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As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one

As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users. There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. Users reporting spam is done by them sending a message to an admin, or in the admin channel, and requires someone to manually intervene and moderate the message. So we effectively need to aim for follow-the-sun moderator coverage, which is a bit painful. In terms of usability and accessibility, some of the things Slack does (e.g., threads) are not super-inclusive or accessible to users who use screen readers. Today, based on feedback I've gotten, IRC is still superior for users who rely on screen readers due to some form of visual impairment. Whichever product they go with, it'd be nice if they provided an authenticated IRC gateway which would allow this class of user to have a better experience using the platform as they could use one of the text-based IRC clients that has served them well. For everyone who is saying they hope Slack isn't the choice, I'm fairly confident with these issues today they won't pursue Slack. If anyone from Mozilla, or any other org, would like to discuss some of the challenges we've had using Slack as an open community I'm more than happy to schedule time. I'd like to help you provide the best experience and community for your users.

pcwalton 7y ago
That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.
- carbocation 7y ago
  On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.
  - sk5t 7y ago
    Slack's refusal to add a "block user" option is beyond frustrating. Short of the nuclear option of disabling the account, there is no way to prevent a bad actor from pestering you. Yet this condition seems to be a deliberate choice of Slack's.
    - TheSwordsman 7y ago
      Because Slack's product assumes you have an HR department, and that's an HR issue.
      - jkaplowitz 7y ago
        True story: at a former employer, a colleague made an HR complaint that in reality was well founded due to abuse. At one point in the investigation, HR told the two people not to interact with each other directly, but for unavoidable work reasons they were still in the same team-related Slack channel. A mute or ignore feature would have been great to lower the victim's anxiety level during that time due to HR's unhelpful handling of the situation. The victim's finances and general life circumstances did not make "just quit" a good resolution. (Oh, and the end result: HR fired the victim, with some severance paid, and kept the abuser a while longer. The abuser eventually got fired but probably not due to this incident.)
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    I've myself set to Offline permanently on Slack to try and deflect some of that. It seems to have worked for the most part.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    Discord has a block function, and it's virtually identical to (if not better than) Slack (IIRC, it has better text -- and code -- formatting). Sure, it's "chat for gamers", but it works for anything.
- carterschonwald 7y ago
  I recently evaluated a number of options. I was surprised to realize discord has by far the best moderation / permission / access conctrol management. Plus unlimited webhook and boy support. Granted, it has to handle gamer communities.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    I'm hoping you meant "bot support". :-)
    - carterschonwald 7y ago
      hot damn, thats a good typo. ROFL. thanks for catching that :)
BenTheElder 7y ago
Kubernetes also had (has?) pretty major issues with these, but a community member built some tools using what APIs they do have to make the moderation aspects easier at least: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/slack-infra https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/slack-infra E.G. Reporting: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/1105941470723235840 https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/110594147072323584... Bulk-Deletion / banning: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/1113101191032889344 https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/111310119103288934... They've been really helpful, but Slack still seems _far_ from ideal for this.
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  As I understand it, to support things like timed bans your only options are undocumented APIs which can change at any point in time. So while some things are documented and possible, not everything is and that's not the level of support we need.
  - BenTheElder 7y ago
    Right, most of the APIs used are documented, but https://slack.com/api/users.admin.setInactive https://slack.com/api/users.admin.setInactive is not. There are some unofficial docs: https://github.com/ErikKalkoken/slackApiDoc/blob/master/users.admin.setInactive.md https://github.com/ErikKalkoken/slackApiDoc/blob/master/user... Otherwise APIs used are documented: https://api.slack.com/methods/files.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/files.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/search.files https://api.slack.com/methods/search.files https://api.slack.com/methods/search.messages https://api.slack.com/methods/search.messages To be clear: NOT recommending Slack. Just mentioning that we also have issues and some tooling has helped, the tools could use more docs but they're pretty simple and open source FWIW.
  - giovannibajo1 7y ago
    Still, installing those open source tools in the Go Slack and collaborating with Kubernetes over them seems better that just live with whatever Slack offers today.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
So it sounds like regarding moderation, slack is at best on par with irc. And while on orc you can pretty much script and automate anything you want to facilitate the moderation job, with slack you're at the mercy of having some documented or undocumented api call available? One step forwards and two steps back...
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  Well, in general you can also ignore people on IRC, you can ban people from channels, and some IRCds support restricted DM permissions which require a user to share channels with you and be _validated_ to message you. We don't have these sorts of controls in Slack because it's built to support companies with Human Resource departments. Communities like ours don't give the Slack shareholders value. So in some ways it's worse than IRC.
  - minikites 7y ago
    >you can ban people from channels Why not ban them completely and have a private appeal process? How often are people a nuisance in one channel yet valuable in another?
    - TheSwordsman 7y ago
      More than you'd imagine. Someone may be strongly against a feature, library, or tool and their presence in a channel focused on that thing may not be ideal.
    - ytjohn 7y ago
      I see your point and it does make sense. But from an IRC perspective, most people/groups only care about a handful of channels. So you might have the #community or #support channel, and someone starts acting up. A channel operator can ban them from that channel directly. Alternatively, a lot of IRC "teams" maintain a bot to manage the channel. The bot can give someone a temporary channel ban (a timeout) based on keywords, or a mod in the channel might type something like "!ban userx because of rule 12" and that bot might ban that user from a list of managed channels. That user is then still on the server, they can make their own channels or message admins directly. There might be an #ops channel where they can go and plead their case. If they annoy the admins or someone else that reports them to the admins, then they might get a server-wide ban. A lot of this comes behavior from public irc servers. Channel operators can manage their channel however they desire, and if the users don't like it, they can start their own channel. But for an organization ran IRC server, a server wide ban is more possible. But in the case of say, Mozilla, there are all sorts of different groups running their own channel. So a group working on a mozilla labs project might just start a channel for that project, but not actually have server-ban privileges. So they can moderate their channel and perhaps request a server ban on someone, but that server ban might take hours to approve, or the bad actor might just go away.
lewisl9029 7y ago
I used to think Discord was the clear winner in this space, providing good moderation tools (being a platform designed originally for gaming), with better scaling characteristics than Slack and having unlimited history, but the Apollo team's recent post on why they chose Spectrum changed my mind: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-... TL;DR: being able to have posts & chats indexed by search engines and allowing users to read posts without signing in is a killer feature for open-source communities. Plus the product itself is open-source.
- jlongster 7y ago
  Spectrum is good for lightweight communities but it is nowhere near the capabilities of something like Discord, which something as big as the Mozilla project needs.
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  I use Discord all the time; it's a mess. Its permissions model is complex and hard to reason about, obvious UX decisions in Slack that make for a good experience aren't present in Discord. Like being able to click on someone's name and go to the dedicated DM view for them. Discord is the one thing I dislike more than Slack, even if their backend tech is fucking stellar.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    While their permission system takes some getting used to, once you understand how it works it's very easy and you really only need to setup up once. I also don't see it an issue not being able to click a user to go to DM. Not much more work right-clicking and selecting message, or any of the other options.
    - TheSwordsman 7y ago
      Seeing that the context menu that comes up has about 20 items, I can't personally agree. Overall I hate using Discord and wish it was more like Slack in some ways. Better yet, take me back to the days of TeamSpeak when my Voice Chats had a Text Chat implicitly alongside it.
IshKebab 7y ago
It's not hugely surprising that Slack lacks spam/moderation tools. Their target market is companies, where "I'm your boss, please stop doing that" is usually sufficient!
- gtirloni 7y ago
  Agreed. It's surprising open source projects picked it.
xfitm3 7y ago
Slack is trash and hostile to users, but unfortunately, it has significant momentum. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla switches over.
- sumedh 7y ago
  > Slack is trash and hostile to users It seems better than Skype and Hipchat and whatever Google's latest chat app.
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    I think we need to be explicit, Slack isn't always conducive to the needs of open communities. Some of its features are extremely friendly to users, like having the possibility of full message history retention and mobile apps. But the former does require you be paid, and the latter is also possible with other solutions.
  - cauthon 7y ago
    And immensely better than Microsoft teams
  - lugg 7y ago
    That's debatable. I can't stand hipchat but at least it doesn't fall over loading gifs.
    - sumedh 7y ago
      Is it really debatable when Atlassian gave up on hitchat.
  - mrweasel 7y ago
    Although everything is better than Google Chat.
  - thinkmassive 7y ago
    But how about Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, and other open source chat servers?
vertis 7y ago
I can't fathom open source projects and communities using slack as a communication platform. I like slack, it's a great product for business, where you can pay $X for each user in your org. However, OS and non-profit communities quickly run into the history issue. There is no way that some of the communities I'm part of on Slack could pay for all the users. For example, the "Maker's Kitchen" slack has 1500-2000 people. How much information and knowledge is lost and questions re-asked?
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  As I mentioned, in our community we have some deal with Slack so that we are paid (up to a point) and have full message history retention. Search can also go through all of those messages too. This is extremely valuable, and is a selling point for Slack if you can somehow get on to a paid plan without breaking the bank. But in my experience, many don't use the search anyhow. :P I'll admit, I don't know the full details of the relationship we have with Slack as I'm just an admin and not an owner. It is paid for by someone, but I don't know how much we're paying per head or of it's a flat rate.
  - solipsism 7y ago
    If people aren't using search, then message history retention isn't that important for you it seems. I would suggest that maybe your people are using email in situations where they'd like more permanence. This is common, and Slack is treated more like a hallway conversation. Hallway conversations are enormously valuable, but if you want a record of something or if you want to make sure it reaches everyone, you use email instead.
    - TheSwordsman 7y ago
      It is to me personally, as I use it to find answers to questions I don't know the answer to. At a minimum, I can point them to someone who had a similar problem in case they solved it.
      - 7y ago
hanniabu 7y ago
Have you tried Discord? I seems like it would meet all these desires. We switched to it a year ago and it's been great.
- consto 7y ago
  Isn't Discord burning through VC money right now to aquire users?
- Sir_Substance 7y ago
  Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's decided I look like a headless browser or something. Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla. I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  I have another thread I commented on where I discuss Discord very briefly. Most times I used Discord I'm hella annoyed, Slack just has me slightly frustrated sometimes. To each their own, but the Discord UX doesn't do it for me. That said, watching them migrate voice servers seamlessly between regions is fucking impressive, though. Kudos to them on that.
- nonbirithm 7y ago
  Discord works okay. For me, the only issue is not being allowed to use third party clients without being banned. I was hoping I could integrate it with tmux or Emacs like I was used to doing with IRC.
- auscompgeek 7y ago
  Discord has terrible accessibility - its themes are low contrast. The GFW is also a concern here.
varjag 7y ago
The change is generational. New kids grew up on Discord and Slack, it's what they are going to use.
seancorfield 7y ago
I'm an admin on the Clojurians Slack workspace where we have about 15,000 members, of whom about 1,400 or so are considered "active" for Slack's purpose -- which is still an unaffordable amount for an open source community. Over the years since we created the Clojurians Slack, we've tried to create communities on a broad range of alternatives. None of the others have gained traction, unfortunately. I think Zulip is probably the best alternative and it offers a free option for open source projects with full history/searching, and that's probably been the most successful alternative so far. Clojure's community on IRC was in the hundreds. Slack very quickly became thousands. It surprised us. The fact that none of the alternatives have grown has also surprised us but people go where people go.
tjpnz 7y ago
>There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. I've been using IRC for almost two decades now and I can't help but feel this is a good thing. A lot of big IRC channels have become very good at alienating members of their communities through excessive moderation - if you don't believe me spend some time on Freenode on any given day. Having to go through a few additional steps seems like it could benefit many communities.

pcwalton 7y ago

That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.

carbocation 7y ago
On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.
- sk5t 7y ago
  Slack's refusal to add a "block user" option is beyond frustrating. Short of the nuclear option of disabling the account, there is no way to prevent a bad actor from pestering you. Yet this condition seems to be a deliberate choice of Slack's.
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    Because Slack's product assumes you have an HR department, and that's an HR issue.
    - jkaplowitz 7y ago
      True story: at a former employer, a colleague made an HR complaint that in reality was well founded due to abuse. At one point in the investigation, HR told the two people not to interact with each other directly, but for unavoidable work reasons they were still in the same team-related Slack channel. A mute or ignore feature would have been great to lower the victim's anxiety level during that time due to HR's unhelpful handling of the situation. The victim's finances and general life circumstances did not make "just quit" a good resolution. (Oh, and the end result: HR fired the victim, with some severance paid, and kept the abuser a while longer. The abuser eventually got fired but probably not due to this incident.)
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  I've myself set to Offline permanently on Slack to try and deflect some of that. It seems to have worked for the most part.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  Discord has a block function, and it's virtually identical to (if not better than) Slack (IIRC, it has better text -- and code -- formatting). Sure, it's "chat for gamers", but it works for anything.
carterschonwald 7y ago
I recently evaluated a number of options. I was surprised to realize discord has by far the best moderation / permission / access conctrol management. Plus unlimited webhook and boy support. Granted, it has to handle gamer communities.
- mcguire 7y ago
  I'm hoping you meant "bot support". :-)
  - carterschonwald 7y ago
    hot damn, thats a good typo. ROFL. thanks for catching that :)

BenTheElder 7y ago

Kubernetes also had (has?) pretty major issues with these, but a community member built some tools using what APIs they do have to make the moderation aspects easier at least: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/slack-infra https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/slack-infra E.G. Reporting: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/1105941470723235840 https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/110594147072323584... Bulk-Deletion / banning: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/1113101191032889344 https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/111310119103288934... They've been really helpful, but Slack still seems _far_ from ideal for this.

TheSwordsman 7y ago
As I understand it, to support things like timed bans your only options are undocumented APIs which can change at any point in time. So while some things are documented and possible, not everything is and that's not the level of support we need.
- BenTheElder 7y ago
  Right, most of the APIs used are documented, but https://slack.com/api/users.admin.setInactive https://slack.com/api/users.admin.setInactive is not. There are some unofficial docs: https://github.com/ErikKalkoken/slackApiDoc/blob/master/users.admin.setInactive.md https://github.com/ErikKalkoken/slackApiDoc/blob/master/user... Otherwise APIs used are documented: https://api.slack.com/methods/files.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/files.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.delete https://api.slack.com/methods/search.files https://api.slack.com/methods/search.files https://api.slack.com/methods/search.messages https://api.slack.com/methods/search.messages To be clear: NOT recommending Slack. Just mentioning that we also have issues and some tooling has helped, the tools could use more docs but they're pretty simple and open source FWIW.
- giovannibajo1 7y ago
  Still, installing those open source tools in the Go Slack and collaborating with Kubernetes over them seems better that just live with whatever Slack offers today.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

So it sounds like regarding moderation, slack is at best on par with irc. And while on orc you can pretty much script and automate anything you want to facilitate the moderation job, with slack you're at the mercy of having some documented or undocumented api call available? One step forwards and two steps back...

TheSwordsman 7y ago
Well, in general you can also ignore people on IRC, you can ban people from channels, and some IRCds support restricted DM permissions which require a user to share channels with you and be _validated_ to message you. We don't have these sorts of controls in Slack because it's built to support companies with Human Resource departments. Communities like ours don't give the Slack shareholders value. So in some ways it's worse than IRC.
- minikites 7y ago
  >you can ban people from channels Why not ban them completely and have a private appeal process? How often are people a nuisance in one channel yet valuable in another?
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    More than you'd imagine. Someone may be strongly against a feature, library, or tool and their presence in a channel focused on that thing may not be ideal.
  - ytjohn 7y ago
    I see your point and it does make sense. But from an IRC perspective, most people/groups only care about a handful of channels. So you might have the #community or #support channel, and someone starts acting up. A channel operator can ban them from that channel directly. Alternatively, a lot of IRC "teams" maintain a bot to manage the channel. The bot can give someone a temporary channel ban (a timeout) based on keywords, or a mod in the channel might type something like "!ban userx because of rule 12" and that bot might ban that user from a list of managed channels. That user is then still on the server, they can make their own channels or message admins directly. There might be an #ops channel where they can go and plead their case. If they annoy the admins or someone else that reports them to the admins, then they might get a server-wide ban. A lot of this comes behavior from public irc servers. Channel operators can manage their channel however they desire, and if the users don't like it, they can start their own channel. But for an organization ran IRC server, a server wide ban is more possible. But in the case of say, Mozilla, there are all sorts of different groups running their own channel. So a group working on a mozilla labs project might just start a channel for that project, but not actually have server-ban privileges. So they can moderate their channel and perhaps request a server ban on someone, but that server ban might take hours to approve, or the bad actor might just go away.

lewisl9029 7y ago

I used to think Discord was the clear winner in this space, providing good moderation tools (being a platform designed originally for gaming), with better scaling characteristics than Slack and having unlimited history, but the Apollo team's recent post on why they chose Spectrum changed my mind: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-... TL;DR: being able to have posts & chats indexed by search engines and allowing users to read posts without signing in is a killer feature for open-source communities. Plus the product itself is open-source.

jlongster 7y ago
Spectrum is good for lightweight communities but it is nowhere near the capabilities of something like Discord, which something as big as the Mozilla project needs.
TheSwordsman 7y ago
I use Discord all the time; it's a mess. Its permissions model is complex and hard to reason about, obvious UX decisions in Slack that make for a good experience aren't present in Discord. Like being able to click on someone's name and go to the dedicated DM view for them. Discord is the one thing I dislike more than Slack, even if their backend tech is fucking stellar.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  While their permission system takes some getting used to, once you understand how it works it's very easy and you really only need to setup up once. I also don't see it an issue not being able to click a user to go to DM. Not much more work right-clicking and selecting message, or any of the other options.
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    Seeing that the context menu that comes up has about 20 items, I can't personally agree. Overall I hate using Discord and wish it was more like Slack in some ways. Better yet, take me back to the days of TeamSpeak when my Voice Chats had a Text Chat implicitly alongside it.

IshKebab 7y ago

It's not hugely surprising that Slack lacks spam/moderation tools. Their target market is companies, where "I'm your boss, please stop doing that" is usually sufficient!

gtirloni 7y ago
Agreed. It's surprising open source projects picked it.

xfitm3 7y ago

Slack is trash and hostile to users, but unfortunately, it has significant momentum. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla switches over.

sumedh 7y ago
> Slack is trash and hostile to users It seems better than Skype and Hipchat and whatever Google's latest chat app.
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  I think we need to be explicit, Slack isn't always conducive to the needs of open communities. Some of its features are extremely friendly to users, like having the possibility of full message history retention and mobile apps. But the former does require you be paid, and the latter is also possible with other solutions.
- cauthon 7y ago
  And immensely better than Microsoft teams
- lugg 7y ago
  That's debatable. I can't stand hipchat but at least it doesn't fall over loading gifs.
  - sumedh 7y ago
    Is it really debatable when Atlassian gave up on hitchat.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  Although everything is better than Google Chat.
- thinkmassive 7y ago
  But how about Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, and other open source chat servers?

vertis 7y ago

I can't fathom open source projects and communities using slack as a communication platform. I like slack, it's a great product for business, where you can pay $X for each user in your org. However, OS and non-profit communities quickly run into the history issue. There is no way that some of the communities I'm part of on Slack could pay for all the users. For example, the "Maker's Kitchen" slack has 1500-2000 people. How much information and knowledge is lost and questions re-asked?

TheSwordsman 7y ago
As I mentioned, in our community we have some deal with Slack so that we are paid (up to a point) and have full message history retention. Search can also go through all of those messages too. This is extremely valuable, and is a selling point for Slack if you can somehow get on to a paid plan without breaking the bank. But in my experience, many don't use the search anyhow. :P I'll admit, I don't know the full details of the relationship we have with Slack as I'm just an admin and not an owner. It is paid for by someone, but I don't know how much we're paying per head or of it's a flat rate.
- solipsism 7y ago
  If people aren't using search, then message history retention isn't that important for you it seems. I would suggest that maybe your people are using email in situations where they'd like more permanence. This is common, and Slack is treated more like a hallway conversation. Hallway conversations are enormously valuable, but if you want a record of something or if you want to make sure it reaches everyone, you use email instead.
  - TheSwordsman 7y ago
    It is to me personally, as I use it to find answers to questions I don't know the answer to. At a minimum, I can point them to someone who had a similar problem in case they solved it.
    - 7y ago

hanniabu 7y ago

Have you tried Discord? I seems like it would meet all these desires. We switched to it a year ago and it's been great.

consto 7y ago
Isn't Discord burning through VC money right now to aquire users?
Sir_Substance 7y ago
Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's decided I look like a headless browser or something. Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla. I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.
TheSwordsman 7y ago
I have another thread I commented on where I discuss Discord very briefly. Most times I used Discord I'm hella annoyed, Slack just has me slightly frustrated sometimes. To each their own, but the Discord UX doesn't do it for me. That said, watching them migrate voice servers seamlessly between regions is fucking impressive, though. Kudos to them on that.
nonbirithm 7y ago
Discord works okay. For me, the only issue is not being allowed to use third party clients without being banned. I was hoping I could integrate it with tmux or Emacs like I was used to doing with IRC.
auscompgeek 7y ago
Discord has terrible accessibility - its themes are low contrast. The GFW is also a concern here.

varjag 7y ago

The change is generational. New kids grew up on Discord and Slack, it's what they are going to use.

seancorfield 7y ago

I'm an admin on the Clojurians Slack workspace where we have about 15,000 members, of whom about 1,400 or so are considered "active" for Slack's purpose -- which is still an unaffordable amount for an open source community. Over the years since we created the Clojurians Slack, we've tried to create communities on a broad range of alternatives. None of the others have gained traction, unfortunately. I think Zulip is probably the best alternative and it offers a free option for open source projects with full history/searching, and that's probably been the most successful alternative so far. Clojure's community on IRC was in the hundreds. Slack very quickly became thousands. It surprised us. The fact that none of the alternatives have grown has also surprised us but people go where people go.

tjpnz 7y ago

>There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. I've been using IRC for almost two decades now and I can't help but feel this is a good thing. A lot of big IRC channels have become very good at alienating members of their communities through excessive moderation - if you don't believe me spend some time on Freenode on any given day. Having to go through a few additional steps seems like it could benefit many communities.