I've been hosting a personal server, a company server, and servers for every one of clients since we started as a web consulting company.
It's far superior to Slack for remote work in our experience because it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously, as opposed to something like Slack/IRC where you have a wall of unread messages all mixed together every time you sign in.
The biggest difference is that every conversation must have a topic title and be put into a stream, giving all the benefits of forums or email threads with subjects. Compare that to Slack/IRC where the the default mode is putting your messages in big firehose channels that don't encourage breaking individual conversions out into separate threads.
It's far superior to Slack for remote work in our experience because it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously, as opposed to something like Slack/IRC where you have a wall of unread messages all mixed together every time you sign in.
The biggest difference is that every conversation must have a topic title and be put into a stream, giving all the benefits of forums or email threads with subjects. Compare that to Slack/IRC where the the default mode is putting your messages in big firehose channels that don't encourage breaking individual conversions out into separate threads.