:mega: Let’s get some retweets to show support to ...

# announcements

[orangy]

📣 Let’s get some retweets to show support to Hadi’s quest for better environment for us to talk!
https://twitter.com/hhariri/status/968750461456183297

[gildor]

Maybe worth to use @channel 🙈

[orangy]

Let’s see what we can get without using it 🙂

[sindrenm]

I guess an alternative would be to set up a Gitter instead, but that's just yet another client to keep open all the time … =/

[sindrenm]

It's also definitely not the same.

[hhariri]

Before Slack we had IRC for many years. We had around 20 people on there. Once a week someone would send a message and we’d all get excited, only to realise the person had recently joined and was in the wrong channel.

We decided to switch to Slack, and the growth was shocking (even before I/O). Now I’m not saying Gitter isn’t any good and there aren’t alternative solutions out there (and if push comes to shove we should probably consider these), but the reality is that we want to enable a channel for where our users are and majority of them are comfortable with Slack. The less barriers we put, the more welcoming the community is, the better for all.

[gildor]

Slack is industrial standard, even with all the alternatives and competitors. So you can find alternative, but probably it will decrease amount of new and active users

[Czar]

Rocket.Chat seems a good alternative, from what I've seen it's almost a Slack clone, but cheap (cloud for 50k users, 5TB storage, unlimited messages costs $500/month), free on premises and opensource.
I would switch without a problem.
IRC on the other hand is not such a great example, it's too old school, even people who used that in pre-skyp, pre-ICQ, pre-everything days mostly think it's dead. I was using IRC for some java project related chat last year and when my colleague saw it he was genuinely surprised to learn that IRC was still alive.

[gildor]

I see this on Rocket.Chat Large cloud plan:
Concurrent users: Up to 500

Looks not really good.

[sendilkumarn [JHipster]]

IMO pushing slack to have an opensource model is a winwin for both.
Moving to gitter / rocket.chat means that another client, and another 15k movement

[Czar]

@gildor oh, I missed that.

[dh44t]

I do remember the old Kotlin IRC days 👴🏻

[Czar]

To be honest if it was IRC instead of Slack, I would've joined IRC at exactly the same time I did Slack. I was starting out and wanted access to some real-time community, I prefer slack to IRC, but not a deal-breaker to me.

[orangy]

IRC has a problem. I close my laptop and go home, I open it, and I lost all that happened inbetween

[sendilkumarn [JHipster]]

yeah exactly. Its often frustrating when you have to go home but wait to finish the convo

[gildor]

It's really big problem

[elect]

I'd like to remind you guys the open source alternative of slack, https://about.mattermost.com/

[orangy]

Is there any solution written in Kotlin? 😄

[bj0]

how many people use a non-web based client? Switching to a clone or gitter wouldn't really be any different for people using the web interface

[elect]

it's a support for coding

[elect]

I find it hard using it otherwise

[gildor]

Many people use Slack for work already. And Slack supports multiple workspaces. Also Slack most popular option for many other communities.
So migration wouldn't be so smooth even from web client

[bj0]

not sure what you mean support for coding. I've only used the web interface (I use it for work as well). either way I just have a second browser window open

[elect]

ah, forget, I read web-based

[hhariri]

Response from Slack - tl;dr they can’t help.

[Czar]

Is that from email conversation they invited you to?

[hhariri]

Yep.