Don't know if it is their intention, but this is probably more of a cost-cutting measure than a revenue-increasing one (or maybe even a technical one, with their data strategy/partitioning it may be much easier to do everything time-based).
Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on dropping these types of customers.
There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few thousand active users on the free plan was basically unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly, isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.
What's wrong with Discord? Most of the projects I want to follow have Discord server, often connected with an IRC channel. I miss a few features from Slack, but in general I'm happy with Discord. It's still free from what I can see. So, what happened to make "OSS projects" etc. to stop using Discord? (Honestly asking, I don't follow Discord itself at all)
Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on dropping these types of customers.
There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few thousand active users on the free plan was basically unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly, isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.