I got PTSD reading the list of sign-up complaints; it goes double for the extra hoop-jumpery of adding 2FA for each newly created account. Icing on top for the obligatory email unsubscribe 3 days later when some rando "welcome" bot mentions me and Slack feels it important to email me to let me know that I'm welcome and I should post a message if I have any questions<p>Zulip, or even Mattermost a little bit, offers unlimited hosting for open source communities, and not this "we're going to throw your messages in the trash" stupidity that Slack is doing. It's a grave disservice that Slack is doing to those communities
I think the quote the author is looking for is by Chris Dixon.<p>"What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years"<p><a href="https://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on-the-weekend-is-what-everyone-else-will-do-during-the-week-in-ten-years" rel="nofollow">https://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on...</a>
Personally I prefer Discord for community chat because search is not limited to the past 10k messages. I wouldn't trust Discord for work chat (weak privacy). For work chat I prefer self-hosted e.g. mattermost.
agreed on all of this - Slack is really tough to build a community on top of! Kurt’s quote in that post is very true; the moderation/role stuff in Discord makes it super appealing for building any sort of large community.<p>i’ve been working on a new discord server for people building mailing lists[1] and newsletters and built out an opt-in software channel section where people can opt into #mailchimp, #convertkit, etc. channels without any sort of moderation/admin input needed. it’s a really nifty “self-serve” thing that i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t have been able to pull off with slack.<p>fully expecting “discord communities-as-product” to be a big thing over the next few years as they’ve built a great platform to do that sort of thing.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/chat" rel="nofollow">https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/chat</a>
Slack is making the conscious decision to not build their product for this use case. And I think they're right to! It's absolutely fine that alternatives exist for developer communities. Making Slack a massive, amorphous application that appeals to all use cases would be a quick way to kill it.