Team chat.Just the load-bearing parts.
Channels, threads, DMs, mentions, search. Presence dots that mean something. No huddles. No clips. No AI summaries you didn't ask for. Just the chat your team will actually open.
One window. Channels on the left. Conversation in the middle.
No sidebars-within-sidebars. No collapsible mystery panels. The shape of chat — restored.
- general
- design
- engineering4
- product
- incidents12
- random
- launches2
- hiring
- MCMira Chen
- DPDevon Park
- SHSasha Hill
- TVTheo Vance
- TTickets
- KTasks
- NNotes
Pushed v3 of the sidebar — the unread badge now lives flush to the channel name. Feels much calmer.
Beautiful. Going to mirror this on the threads panel so they share a rhythm.
Quick question — should the active channel use the accent border on the left or the right?
Left. Reads like a book. Right-anchored selections feel like notifications.
Agree. Let me push a fix
A reply isn't a fork in the road.
Threads stay anchored to their parent. The conversation never leaves the channel — it just steps to the side.
DMs that feel like one-on-ones.
Pin the message that matters. Watch presence in real time. Read receipts that respect your status.
How a message moves through Channels.
A message lands in a channel. No formatting bar in your face, no rich block editor mood.
Replies branch into the thread, anchored to the parent. The channel stays readable.
Emoji that mean something. No corporate-approved sticker pack.
@person, @here, @channel. The notification you actually wanted.
Eight things. All of them load-bearing.
Every feature here exists because removing it would break a real day. The rest of the surface area? Gone.
Public, private, and 1:1. The whole shape of chat in one sidebar.
A reply doesn't fork the channel. The conversation steps to the side.
@person, @here, @channel. Notifications you actually wanted.
Online dots that pulse with the truth. Typing indicators per channel.
Full open-source set. Your shrug doesn't need approval.
Indexed across channels, DMs, threads. No 90-day paywall.
Respects Away / DND. Mentions queue up, the dot stays dark.
Per-channel counts that don't lie. Mark all read actually does.
The features we deliberately deleted.
Every line below was a roadmap item we said no to. The list is the product.
Where Channels actually shows up.
Two timezones, no time for ceremony. Channels, threads, DMs — that's the whole tool. Onboarding takes a coffee.
Public #help and #dev channels. Threads keep the bug reports tidy. Mentions actually surface — no marketplace noise.
Design, engineering, support sharing one workspace. Pinned messages keep specs at hand. Quiet hours mean late shipping doesn't wake support.
Six questions we get a lot.
Slack is a chat app with a hundred tools bolted on. Channels is a chat app. We don't ship huddles, clips, Workflow Builder, AI summaries, a marketplace, Slack Connect upsells, or per-channel SSO. The pieces that remain — channels, threads, DMs, mentions, presence, search — are tighter for it.
We don't ship them. The world has Zoom, Meet, FaceTime, Tuple, and a phone. Channels does text, well. If you need a call, click the link.
Webhooks in. Webhooks out. A small set of first-party connectors for the things teams actually use (GitHub, Linear, Stripe alerts). No directory of 1,800 apps; no app-of-the-week feature pushes.
iOS and Android. Same shape as the desktop app — sidebar, channel, thread. Push notifications respect Quiet Hours. No social-media style 'engagement' nudges.
Full-text index across channels, DMs, and threads. No 90-day paywall on history. Filter by person, channel, or date in the same input.
Configurable per workspace, with sensible defaults. Export anytime in JSON. Your messages stay yours, even if you leave us.