I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, your communications are often legally not your own property (though it is arguable, at least in the US).
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
No, I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. There are other categories where I've had no choice but to use the same communication channels others were using despite the content of my communications being emphatically mine.
I actually had the same question. Maybe community or neighborhood groups or volunteer activities? I'd probably just call all that personal but I could see a distinction.
> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
Well then you missed the entire point of my comment, which was specifically about the free plan, and specifically about when you haven't had a chance to run such a script incrementally.
