Everyone can join the scala-lang.slack.com by following this link https://scala-lang-slack.herokuapp.com (it’s linked in the tweet linked previously by @SethTisue)
FWIW, @SethTisue posted this link on the gitter channel yesterday, which generate a small discussion about the topic.
There the general conclusion was to stay on gitter.
But, please do not believe me and read by yourselves.
(Note that this is my first post here, and probably the last. Thus, do not expect me to answer anymore, I just thought that it was important to share the gitter discussion).
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Also I urge everyone to look at official Rust Lang Discord. Just look at how it has been organized its very impressive.
A Great example of what can be achieved with Discord to build a community and take what we do with gitter to the next level with something that works.
Invite to Rust Lang discord: https://discord.gg/V5myWrF
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It looks as though there is already a Scala community on Spectrum https://spectrum.chat/scala/general?tab=posts.
FWIW there was a response from gitterHQ addressing some of your & others arguments:
- they say iOS 13 fix will be released soon: https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/1183492088975056896
- web app will still have push notifications via web-push: https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/1183493254920228865
- re: notarization " We’re not aware of this notarization problem. I’ve created an issue to track the details" https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/1183492088975056896
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I discovered tonight that you can, either through the right-click context menu or the kebab menu
[Edit: need to enable “User Settings” - “Appearance” - “Developer Mode” to enable this menu]
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That’s great news!
I encourage everyone to visit https://next.gitter.im/
Looks like they are working on many features mentioned here:
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Yeah, I think we should seriously look at Zulip, as I find it finally merges the world of instant messaging and emails.
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I just want to quickly share what I see as the main pain point of interacting with a community in Gitter.
For me, the most important feature that supersedes any other is conversation threads. There seem to be many good features in Discord (like markdown and moderation tools), but without conversation threads, it becomes too hard to follow any conversation.
For context, I work on the Play and Lagom framework. Conversations get interleaved without threads and very quickly you become unable to follow them.
The reality of anyone working on open source is that we check the community channel between many other tasks. As a result, when you open the chat, there are lots of conversations happening in all directions. Without threads, conversations get lost and people only get help from those that are at that moment on the chat.
I agree that Slack is not ideal, and the thread in Slack could be improved. I also don’t like that the threads are on a tiny sidebar, but at least it’s possible to create threads and follow a conversation.
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about this, I don’t understand how they plan to deliver push notifications on iOS if they really deprecate the native app.
Web push is not (yet) a thing on iOS devices, so that won’t work.
I’ve asked them on twitter and report back if they answer
I hate Slack, but I hate the idea of adopting yet another proprietary platform (that will be dead for me in another year or two) even more.
We adopted Gitter instead of IRC, because Gitter had a web app and people could quickly login with their GitHub / Twitter accounts. Now that we see Gitter is basically unmaintained, instead of recognizing the mistake we’ve made, we’re ready to make another one.
Strong 
on adopting yet another proprietary platform! In fact I will fight hard against advertising a Discord channel on any of the projects I contribute to.
In this blog post discussing candidates for Mozilla’s IRC successors, the author says:
Discord’s terms of service, particularly with respect to the rights they assert over participants’ data, are expansive and very grabby, effectively giving them unlimited rights to do anything they want with anything we put into their service. Coupling that with their active hostility towards interoperability and alternative clients has disqualified them as a community platform.
That’s a bad start right there. Several candidates are then proposed:
All 3 solutions seem to be open source.
And on Slack, it at least has the virtues that many of us already use its client for work and that it has decent threaded conversations for a chat app. The 10,000 messages limit and the subscription process are a pain in the ass.
But at the very least it’s a chat app that’s sort of a defacto standard now and has a clear business model for businesses, instead of being the kind of venture capital driven app with an unclear and consumer driven business model that will probably depend on ads in the future.
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I would also be against adopting a proprietary solution (Slack, Discord,… )
The above mentioned Zulip is 100 % free software, and also offers gratis service for open-source projects.
The biggest users are Wikimedia and MariaDB.
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If you’re looking at evaluating open source solutions, there’s also Corteza which includes Messaging. Fully open source, written in Go, and also has a wider focus to support large organisations. I can’t say it’s as feature-packed as Discord is (yet), but the whole ecosystem is growing as a whole. It connects to an OIDC provider, so you could bring your own users into it.
Disclaimer: I wrote a lot of the messaging implementation and I’m involved as a shareholder. If you have questions or anything, give me a shout.
Huh – at least at first glance, that’s pretty nice-looking…
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they say iOS 13 fix will be released soon
FWIW, the iOS app has been mostly broken for 3 years and they haven’t cared. The only reason they’re doing anything now is because the app is entirely broken. I have zero confidence in their willingness to invest anything beyond the bare minimum.
web app will still have push notifications via web-push
Doesn’t work very well on any platform, requires re-authorization every time, and ultimately still requires you to use the application as a browser tab. Some people want that. Many others do not. At the very least it’s a severely suboptimal experience compared to a native client, even an electron one.
re: notarization " We’re not aware of this notarization problem. I’ve created an issue to track the details
If they’re deprecating the native apps entirely, then it’s a non-issue. Well, to the extent that any native app deprecation is a non-issue.
This is, quite unfortunately, the reality of modern chat. You and I have both been on this merry-go-round long enough to know that the open solutions never gain enough traction to survive, and to the extent that they do gain such traction, they ultimately end up being embraced and extinguished by the big players. GChat embracing XMPP, gaining wide adoption, feature-creeping people out of the federated model, and then finally getting killed off entirely is perhaps the best example of this. XMPP was a vastly superior protocol (from a technical standpoint) to literally all of the currently proposed options, and it obtained wide adoption early on in its life (much wider than any of these alternatives), and it was totally open(!), and yet now where is it?
Open protocols don’t save you. Unfortunately. Believe me, I wish they did.
Strong
So what will you do instead? Gitter is (at least for the moment) dead, and even if it’s not completely abandonware, it’s certainly doing a great impression thereof. Will you push people to IRC? Will you push people to a different platform with less critical mass? I mean, it’s 100% your right to do so and I wouldn’t challenge that at all, but I question the efficacy of such an approach.
And on Slack, it at least has the virtues that many of us already use its client for work and that it has decent threaded conversations for a chat app. The 10,000 messages limit and the subscription process are a pain in the ass.
Threads are pretty divisive. Some people love them. I hate them. Even in extremely busy channels I hate them with a passion (especially in busy channels, tbh). At the very least, I wouldn’t list them as an unambiguous advantage in any sense of the word.
And as a data point, I don’t use Slack for work, though I do strongly suspect I’m in the minority on that one. More relevantly, even if I did use Slack for work, my account wouldn’t carry over to an open source community, due to the fact that Slack balkanizes servers.
But at the very least it’s a chat app that’s sort of a defacto standard now
Slack has an order of magnitude fewer users than Discord.
instead of being the kind of venture capital driven app with an unclear and consumer driven business model that will probably depend on ads in the future
Yeah I have no idea where Discord is going with monetization, and I don’t think they do either. The good news on that front is that they’ve been radically more sustainable from an engineering and business standpoint than Slack was (look up the amount of VC they’ve taken, and also how many employees they have). They’re not as unsustainable as it appears from the outside.
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FWIW, apparently neither Discord nor Slack provide typeset equations. I don’t want to do that in gitter very often, but it is hugely useful when I do.
Discord’s channel discoverability is nice. Having to use an extra login credential is annoying, though. The UI has stochastically broken buttons on my platform (Firefox on Ubuntu), which I find extremely unimpressive as that’s literally the primary thing we’d switch to it for (to get better support for different platforms).
Slack’s lack of code highlighting is a substantial flaw. I wouldn’t enjoy using it for discussing code. I don’t know why people do. Explicitly rejecting markdown because their customers aren’t familiar with it is another red flag for me.
I’m unconvinced that switching to either of those two is actually an improvement overall at this point.
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There are bots which do this for Discord. (one of the advantages of Discord is its massive, massive API-driven ecosystem) But yeah, it annoys me too that this isn’t just built-in. I realize it’s a pretty niche thing, but it’s a feature that I want on a regular basis.