I'll Never Use Slack Again

My brother in law and I had a family channel on Slack, using their free plan, to let our family share, discuss and document all of the projects that we were working on (we're a family of builders and makers). I decided tonight, that I would start writing a blog post for Steemit on my experiences in building a 3d printer and since I had documented everything on Slack, I decided to use it as a template. I had been working on the post for quite a while when my memory failed me and I signed into Slack to check my old notes.

As I scrolled to the very top of the channel, but before I got back to the beginning, a notice popped up. It said "There is more to this channel. In order to access it, upgrade to one of our paid plans." I checked and double checked and there was no way around it that I could find. I HAD BEEN LOCKED OUT OF MY OWN CONTENT. Almost every post of substance on that channel had been made by me and I couldn't even look at the first posts I'd made. My blood pressure started to rise.

Yes. I was on the free plan. Somewhere in the fine print that are the Terms of Service, there is very probably something that says that this would happen. But, I didn't read the fine print and I didn't know. My bad. That's on me. My fault. What I do know that is that I cannot now get to content that I created and that is now in their possession and absolutely useless to me.

So, what's to be done? There's no way that I am paying 6 or 7 dollars a month in order to retrieve it. Not even for a single month. At this point, even though I know this is ultimately my own fault, I would consider anything paid to them to be a ransom for my data. I can rebuild all of the photos that I posted, since almost all of them were backed up to my cloud storage, phone or server. I can probably rebuild a good part of my content from memory, using the photos to jog my memory. In the end, I will probably manage to regain most of it. I'm not old and senile... not yet, anyway. But, there is still the fact that MY STUFF has been taken from me.

After giving the matter due consideration, I decided that I could replace everything I had lost and then proceeded to delete every login that I had on Slack, on every channel, on every group, etc. I will not be posting anything there in the future. My family can visit my website or Steemit account to see what I'm up to.

But, I'm going to turn this into a learning experience. From now going forward, I'm going to start paying more attention to the Terms of Service. Nothing is totally free, even on the internet and your data is only truly yours if you have backups and physical possession of it. If my contributions are going to be used by that company for the generation of revenue, I'm going to get my share of it or at the very least, receive enough in service to make our mutual arrangement beneficial and equal for both of us, and I will insure that I never again lose access to my original content and contributions, by at least having direct backups and preferably have an assurance from the company that if there is a free and paid plan, that the content on one will never shift to the other without some form of warning.

How successful will I be in this? I don't know. But, I do know that this will never happen to me again on Slack.

I'm not going back there, ever again.