(DUPLICATE) Moving from Slack to another service

[benigeri]

PLEASE DISCUSS IN #25

Why don't we leave Slack?

In short, we haven't found a better alternative.

1. High switching cost

7500 people already have Reactiflux Slack account. Dozens of repos link to their respective Reactiflux channel. Switching to another service would be a big deal, and we'll probably lose a significant chunk of the community.

We're not opposed to moving away from Slack. We have very high switching cost though, so we'll only move if we have very good reasons to do so.

2. The product is amazing

Slack is great, and lots of people love it. Many of us believe it's the best messaging service for teams.

3. Many of us have it open by default.

Reactiflux is unusually active compared to other public Slack groups, Gitter channels, IRC channels, etc… Why is that?

Probably because so many of us use React and Slack at work.

Many of us are thinking about React at work. We’re working using libraries, building libraries, and running into bugs and problems. So we’re inclined to talk (read complain) about it with other people.

Many of us work at startups and tech companies that use Slack for team communication. So we open Slack every day and leave it running almost all the time.

And several months ago, Slack made it incredibly to switch between all of your teams.

Which means that even though most of us could never justify having yet another app or webpage open 24/7, just to talk to Reactiflux people, it happens automatically.

Obviously this isn’t the case for everyone on Reactiflux, but it is for many of us. In the early days, tons of people that joined kept on telling me “Oh, it’s so nice to be able to ask React questions on Slack since I already have it open all day.”

What are the top contenders?

Gitter

Gitter's benefits are that:

1. It works well with GitHub, which probably everybody on Reactiflux users.
2. It comes with unlimited message history.

But Reactiflux would not make sense in Gitter world. Gitter channels are based on repos. So instead of what we currently have, in Slack world:

• reactiflux/react-router
• reactiflux/redux
• reactiflux/fluxible

Gitter world would look like this:

• rakt/react-router
• facebook/react
• yahoo/fluxible

All channels would no longer be grouped under Reactiflux. The community would break up and separate into dozens of smaller organizations, like Facebook, Yahoo, and Rakt. (Are we even sure that Facebook or Yahoo want Gitter organizations?)

So in Gitter world, what would be left of Reactiflux? Not much. Why do we need another Reactiflux/redux room? There will already be a Rakt/redux room.

I don't think Gitter world would be better.

In Slack world, Reactiflux creates an overlap between all of the React sub-communities. It brings people from #redux, #alt, #reflux, and #fluxible together because it's so easy to go from one channel to the other, or to mingle in #general.

In Slack world, it's easy to find channels and to peek inside to see if you like it. You can tag people across channels, so everybody's around all the time.

Slack let's Reactiflux be a higher order community for all of the smaller React and Flux communities.

[eldh]

It won't solve points 1 (though it seems user accounts can be migrated) or 3, and I'm not sure about 2 either. But anyway, I would like to throw in http://www.mattermost.org/ as an alternative. It's built with react, it's open source, and at least on paper it provides a similar feature set as Slack. The operating cost would be limited to the cost of running a server. It's at least better fit to the Reactiflux community model than Gitter.

[zackify]

I have used mattermost and let me assure you: it is far too buggy to be
used yet. I wish it was stable, but it has a lot of problems. Bugs. Tons of
them. No native apps, and a lot more.
On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 04:51 Andreas Eldh notifications@github.com wrote:

It won't solve points 1 (though it seems user accounts can be migrated) or
3, and I'm not sure about 2 either. But anyway, I would like to throw in
http://www.mattermost.org/ as an alternative. It's built with react, it's
open source, and at least on paper it provides a similar feature set as
Slack. The operating cost would be limited to the cost of running a server.
It's at least better fit to the Reactiflux community model than Gitter.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#17 (comment)
.

[eldh]

Ok. Too bad, it seems like an interesting project and it would be awesome if there was a viable open platform alternative.

[benigeri]

Yup, I bet that it will get some love one day and become a viable option for many communities. But today it feels like a premature product. Lots of bugs and missing features. It's really hard to beat Slack's product quality and polish.

[aaronjensen]

fwiw, you can have rooms within a gitter, so you could do: reactiflux/f/redux, reactiflux/f/alt (where f is just a short name I picked out for a project).

If projects wanted their own room, that'd be fine, you could just have reactiflux be a curated list of react gitter rooms, many of which are hosted at reactiflux/f/*

[vcarl]

Sam C (Slack)
Sep 24, 3:24 PM

Hi Paul,

I’m writing to inform you that we've disabled the ability to add more users to the Reactiflux Slack team. We're happy that you've found Slack to be a great platform for your community but from both an administrative and performance perspective this is proving to be unsustainable.

Although we do simple chat and file-sharing very well, Slack simply isn’t designed for communities of thousands of users to chat. Slack's ideally designed for teams of coworkers who collaborate closely and frequently to get work done. That said, looking into ways to better support communities like yours in the future is something that has been suggested many times! The idea is under consideration, and if changes are implemented to make this easier in the future, we'll be sure to get the word out.

I’m not sure how you’re sending out your invites, because if you’re using the web interface it should tell you that your maximum user limit was reached. If you’re using the undocumented API, we’re returning a user_limit_reached error that you'll run into soon.

If you do want to continue to use Slack to manage this community, I'd recommend you spin up multiple smaller teams and cap each one around no more than 1,000 users. Once one team fills up, stop inviting people to that team and start a new one for the next group of people who want to join your community. That's the best way to ensure that your teams remain manageable and that the service stays nice and snappy for you.

Thanks so much for your understanding. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop us a line!

Regards,

Sam

TL;DR Slack says Reactiflux is too big and needs to find a new home.

[robotmayo]

My heart belongs to IRC.

[cobbweb]

Another option: https://www.zulip.org/

[jaylaw81]

And https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat

[vcarl]

We've talked about Rocket, Zulip, MatterMost, IRC, Gitter, etc. The main downside of a lot of these is that they're self-hosted, so Reactiflux would have to cover server costs and have somebody keeping it running. Given that Slack has mentioned performance and administration issues, that might not be viable.

• Gitter: Few people like it, but it's not terrible and they've supported communities of >7k in the past. It's hosted, so we don't need to worry about keeping it running, and it's free.
• IRC: Would work for the scale, but clients are meh and discoverability isn't as great.
• Rocket: Self-hosted, but otherwise looks good.
• Zulip: Looks like it would meet our needs, but it's still self-hosted.
• MatterMost: None of the people who'd used it had good things to say, and it's self-hosted.

[morenoh149]

http://www.reactiflux.com/ should be disabled then no? I've shared the link with colleagues and they have received no email. A note would suffice.

[Aaike]

i have the same problem , tried entering my email several times at reactiflux.com, i get no invitation email...
how can i get an invite ?

[germ13]

@morenoh149
I believe the invite screen is rendered by slackin.

The README.md there states one reason why emails wont be received.
Might be a good idea to look into this.

Although, there are a multiple places where things might be going wrong:

• slackin itself and/or config
• server config
• mail server (i dont know what is handling this)

[morenoh149]

@Aaike @germ13 no. We found out in this thread that slack is not allowing new members to join reactiflux. I'm suggesting the signup page be disabled altogether or replaced with a note.

[vcarl]

Agreed. @benigeri, I'd be happy to do some of that, but I'm unaware of where anything is hosted or where the code lives.