A while back, I joined a company with a "Slack-first" communication policy. I was concerned from the beginning because Slack or Teams had never felt sufficient at the companies where I'd worked before. Some discussions happened over email, meetings played an important role, Jira was used heavily, and Google Docs or Confluence was used for documentation. That setup felt necessary, but it wasn't optimal. So the "Slack-first" approach sounded suspicious, but intriguing. I was curious what they had done with Slack to solve this multi-tool mess. In practice, though, it didn't solve it for me.

Take the DevOps support channel. I was new, the infrastructure setup had some issues, and I asked question after question, feeling more and more like an idiot who constantly bothers people (potentially, every person in the channel), because sometimes it was a genuine bug, and sometimes it was simply my misunderstanding of the setup. I always got answers eventually, but they were slower and shallower than if someone had walked with me through the entire process. But why would anyone do that when the official format for this type of conversation was a channel where "someone will help ASAP"?

Every new project got a channel. But a project isn't one conversation - it's many. Threads were supposed to fix that, except threads are optional by design - and it only takes one person replying in the main channel for the structure of the conversation to collapse for everyone.

Topics that were inconvenient simply scrolled away. I'd raise something important in a meeting, hear "we can talk about that later" because our room booking was ending, I'd write in the channel, and the channel made sure later never came, because chat has no concept of "unresolved", but it has a concept of "skipped and forgotten".

I left that company in about a month. This communication mess wasn't the only reason, but it played its role. I'd had a proof of concept for a "forum for work" sitting around for years, unsure whether anyone needed it. That month convinced me. So I built it - most of what exists took me a few months. AI made that realistic for a solo founder: not only the code, but the landing pages, help docs, videos, and all the surrounding work that would have taken too much time and resources to finish alone.

Vostorq is essentially a message board adapted for internal company communication. Not the strongest selling point in 2026, perhaps, but I've loved this format since my youth. Spaces (forums, in message-board terms) are permanent areas for a team, project, or function. Each space contains topics, with one focused discussion per topic: a decision, an RFC, a recurring question, or anything else that deserves its own place. And topic is that place - it's not a position in a stream. It can slip to page two, but it doesn't dissolve into a thousand unrelated messages, and someone can always bring it back. Replies tend to be complete thoughts rather than fragments because the format quietly encourages that.

Vostorq is unlikely to become the best place for "Anyone seen my charger?" and #ourpets, but these conversations should not dictate the format companies use for important discussions, because currently chat destroys the value of the important ones.

The honest state of the project: it's an MVP built by one person (myself). There is a public demo workspace you can explore: https://app.vostorq.com/join/W-1/join-demo (it requires sign-up, but it is super fast and simple).

Plenty is still missing. There are no mobile apps and no integrations yet, apart from the AI agents, which are a built-in feature rather than a plug-in.

I would be glad to hear your thoughts about the tool, but also — does your company have this communication problem, or was my experience just uniquely unlucky? And if you've tried moving serious discussions out of chat before - using Twist, Basecamp, Threads.com before it shut down, or some other tool - what killed it?

Show HN: Vostorq – I built the anti-Slack after working at a Slack-first company