(DUPLICATE) Moving from Slack to another service #17
Comments
|
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. |
|
I have used mattermost and let me assure you: it is far too buggy to be
|
|
Ok. Too bad, it seems like an interesting project and it would be awesome if there was a viable open platform alternative. |
|
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. |
|
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/* |
TL;DR Slack says Reactiflux is too big and needs to find a new home. |
|
My heart belongs to IRC. |
|
Another option: https://www.zulip.org/ |
|
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.
|
|
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. |
|
i have the same problem , tried entering my email several times at reactiflux.com, i get no invitation email... |
|
@morenoh149 The Although, there are a multiple places where things might be going wrong:
|
|
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. |
|
Hello Everybody, I work for Free Code Camp. A couple of months ago we also ran into the same issue that the Reactiflux community ran into with Slacks invisible user limit. Unlike this community, we where given no warning that we where going to hit the ceiling. I won't go into further detail, but you can read about it here if you have a couple of minutes. We switched to Gitter. We had an exceedingly warm welcome from the team and assurances that they could accommodate our community as it grows. In our main chat room we have over 24 and a half thousand users and we have 500 rooms under Free Code Camps organization. There has not been any noticeable drop in quality of service. In fact we have noticed a steady climb. The Gitter team is incredibly accessible. We know them on a first name basis (The team is only four strong). Can you say that about Slack? And even though they are located in England we have have met with the team in San Francisco twice now. They let us in on what their plans are and how they could effect us in the future. They give us sneak peaks into new unannounced features (I'm extremely excited about one of them and can't wait for their public announcement). Reactiflux is going to be huge and ever expanding. I think Gitter is the perfect platform. Just the response we got from the Gitter team when they heard Slack decided to stop letting our new users join our chat is enough of a reason to switch. |
|
We actually saw your blog post about the difficulties you had, Gitter's pretty high on our list because of your positive experiences. It's cool to hear they're so accessible, that's definitely a plus. |
|
@BerkeleyTrue that is good to know , we are also using Gitter on the Aurelia team , Our user base isn't as big as yours but we have a little over 2000 members now , and have experienced this steady increase in quality like you mentioned. Would be really great if the switch to Gitter could happen sooner rather than later since a lot of people including me are feeling a bit left out when it comes to Reactiflux ;) |
|
Awesome. I'm really hoping every thing works out regardless of the platform y'all choose. When you all do switch one thing you could do is create a bot that responds to all messages in Slack that the community has moved and how to join the new platform. That will ensure people move or they will constantly see an annoying message for every one of theirs. One thing you definitely don't want is for people to hang around the old Slack. |
benigeri
changed the title
|
Unfortunately, we have to leave Slack. I got on the phone with a couple of Slack people last week, and they have decided not to support infinitely large public communities. Slack wants to focus on building team communication software, and groups like Reactiflux don't fit into that. The main issue is with our rapidly growing user base. We are already causing a decent amount of load on there servers, and many of us are already experiencing performance issues. It would take Slack time and effort to attend to these issues, and they have not allocated the resources to do that. The only way we could stay with Slack would be to cap our user base at < 8k. Probably around 1-3K. This obviously doesn't work for an open community. The most important thing about our community is that it's open and anyone can join in less than a minute. So when new people want to join the conversation, it's very low friction. We obviously can't keep the friction low if we start moderating accounts to keep our numbers low. This is a bit sad, but at least we know for sure that Slack is no longer the right platform for us. Now we can focus our efforts on finding a better platform for Reactiflux. I'm going to create a new issue to focus the discussion on which product/service we should migrate to. I hope we can make a group decision in the next 1-2 weeks. |
|
Please pardon me for this plug. And feel free to delete this if you deem it inappropriate. I'm from the Rocket.Chat project, a 100% MIT-licensed open sourced slack alternative. We are in the midst of adding a provisioning and hosting service (attempting to do it free - long term - for all true FOSS projects). Please try us out here in our support and demo community server - it is filled with helpful core devs and contributors around the clock during the work week. Contact any one of us. We will gladly supply you with more information on the project/service - or assist with migration whenever you are ready. |
|
I'm a fan of IRC. Let's keep things simple. IRC is easy if you want to participate in a conversation (via web options) It only gets difficult when you want to do more. Rocket.Chat is looking pretty cool to me though. It's at least worth looking into. |
|
Have you considered www.hipchat.com ? Native clients on all platforms (incl Linux), unlimited integrations + free for teams of all sizes forever. There's even an easy Slack importer to migrate all your current teams, channels & people over to the new instance. We have many customers operating at the scale you're looking for; give it a try! |
|
i know IRC is a popular option and i do like it. |
|
I'm indifferent as I'm not part of this community, but I recently heard about a free alternative to Slack called Ryver: |
|
Hipchat is the way to go, almost as good as Slack |
|
That is incorrect, Dan: On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:07 AM Dan Schuman notifications@github.com wrote:
|
|
https://github.com/Arcbot-Org/Arcbot On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:10 AM Jordan Hawker hawker.jordan@gmail.com
|
|
@elwayman02 Glad to be wrong! |
|
I was pulling my info from here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/4moihw0kt47f2sy/bj3as-wh.png |
|
Yea, it's not officially released/documented yet, but it's there. On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:14 AM Dan Schuman notifications@github.com wrote:
|
|
Discord is blocked by corporate webfilters as gaming related, so IMO it's not the best choice. |
|
I think there's an argument to be made to get it whitelisted for work On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:23 AM Carl Vitullo notifications@github.com
|
|
In fact, pretty much the only way Discord will stop being blocked as On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:24 AM Jordan Hawker hawker.jordan@gmail.com
|
|
It advertises itself as being for gamers, I don't think that's a concern for them. Their main userbase is people using it for gaming, and there are already features we won't be taking advantage of. I think Gitter is the best option. Other than personal preference I haven't seen a reason it wouldn't work, and it's previously been extremely friendly to groups larger than ours in the past. |
|
FWIW the voice features on Discord are so cool that at least a few of us are thinking of trying it out for more work-related stuff. |
|
Chat room discovery on Gitter is pretty awful. There doesn't seem to be a On Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 10:28 AM Carl Vitullo notifications@github.com
|
|
Do we have a sense of how many Reactiflux users would be affected by corporate blacklist? |
You would just navigate to /rooms. See: https://gitter.im/orgs/FreeCodeCamp/rooms |
|
Also https://gitter.im/orgs/reactiflux/rooms, we made a few while exploring options a while ago |
|
@elwayman02 we're working on improving that, but it's certainly not the case that there isn't a channel list. in any room, there's a globe of the world in the top right corner and that will take you to the directory of rooms ala: https://gitter.im/gitterHQ Admittedly it needs to be better surfaced, and we're working on some designs for that right now. |
|
Just my opinion but we've heard a lot of options at this point. Could someone authoritative narrow it down to a few top contenders now so the conversation can continue from there? If I made the call, we would continue with the assumption that we'd now be choosing between one of the following: Just my opinion though! |
|
The community has expressed interest in IRC and Discord, mainly. The group coordinators have settled on Gitter as the most viable option, but didn't discuss Discord at the time. Pretty much everything has an IRC bridge (and would be simple to bot), so I think the IRC crowd can remain content-ish no matter what platform. For the purposes of narrowing options, the shortlist is
|
|
So right now, we're practically deciding between the following? Gitter |
|
IRC was decided to be nonviable because of the relatively high switching cost for people who don't already use IRC, and the availability of bridges for those who really want IRC. Also, lack of discoverability of rooms. |
|
@vcarl what about our offer to host Rocket.Chat for you guys? |
|
IRC is also pointless because if you wanted to use Freenode#reactjs, you'd already be using it. There's no "switch to IRC option", the "switch to IRC option" is just "shut down Reactiflux and use Freenode#reactjs instead". |
|
Good points @vcarl and @taion. So now it's just a matter of choosing between Gitter and Discord? I personally am in favor of trying Rocket.Chat and taking up the offer from @engelgabriel but if that's off the table, let's officially put it to rest |
|
Another contributor to Rocket.Chat here. Just something to think about. We're rapidly growing, features are being added daily. If you want feature X you can open a PR and get that feature in the core. That's not something you can do with these other platforms. /end plug |
|
#25 seems to be the more relevant issue to discuss this in :) |
benigeri
changed the title
and others
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:
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:
Gitter world would look like this:
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.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: