<!channel> Hello RemoteIndians, I would like to have a constructive debate on whether it makes sense for the community to move from Slack to Discourse. I have been thinking about this for a long time and today I have finally gotten around to writing my thoughts down. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18CZ92uiyWCLyU3yH3qUzK8WB_g2kXCQtn7wLY9nKoeM/edit?usp=sharing

How is discourse mobile web app?

discourse+discord 👍🏻

not an expert on topic but I guess this will cause a bit of user dropout for you (might be a good thing for community though) since most folks here are devs/designers/tech people they do have/use slack on day to day basis and thus there's no friction in engaging with community. I've been part of bunch of Telegram communities in past and it seemed like one of the most matured open source platform/product (in addition to regular bells and whistles they support bots natively, which I'm not sure about discourse) It'd be interesting to see how it turns out though 😄

I think Reddit would be a better choice

Why Discord though?

How is discourse mobile web app?

@rough-autumn-89795 Did you mean the mobile version of discourse ?

@calm-grass-85557 You have excellent points in your doc. I went through them and could not find fault with any of them. Personally (and I am not a big forum user nor discourse user). I checked out Discourse and it seems to me to be a big contextual shift. Like you are changing the engine of this thing. Slack is around conversations and Discourse I feel is around topics. You need to evaluate what would be more beneficial? My gut feel says that a platform like Discourse requires someone to actively create topics and keep the pot stirring while a place like Slack, it is more conversational and as a result, results in a lot of serendipitous events. Either is fine by me -- I feel you being closest to the day-to-day operations of the community, would probably be the best judge of this.

@calm-grass-85557 no I meant the web app when it's opened on mobile. I just checked, it's usable but a good native app will be better.

I agree with @loud-glass-33663 too. Moving to Discourse would essentially mean we want a change in how things work. I’ve always seen it more as a forum/customer support sort of a thing and while it might work better than Slack for several companies looking to solve that problem, I feel like Slack was made for communities. Alternatives to Slack could be something like Spectrum (no mobile app), Discord (too gamer-y) or Telegram. We could probably discuss these as alternatives and see where that takes us. I also agree with @dry-waitress-7852 where he says there will be a drop off but I am not sure if I have an issue with that as it will leave us with active members. Although, that shouldn’t be a reason to move. If your issue with Slack is the lack of threaded discussions or the chaotic manner of conversation, I’d suggest an alternative that I am not sure too many people have heard of but is great. Perhaps we could consider it as well - https://twist.com/home

I have not used discourse but have tried to build a community over slack in a separate setting before. One major challenge I saw was people were not savvy to Slack. People would join, feel confused and never engage. And it wasn’t in their daily workflows. I don’t know the demographics of this community but stuff like slack/discourse is confusing to those in non tech circles. This puts a barrier to entry. Esp. problematic when you want to grow the community. Reddit is a great option but it adds an anonymity to the surface. Plus it’s just as confusing to people used to Facebook. Radically enough, google groups (email) is still rather popular. Helps long-form communication, provides archives, search and so much more. But has obvious downsides for being an older technology for asynchronous communication

@brash-flag-12364 Yeah, I do use reddit as my main social medium. For some reasons, I don't feel it's a right choice for what RemoteIndian. It's a great platform nonetheless.

Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts on this topic. I will try to answer all of your concerns but I need some time. Thanks 🙂

Decisions do not have to be binary. I agree that Slack’s limit gets in the way of building a community knowledge base, which is quintessential to building a lasting thing. That being said, Slack offers some great things right out of the box which other platforms might be lacking/doing differently. I think one mid way would be to keep the community on Slack but add a third-party knowledge base and utilise integrations to make it feel seamless. I don’t have any suggestions right now about what to use as a knowledge base but it might be worthwhile to think about this option as well.

I want to add additional info the existing suggestions, * There are companies who have moved away from slack to spectrum to build a community and provide support. * Slack is no-doubt a great tool but it only works for a team, not for building communities. * Totally agree that spectrum currently doesn't have a mobile app but they are still working on it * Reddit is similar to discourse but the only downside of Reddit is the ads, otherwise it is not a bad option. * Discourse is mostly used for providing support and said in previous messages it removes the chat experience. * Discourse provides a bunch of option to makes it totally customized which makes it too much of complicated task and also we need to self-host it. * Many open source & teach companies are using Discord for building communities. Not to mention a big library like React & Vue.js are using it too * As said Discord might be started with the gaming in mind, but still you can totally customize the way you want to use discord and disable games * As far as video calling is concerned slack uses Google under the hood and comes with paid plans to add more participants * Reddit/Discourse doesn't even have the option to do audio/video call * Discord is powerful even that you can do concurrent audio calling with for than 99 people and they are working on bringing video calling to the server too (I do know a trick by which we can create a video calling in discord server and we can go group video call with as many people) * Discourse has too many weird badges and achievement which is totally useless. * In Discord we can make the community more engaging my providing higher roles (if they are curious to get one). And best for all you will get all-in-one without extra signups and ads free experience. * Unlike slack, you can install and create an unlimited number of bots in discord * Not sure if we can add bots to Discourse The only reason a community can grow if they don't have to create a new account for a new place. (That's my personal reason) For every new/other workspaces on Slack we need to set up a new account, which I totally hate it. NOTE: All of above points are just my opinion and doesn't disrespect the other person POV. 😂 Thanks