Alternatives To Slack?

[StrangeWill]

Background​

Well recently this article has been floating around: https://skyfall.dev/posts/slack

TL;DR: an open group slack ended up crossing the threshold for free Slack for communities like ours, moving to $5k/yr (we're not there yet) and nailed them with another fee. While that's been fixed, their data was effectively at risk of being lost on short notice.

While we haven't hit the 250 yet, at 250 users we only pay 15% which is... $271.87/mo, that's still way more than we can afford currently (and even if we could, I'm not super interested in burning 95% of the Devanooga budget on Slack).

Why Slack?​

Originally we choose Slack for the following reasons:

• Our old online community for Chattanooga was Slack, so familiarity
• Businesses usually approve of Slack, so the app is already approved
• Channels can be created and joined/left as desired, subscribe to what you care about

We had considered Discord but:

• All channels were auto-subscribed by default (this is no longer the case in newer Discord builds)
• The UI really doesn't play well with large number of channels
• No channel creation (could smack a bot to do that though)

"What about IRC"

OK all IRC clients mostly suck, we're not subjecting people that may not be uber-nerds to.... all of that.

What Are We Looking For?​

We've had this discussion off and on a few times, and I think it's time again to have that discussion so my thoughts:

• Own our own data
• Indexable is a huge plus (allow others to see public channels)
• Port data from Slack (not mandatory but would be a huge plus)
• Desktop/Mobile clients (web only isn't great)
• Good UX
• A decent API so we can port some of our tooling over

My general feelings so far:

• Slack
  • Rather get off of it, but can tolerate being around longer
  • Moderation tools are awful
  • Costs will be bad when we hit that
• Discord
  • It's gotten better, may be an option, but still in the bucket of Slack
  • Moderation tools are better
  • Costs don't really exist but we lose access to all of our icons and fun stuff like that
• Mattermost
  • They've been making the open source version worse, not super interested
• Rocket.Chat
  • Last time we evaluated this, it wasn't great, pretty clunky, maybe better now.

Thoughts? If we got more to consider I'll add them to the poll!


Something that supports SSO (like Keycloak for both these forums + the chat) may be nice...

 

[sauerkraus]

Yeah another main con for Discord was/is that employers generally don't like it when that's installed on work machines, which reduces accessibility for people during their work day

 

[brb3]

From my perspective, Discord is completely out of the question as it's really just a worse Slack. The one thing that's better are the Voice Channels. Everything else is worse, IMO.

I don't think that Indexable channels are something that we will find, to be honest. The closest we will get to that is just using the forums.

Zulip is probably the closest we will get to a good direct alternative to Slack. There are some limitations (limited amount of mobile notifications, for example), but ya know, whatever.

I would also propose that we explore Matrix using Element (client) and Element Server Suite (server) -- I don't know much about it, but I think it's a contender we aren't considering.

@StrangeWill I can throw the Element Server Suite online and we can evaluate if you'd like.

 

[StrangeWill]

Yeah another main con for Discord was/is that employers generally don't like it when that's installed on work machines, which reduces accessibility for people during their work day

Yeah, that's going to be annoying with a few of the platforms, but Discord doubly so because it's a "Gamer platform".

From my perspective, Discord is completely out of the question as it's really just a worse Slack. The one thing that's better are the Voice Channels. Everything else is worse, IMO.

Yeah, the chat is rough.

Zulip is probably the closest we will get to a good direct alternative to Slack. There are some limitations (limited amount of mobile notifications, for example), but ya know, whatever.

I would also propose that we explore Matrix using Element (client) and Element Server Suite (server) -- I don't know much about it, but I think it's a contender we aren't considering.

@StrangeWill I can throw the Element Server Suite online and we can evaluate if you'd like.

If it isn't a huge pain, getting a server online to play with would be great, do you think we care about "importing" our stuff or do we cut, run and cry?