COMMUNITY Just this morning, Jonathan Edwards wrote something that's stuck in my mind like a burr:

Slack is a terrible place to have conversations that last more than a day

This resonates with me, and I know a lot of you feel similarly. We've all been in other communities hosted on other platforms, and we constantly feel the comparative weaknesses of Slack. At the same time, moving the community will lose good people, and I'm not sure we can survive that sort of a seismic shift. We could also introduce a second platform as a complement to Slack, but that doubles the effort needed to keep up. And besides, this community has remote colonies on other platforms already — Lobsters, Lambda the Ultimate, Twitter, HN, Lines, XRA's Discord, and countless others. What we have right here is what it is because of Slack. The aggressiveness with which Slack forces us to lose touch with past discussions and miss out on things happening in threads has the Twitter-like consequence of restricting how much time you can spend reading. For some that's a blessing, not a curse. If we moved to a platform with better support for long-form posts and rich threads, that would surely make it easier to read everything everyone writes, but I don't know how many of us could afford to spend that sort of time. All said, I'm very sympathetic to the position of Jonathan (et al.), and want to keep the search for alternatives alive. I like the idea of starting up a shadow community on another platform just to get a feel for it, so please keep posting suggestions for that in #CEXED56UR. If enough of us are serious about moving, and we manage to agree on a spot, and we try it out and it feels good, I'd be happy to make it an official home of the community. I'm excited that Mariano Guerra is starting a community newsletter — I really hope that takes off, as it'll probably help any eventual change to the platform our community calls home. If you have any similar project you'd like to try out on behalf of the community, I have a stamp of Official Blessing that Steve left on my desk and I'm eager to use it. Of course, if you have concerns about anything that you'd rather not discuss openly, please send me a DM. I don't have any plans to explicitly change anything about how the community functions, but I am very open to new ideas. I love the energy and activity we have here. I love the split between academic research and industry practice. I love that folks are organizing meetups and helping each other find jobs. I love that many of us are working away on our own FoC projects that will take many years to come to fruition, and we'll get to share that difficult process together. Thanks everyone for making this place what it is, and I hope that we can keep it going and growing for years to come.

We could import this entire slack into Zulip, subscribers, messages and all.

Discord has no history restriction, and its pretty good otherwise

chat, opinion piece & peer reviewed - Off the top of my head I can think of 3 written forms, chat, opinion piece & peer reviewed. I assume the output of the group would be in written form and then there is also the podcast. ... also there is group collaboration, but collaboration is a twist on how the output is created, with group refinements to the format of the written output. Maybe it is worth having both opinion pieces & peer reviewed sections in the newsletter. Re: zulipchat - I have not used this, it looks a bit like google wave - @jonathoda - Am guessing you have used zulipchat, and slack. What would you say is the main advantage of zulipchat over slack?

May I suggest https://spectrum.chat as an alternative? I must say I find zulipchat not very appealing visually…

Old fashioned web-based bulletin boards like phpbb work(ed) quite will for topical conversations.

I haven't seen Zulip before. To me, it looks to offer very similar features and purpose to Slack, but with a handful of our biggest pains alleviated, and a lot of thoughtful improvements. I agree with Martin that it's a bit ugly, and that matters to me (and surely others here), but of all the options I've seen so far this looks the most promising — and I suspect the look & feel will improve with time, since that's easier to change than the underlying communication paradigm. Can anyone with Zulip experience share any shortcomings they've found compared to Slack?

Some of us tried spectrum a while ago Here's the link to the trial chatroom if anyone wants to try: https://spectrum.chat/programmablesystems?tab=posts It seems like a chat/forum hybrid. The first post gives you an easier way to write longform but it makes it easy to reply as a chat message (enter will submit the message).

Indeed we do. It’s interesting for grouping conversations around a problem or a thesis. And it’s searchable.

Zulip has a kind of "indie" feel and level of support, but it is much better at threading and persistence. Agree with the sentiment of caution about uprooting the discussion from a "settled" colony

Spectrum's infinite scrolling implementation is pretty janky. Eg: when you open a thread and then go back to the channel, it loses your scroll position — you're always dumped back at the top. How does spectrum do for permalinks?

I’m mostly using mobile devices to participate in this Slack. The mobile Slack experience isn’t great, but far ahead of any other similar tool I tried. So mobile or small-screen experience is something I care about. I don’t care if native or mobile-optimized web app. Is this an exotic feature request? Is everybody else here mostly using mouse/keyboard to access this forum?

I use both equally 🤷‍♀️

I agree with the OP, but I’m not versed with great alternatives. One thought that might be entirely daft… Some friends have bridged their text talker that some members use in to slack that others members use. I wonder if this might be a sensible way of moving to a new platform? If the new platform provides a better full fat experience, and discussion on it can be pinged over to slack, it seems reasonable members will probably migrate to where the discussion experience is better.

How does spectrum do for permalinks?

They have permalinks for threads and also messages within a thread. BTW, I happened to notice some recent FUD around spectrum on their self discussion chat: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/is-spectrum-dead~ae821b96-0005-4d1d-bd74-9ec0802f3a8d

Wow. It does look like Spectrum's devs are doing something different now — https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum/graphs/contributors. Not sure if that means the project is dead, or if they're just changing how they work on it, but it's probably worth being cautious about hitching our wagon to that star (is that the expression?)

I'm neutral on Discourse. I'm not even an active user on any Discourse forum. I just wanted to put it out there while this topic is hot, because it has come up before and in terms of web forums it seems like one of the nicer ones.

Other folks in this thread — stick with a chat service, or move to a forum?

This is the key question I think. Or have both and split the community. I do think there are folks that don't post or follow the chat that much because of the ephemeral nature. Maybe even a mailing list would suffice. Now that we have the tinyletter, if a forum/mailing list is spun up - it could provide at least one integration point - we would post the weekly summary to the forum/ml also.

Fwiw, in addition to the "is it dead" discussions, I've found Spectrum to be a poor UX [on Firefox at least]. Scrolling up and down causes all kinds of visual jank for me. Typing is slow. Etc.

FWIW, I don’t think we will make any progress further discussing potential future platforms until we set one up and start using it. Every platform will have a slightly different set of supporters and haters, and a transition somewhere else or the addition of another forum will likely make us lose some community members. That’s why I think it’s a little risky, as our community is still quite small, but maybe it’s even a good thing — “cleaning out” a few of the accounts that haven’t logged in for a while and realizing how far away from 1k active members we really are. Personally, I’d prefer moving the discussions about other platforms back to #meta, where they are easier to ignore and just keep going until we’re too big to move or Slack shuts down and we have to. But if there’s an executive decision that we’re moving than I’ll support that too. I just don’t think we’ll find out if it’s a good idea until we do it and then it’s too late if it wasn’t anyway. :-) I can’t wait for the part of the discussion where we try to decide over how we decide that… please let’s do that in #meta, pretty please!

You might want to unfollow this thread — there may be more comments yet before it falls off the horizon. I'm planning to try some of the options listed above and put together a proposal... after the holidays, hah. And yes, such bikeshedding will happen in #meta.

Nah, I will of course keep reading this thread and everything in #meta because I’m more interested in what’s going to happen to this community than I make it sound in my controversial comments trying to add perspective by pouring oil into fire. 🥳

I very much like the dicuss/discourse forums: https://discourse.org/

I also quite like Discourse, or even plain old phpBB-style forums. There are a number of people here who would be very happy to move to such a forum. My biggest question is.. what would that do to the tone of our conversation? I feel much more at ease when posting thoughts in a chat, compared to writing a forum post. Chat encourages brevity and spontaneity. You can see when someone else is writing, and choose to wait for them to finish before responding. It's a different kind of interaction. As for Aragon or Colony.. I'm personally really uncomfortable with token/coin/crypto economies. I'm thrilled that people are experimenting with them, but I'm not yet willing to be a participant. They're also solving a problem that I don't think we have, though exploring this option in more detail will probably totally derail this thread. Feel free to spin up a new one in #CEXED56UR if you're seriously interested in these options, and I'll meet you there 🙂 Can you give me some examples of what you mean by "something that incorporates collaboration with code, information and community management"?

I am really surprised all these different systems and yet none of them IMO work as well as phpBB/vBulletin/SMF etc back in 2000-2008. At least for me. I ran a very vibrant community and it was easy to track topics, threads, pick up where you left off, subscriibe to any topic you want and not to others,etc. For whatever reason discourse utterly fails at this IMO and of course all the chat apps like slack aren't even trying. They're basically IRC with history and search and so are not helpful for having lots of various threads the same way those old forums were. It's really strange to me their relative success. Now "Get Off My Lawn!"

All I care about is a simple workflow that lets me catch up on everything I’ve missed, but also easily skip over the uninteresting threads. As far as I can tell, this problem was solved decades ago with forums, and I don’t see anything but negatives from the newer chat-based systems. So yeah, phpBB would be ideal for me.

@jonathoda — Safe to say that a forum like phpBB would be your first pick, but if we're going to stick with a chat then you'd prefer Zulip over any other option?

Thanks for asking @Ivan Reese. I’ve only glanced at Zulip - it seemed to have support for threading, which is all I really care about. I mostly heard about it from the Recurse Center, which is a good endorsement.

@gman Well one thing I could imagine is that people really ARE overwhelmed by all the information. And these other haps "hide" or "forget" information so it feels easier to use