We’ve received notice from Salesforce that our Slack workspace WILL NOT BE DOWNGRADED on June 20th. Stand by for more details, but for now, there is no urgency to back up private channels or direct messages.
The CNCF Slack workspace will be converted from an enterprise plan to a free plan on Friday, June 20, 2025. This will have implications for how Slack works for our community, including a few limitations that we will need to be aware of; however, we don’t anticipate this change to radically impact our collaboration.
For the past ten years, Slack (and Salesforce, which acquired them) has provided the CNCF community with a free enterprise account. They have recently informed us that they will no longer be able to continue to support us as they originally did. We’d like to thank the original Slack founding team and Salesforce for their decade of support.
Starting Friday, we will be subject to the feature limitations of the free Slack plan. The primary ones that will affect us will be retaining only 90 days of message history and having to turn off some apps and workflows that we are currently using.
The CNCF Slack Admin team will do their best to manage these limitations, including making a backup of all public Slack channel history. Depending on how you use the CNCF Slack workspace, you may be impacted by some of these changes.
Later this year, the CNCF may move to an alternative chat and discussion platform more suitable for our community, such as Discord. However, until that point, you’ll find guidance and answers to frequently asked questions about Slack below. If you have any other questions or feedback on our Slack status, join the discussion in the #slack-faq channel.
FAQ
What is changing about Slack?
The CNCF Slack workspace will lose its special status and will be downgraded to a free plan on June 20, 2025. If you are responsible for a channel or private channel, you will need to take some action as soon as possible.
The exact hour and minute of the downgrade are not known, though we have a request in to Slack support for more details.
What actions should channel owners take soon?
If you are responsible for a channel, you’ll need to take some actions this week to deal with the downgrade.
Before Friday:
Saved files and pinned posts: If your channel has important saved files and information in pinned posts, you need to copy that information to other media, such as GitHub files or Google Docs, as soon as possible, and instead have a bookmark linking to that location. Once our account is downgraded, we will no longer be able to access pinned posts and files that are more than 90 days old.
Private channels: Private channels are not backed up to our archives because they can’t be. If you have important information in private channels that is more than 90 days old, copy it to another location as soon as possible. We recommend backing up the contents of your private channel using slackdump, an open source tool.
Additionally, if you have important saved information in direct message conversations that are more than 90 days old, consider copying that information somewhere else. You can use slackdump for these messages as well.
Who will back up private channels?
If you are in a private channel, coordinate there to create a backup using slackdump and determine a storage location for the exported data.
Can I already get a backup of a public channel?
No. We can not provide individual channel backups yet as we are looking into privacy, security, and usage requirements. You can already use the private backup method also for public channels by just using the public channel’s ID.
Are archived channels included in the backup?
Yes.
Why now?
Slack has been a long-time supporter of the CNCF ecosystem. However, there was a recent change in business strategy around supporting large-scale open source communities.
What will running on a free Slack mean?
There are multiple limitations on free Slacks. The ones that will most visibly affect the community are:
- Only retaining 90 days of history: This means that you will not be able to search for messages and statements in your channels that are older than 90 days. We are not permanently losing community history since we have archival backups of all Slack messages. However, those archives are not currently searchable by our community. Note that the 90-day limit includes files posted in a Slack message, so if you have important files for a channel that are part of a pinned Slack message, make a copy of those files elsewhere as soon as possible.
- Disabling all workflows: On our Slack, this primarily means that welcome messages for channels and Slack will stop working.
- Limitation to 10 apps: The Slack Admins team will need to choose a number of applications that are currently in use on our Slack to disable. They will update this FAQ with which ones will be specifically disabled once that decision is made.
- No custom sections: if you have rearranged your channels into multiple custom sections in your Slack interface, those sections will go away, and all channels will be listed together.
- While there are other limitations to free Slack, most of them pertain to features we were not using on ours, such as User Groups, Huddles, and Slack Connect.
What information will we lose?
Our Slack history is backed up to offline archives, which, while presently not searchable, do include the entire time the CNCF community has been on Slack. The things that we will be losing, if not individually backed up, are:
- Private channel conversations: any messages more than 90 days old in private channels
- Direct message conversations: any DM posts more than 90 days old
- Files posted to Slack: any files more than 90 days old that were shared only on Slack
If you have important information in any of these places, please take action to back it up now. You can find instructions here on using slackdump to save private channel and direct message content.
Will we be migrating to a new platform?
Most likely, yes. We are evaluating a move to Discord, which is designed for large communities like ours and includes excellent moderation tools. You can join the discussion about alternatives.
Over the next few weeks, the CNCF staff and community leadership will decide on whether to migrate to a new discussion platform, whether Discord or another alternative.
Could we just stay on free Slack?
Yes, and that’s one of the options that the staff and community leadership will discuss based on our experience under the free plan after the changeover.
Where can I discuss the Slack changes?
If you have specific feedback on our Slack status, join the discussion in the #slack-faq channel. To talk about longer-term discussion about alternatives, join this discussion.
While this is a shift from what we’re used to, we’re confident the CNCF community will continue to collaborate and thrive. We’re doing everything we can to ensure this transition is as smooth as possible for our global community. Whether we remain on Slack or migrate to a new platform later this year, our goal remains the same: to support inclusive, accessible, and open collaboration across all CNCF projects.