@calm-grass-85557 Slack isn't very suitable for communities. Beyond a size, either we'll start losing the archives, links, search etc, or some how per user pricing (which is quite high) will have to be paid. Can you tell us how you went about evaluating alternatives and what eventually sealed the deal in favor of Slack?

Slack isn't very suitable for communities.

I would say slack isn't suitable for async communication because you lose sight of context in all these messages. Though with the start of threads, it's easier to organise discussions these days.

What I like about slack ?

- The availability of useful bots. For eg. @nice-toothbrush-33259 does such a cool job of pairing people on #buddy-calls channel - I like how we can use channels to serve different purpose eg. #fitness

Are there any alternatives that I considered.

I was primarily keen on slack because I was part of remotive slack community and it worked quite well. Also now I see it working for workfromco which has 3k members. Telegram was one option I considered but because of the lack of channels, I did not proceed with that. Would have been too much noise. I did try starting a discourse forum but then it didn't get any love. My assumption is that Indians need a safe private space to share their thoughts about work because it's a big part of their identity. That said there are counter examples like pagalguy.com which are completely public. What are your thoughts on this debate ?

I have been using Keybase for group chats. Has encryption, channels, subteams, auto-destructing messages, team-wise dropbox-like filesync etc. But integrations/API would be a huge gap when compared to slack. Mattermost is more slack-like, but open-source (i.e. without any silly restrictions like No support for dark mode).

Let me have a look at those softwares and get back to you.

No support for dark mode

Have you tried out https://www.sblack.online/

losing the archives when the free limit passes

This is something I will have to look into. One idea - Most of the messages are of transient nature, but if I find something useful I can star messages which can save it to a google sheet (using Zapier/Integromat). Con - everyone has to set this up which can be a PITA, Pro - everyone gets to have their own personal knowledge base.

Not my area of expertise but i have seen more and more people move to spectrum.. but that is search indexed

I see things are pretty stable right now. Happy to have a rethink in 3 months time.