February 22, 2026
When ‘open source’ meets ‘oh no’
Show HN: Openslack – An open source version of Slack
Reddit calls out ‘OpenSlack’ as a Slack clone, AI slop, and a lawsuit waiting to happen
TLDR: A developer launched “OpenSlack,” a self-hosted clone of Slack promising free team chat with familiar features, but the community instantly roasted it as an AI-generated knockoff with legal risks and nothing new. The drama centers on clone fatigue, trademark fears, and whether this project is even real work.
A new project called OpenSlack just dropped, promising a free, open‑source version of Slack – the office chat app everyone loves to hate. It claims channels, direct messages, threads, file sharing, even voice “huddles,” all running on your own server so your boss (or Salesforce) doesn’t own your data. On paper, it looks like “Slack, but free and self‑hosted.”
But the community took one look and basically yelled: absolutely not. One user immediately asked the obvious: how is this different from Zulip, a long‑standing open chat tool that already exists and actually works. That set the tone: people weren’t impressed by yet another Slack look‑alike, especially when others have been grinding at this problem for years.
Then the real drama hit. Another commenter slammed it as “pure AI slop,” pointing out the repo has only two commits and almost no visible work. They accused the project of being a lazy copy dressed up as something big, and questioned whether the creator even understands how the thing works. On top of that, they warned the name “OpenSlack” is basically begging Salesforce (Slack’s owner) to send lawyers. The mood? Suspicious, snarky, and honestly kind of hilarious – a mix of legal doom‑posting, clone fatigue, and meme‑level disbelief that this is all it takes to launch a “Show HN” these days.
Key Points
- •OpenSlack is presented as an open-source, self-hostable alternative to Slack for real-time team messaging.
- •It supports channels, direct messages, threaded replies, rich text editing, emoji reactions, message editing/deletion, file uploads with previews, and message search.
- •A quick start guide is provided using Bun and Docker, including cloning the repository, installing dependencies, running database migrations, and starting a dev server at http://localhost:3000.
- •A feature comparison table contrasts Slack and OpenSlack, noting similarities in messaging and real-time features and differences such as lack of @mentions, video huddles, screen sharing, and bots/integrations in OpenSlack.
- •OpenSlack includes dark mode and syntax-highlighted code blocks, is self-hosted, open source, and released under the MIT license.