Dear Slack,
I use your app all day, every day. A lot of people do!
Slack is all about enabling communication. In fact, according to your website, you go a step further and claim that Slack is “communication for the 21st century”. My understanding is that one part of that is encouraging people and teams to communicate via media beyond just text.
We made Frinkiac and Morbotron because sometimes communicating via shared memories is faster and more fun than just typing. We’ve noticed that some people agree with us, and it makes us really happy that people like what we’ve made.
At first we only had images and images with meme text on them. Slack does a good job of displaying those right in your chat window, when you post a link. Yay!
Later, we added support for GIF files. The people of the internet love those things! But the GIF format is old, and not very good. Like a lot of sites that deal with GIFs, we also generate an identical MP4 file, which is a lot like a GIF only higher quality and ten times smaller. (Sites like Giphy and Twitter will convert GIF files into MP4 files.)
When you post a direct link to our GIF files into Slack, they will appear directly in your chat window and autoplay … if they’re smaller than 2 MB. Since GIFs are kind of big, that’s a short GIF. Like two seconds long, if the GIF looks nice like ours do. They also have support for playing video files: there’s no length limit, but they don’t autoplay. You’ve probably seen this.
Well, there’s one other thing about Slack’s support for playing video files: only videos from Slack’s preferred services (fka their “whitelist”) are supported. In May, shortly after we launched MP4 support, we asked to be added.
We love your important work!
One thing to know about the mp4 route is that the videos won’t autoplay as they do now.
I can’t give an ETA, but we will get you whitelisted, and I can follow up with you when this happens.
We really wanted to keep the autoplay functionality of GIFs. We proposed a new meta tag that essentially promises that the video doesn’t have any audio, so it can autoplay just like a GIF. (We guessed that Imgur and Giphy, etc, would have no problem adding support for such a meta tag, if it existed.)
I’m afraid this will not happen, at least not anytime soon. Would you prefer to remain as-is, or whitelist you for the non-autoplaying mp4 videos?
We chose to remain as-is: to keep autoplay and to think about whether we wanted to change our minds.
Over the next few months, we started including a link to both the GIF and MP4 files in our meta tags. This works better when you’re sharing elsewhere, such as Facebook. (And, notably, Slack uses the Open Graph meta tags that Facebook defined.) Slack sees that there’s an MP4 link and we’re not on the whitelist, so it doesn’t keep looking for the GIF file that it would display if not for the existence of the MP4 file. This was a substantial downgrade in the experience of posting Frinkiac links to Slack.
We changed our minds, and asked to be added to their whitelist. We figured that it was worth sacrificing autoplay in favor of being able to play in Slack at all.
After a not-very-long delay, we got some good news:
Sorry for the delay on this. My team indicated that they just whitelisted those URLs. Let me know if that helps or if I can help with anything else.
But nothing changed, and the video still didn’t unfurl in Slack.
Sorry about this. It looks like there’s unfortunately a significant backlog for the whitelisting since the number of services we’re permitting for now is pretty limited.
Even though I’m unable to give you any time frame on when this may happen, I will get back in touch once your request has been completed.
I’m very sorry for the delay here. In the meantime, let me know if I can help with something else.
I asked to be notified when it was ready. That was in August. Having heard nothing since then, I asked about the progress.
Thanks for checking in on this. I’m afraid that I can’t provide much of an update on this. It looks like due to the limited number of services being allowed, this is preventing very many sites from being whitelisted.
I’m so sorry that I don’t have better news on this. I hope that there’s some progress made on this in the future and if there is, I’ll definitely keep you in the loop. Let me know if there’s something else that I can help with.
Thinking this was quite a big backlog, I asked what we’d have to do to get to the top of it. I even joked that they should give us Vine’s spot on the whitelist.
That’s when Slack told us about having changed their policy:
While we would love to be able to whitelist as many rich media services as possible, there are unfortunately security implications doing so on a large scale. For this reason, the unfurling team has recently re-evaluated its position on whitelisting media sites.
Rather than put teams through unnecessary or unrealistic backlogs waiting for approval, their current decision is to refine the scope of approvals to larger, mass-adopted services like Vimeo and YouTube. I will absolutely keep your domains on the list of interested services, but I’m afraid that we don’t currently have plans to whitelist individual providers at this time.
Now, yes, it’s true that we’re not as big as YouTube.
But I suggest that sometimes it’s not necessarily a YouTube video, or a Vimeo video, that enables you to communicate exactly what you wanted to say as quickly as possible.
Today, Slack welcomed Microsoft as a competitor in the chat game.
Communication is hard, yet it is the most fundamental thing we do as human beings. We’ve spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks.
I hope all your human quirks have been created for you and hosted on the largest and most popular websites.
We are deeply committed to making our customers’ experience of their existing tools even better, no matter who makes them
No matter who makes them, as long as who makes them is the largest and most popular services on the internet.
You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.
I think this was meant to be advice for Microsoft. But it’s advice that, it seems, would be good for Slack to take as well.
Slack’s open letter to Microsoft was about competition, and it was about how much they care about their customers and users.
We here at Frinkiac don’t care about competition. We’re only here to serve up some fun in the corners of the internet where we spend time — and where you spend time. Twitter or Facebook, Reddit or Giphy, Slack or … Skype Teams?
What do we want? We want Frinkiac and Morbotron to work as well as possible everywhere. We want the things you make on our website to make you happy. (Or if it’s a sad GIF, then sad. Your call.) And we want you to be able to see them in Slack when you put them there.
We’re not going to take out a print ad in the New York Times about it, but we will make a small request of you. If you feel like we do, and you’d like Slack to support content from sites like Frinkiac, Morbotron, and others then will you let Slack know?
The popularity depends on whether the service is mass-adopted as Facebook and Vimeo are.
Help?