Along the same lines as author's opening paragraph. The Apache Airflow team used to use Gitter.im, which was actually pretty good in terms of search. Google se

Along the same lines as author's opening paragraph. The Apache Airflow team used to use Gitter.im, which was actually pretty good in terms of search. Google search results would link right to a specific conversation and that provided great value. Joining was easy too. However the community voted to move to Slack. The main reason given was around its popularity, more so than anything else. It was also the Slack free tier, so there was very little in the way of conversation history being available. However, it is what the community wanted, even though it became a barrier for me.