Hey hey, So Slack have gone a bit silly with a new way of recording active users and therefore billing, so it means it is prohibitively expensive now. My big rationale was to provide a searchable history, in a easy to use manner, than docs.pact.io/slack. For searching, I use Linen https://www.linen.dev/s/pact-foundation which is hooked up to our Slack, and propogates all the messages in a nice Slack clone. it is now open source and self hostable https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev You can get a desktop client, super cool built with Tauri and Rust note to self, update docs help page to tell people to search on linen Did anyone else have any other big rationale bar searchable history? Or would Linen suffice? I think GitHub will be the poster child for main discussions/longer tail stuff, but Slack is nice just for being where most people are (alot of works still use Slack) and its been our spiritual community home for ages (beyond the evolution of the google group)

Thanks for raising Yousaf. As per our discussion, I think you made some really good points about clarifying our needs: 1. Slack is great, because it’s a convenient instant messaging tool for many developers. The community I think really benefits from that engagement. The lack of history is the main downside a. we’ve never really taken advantage of other slack features (e.g. video calls, integrations) so paying the ~$50k USD /year fee for IM with history is just not comparable to the value received 2. Being able to have a searchable history (even if off platform) would help offset that, however we do need a way of making it really accessible and visible (otherwise the benefits are eroded) 3. We still have not got a great agreed place to make decisions a. Spec repo: https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-specification/ b. Discussions: https://github.com/pact-foundation/devrel/discussions c. Canny: https://pact.canny.io/ d. Issues on various repositories e. and of course this channel I’ll transfer some of these to your discussion board and put some thoughts, because they do overlap in different ways