Work uses Slack, which is quite entrenched in the organization, so trying to move all of my contacts over to something else would be nontrivial. Colleagues use it to send moderately urgent messages every now and then, so notifications on my phone would be a nice-to-have.
I haven’t had much luck finding well-maintained open-source clients for Slack. I could sandbox Play Services alongside the official app or a browser, but I’d rather not make my phone run the whole Google Play stack just for those notifications. Did I miss any low-hanging fruit or is hosting a Matrix bridge the only alternative?
Same situation. But notifications is pretty easy to solve. Just set them to go to some private email.
As for accessing the app privately, also easy enough: don’t use the app, use the web interface on a private browser profile.
That’s not possible on mobile without user-agent spoofing the browser to make it appear like a desktop. But then if it’s only messages “every now and then”, that should not be problem. Just keep to desktop, your quality of life has improved already! That is just my own experience, of course.