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What do you guys think about using Discourse as an alternative? It's not quite real time chat, but it almost is. You get the same attachments / decent UI benef

by nickjj 9y ago

What do you guys think about using Discourse as an alternative? It's not quite real time chat, but it almost is. You get the same attachments / decent UI benefits of Slack, it's open source, you can self host it without too much pain and it has a pretty nice API. No limitations on chat history too. I think in some ways it's much better than Slack because you have proper categories and threads so I think Discourse is a million times better if you're looking to use it as a mailing list alternative. In some ways it's worse than Slack because there's something very nice about just having to enter in 1 line of chat to get a message across, but with Discourse you would have to start a thread in some category. I'm going to be using either Slack or Discourse to build a private community but I haven't decided on which one yet. In case you've never heard of Discourse before, here's a live demo hosted on their official site https://try.discourse.org/ https://try.discourse.org/.

larrysalibra 9y ago
If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store of community information new members or potential new members can browse to learn about the community. Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.
- nickjj 9y ago
  Yeah, basically I have a bunch of people who signed up to my programming courses and I want to give them a place to hang out, ask questions and interact with each other. I've used Slack with other organizations and it really is a black hole. Not just for the 10,000 history limitation, but it's really hard to find and read previous conversations.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Discourse has the advantage of having some sort of moderation tools included - people can have discrete permissions and rights, unlike Slack where everyone's equal - but the lack of a join/part for channels is annoying, and the inability for admins to create private channels is very frustrating.

by nickjj 9y ago

larrysalibra 9y ago

If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store of community information new members or potential new members can browse to learn about the community. Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.

nickjj 9y ago
Yeah, basically I have a bunch of people who signed up to my programming courses and I want to give them a place to hang out, ask questions and interact with each other. I've used Slack with other organizations and it really is a black hole. Not just for the 10,000 history limitation, but it's really hard to find and read previous conversations.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Discourse has the advantage of having some sort of moderation tools included - people can have discrete permissions and rights, unlike Slack where everyone's equal - but the lack of a join/part for channels is annoying, and the inability for admins to create private channels is very frustrating.