5 ms·

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 scali

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.
snazz 7y ago
I feel like search engine indexing is a feature that should be covered by mailing lists or a forum, not chat. I don’t think that finding a years-old chat log provides nearly as much useful context for solving an issue as longer-form communication.
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  If the full conversation is retained what's the functional difference?
  - snazz 7y ago
    From what I’ve seen (with grains of salt and whatnot): Chat is an inherently transient medium. Being a participant in the conversation can be important and you can’t really reference a conversation you had on May 6th 2007 and expect to have people willing to continue it with you. On the other hand, you can resurrect an email or forum thread if you weren’t there in the first place and expect that it will continue to be replied to.

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.

snazz 7y ago

I feel like search engine indexing is a feature that should be covered by mailing lists or a forum, not chat. I don’t think that finding a years-old chat log provides nearly as much useful context for solving an issue as longer-form communication.

TheSwordsman 7y ago
If the full conversation is retained what's the functional difference?
- snazz 7y ago
  From what I’ve seen (with grains of salt and whatnot): Chat is an inherently transient medium. Being a participant in the conversation can be important and you can’t really reference a conversation you had on May 6th 2007 and expect to have people willing to continue it with you. On the other hand, you can resurrect an email or forum thread if you weren’t there in the first place and expect that it will continue to be replied to.