase/managed-bots#keybase-managed-bots friend but at least based on my experience on Android I can assure you that Keybase is dead. They DGAF, find another platform
godelski
Yeah that's kinda the impression I got but was hoping it wasn't or there was an alternative. Thanks.

Is this one Open Source too? I wasn't sure which project it was under. But if it is then maybe someone else can revive it because I'd love to have a Slack alternative that is E2EE.

mdaniel
It was my recollection that Matrix had support for E2EE, although in fairness I believe XMPP does, too, but as an extension and thus finding compatible implementations and clients could be a hassle

While digging up supporting links, I was reminded that Element exists from the creators of the Matrix protocol, and while their website is an MBA-buzzword-athon their communities page does cite E2EE <https://element.io/communities#:~:text=secured%20with%20end-...> and they are permissively licensed https://github.com/orgs/element-hq/repositories

godelski
My understanding is that no one has built a slack like client for matrix. Whereas at least keybase has something that looks like slack with teams, channels, and threads. But I've only played with it in a sandbox.

I mean there's lots of open source stuff. Signal is open source and people still complain about it being centralized but just won't run their own servers and connect them together. So I think open source isn't enough. It takes people working on things.

Arathorn
Element looks as much like Slack as Keybase did…
tyre
Today we tried installing Claude with Slack and were told that it’s restricted to enterprise versions.
meetbryce
hopefully this being self hosted gets around that kind of restriction (at least for a while...)
jedi4aiimpact
Sounds like a solid value add. We have been thinking of integrating our system at ixcoach.com with slack. Will take a look.