fklement
Hello everyone,
I currently discovered spectrum as a perfect community chat alternative for slack.
There is already a Elixir group which can be found here: https://spectrum.chat/elixir
Here (https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b) is a nice article about the Apollo GraphQL community which fully switched from slack to spectrum.
Basically because of these main reasons:
- Short-lived channel history
- Walled garden (Slack messages are never available outside of Slack)
- Problematic searching
I myself have experienced these problems with Slack and I really think spectrum is a nice approach of solving these problem. Hoping to see more of you on the spectrum elixir chat in the near future.
Greetings,
Felix
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Nicd
What I’m wondering is:
It’s switching from one garden to the other. But I do agree Slack’s short channel history and closedness is not good for open communities. Something visible to search engines would be much better.
I think the biggest problem is network effect, though. A lot of people use Slack at work or for other projects already, and don’t want to switch to other systems. It’s good enough, even though it’s bad. So unless there is an official push from the Elixir core team, I don’t think a switch will happen. More likely is that it will just stay as an alternative.
I will check out Spectrum though.
Phillipp
Since I am banned from the Elixir Slack, I might join the Spectrum one. But tbh, I don’t miss the real time chat that much. If I have a problem, I just post it here in the forum and usually get a much faster reply than in Slack.
njwest
Spectrum is more like a forum with a Twitter-esque UI rather than a chat (you click a thread to reveal and participate in a discussion), and after joining the Apollo Spectrum, I started receiving tons of email notifications by default…
Not to say Spectrum isn’t a useful platform, but I find the Elixir Forum for threaded discussions + Slack && Discord for realtime chat to be sufficient – it’s a nice distributed community
Sunsetting the Apollo Slack is also an interesting choice on Apollo’s part… they seem to really want people to use Spectrum.
@Nicd The magic revenue-positive words in Spectrum’s privacy policy under Use of Data: To gather analysis or valuable information so that we can improve our Service
fklement
I totally agree with you.
Personally I think Slack is great, but the aspect of lacking message history is really annoying.
Especially in communities where many people write/ask/chat much.
Which is great but sometimes when you want to lookup sth that was 2 days ago you can’t find it anymore.
I can’t understand why slack doesn’t support open source communities in some way that messages persists for ever without the need to pay.
kpanic
What about giving a try to https://matrix.org/blog/home/?
It’s free software, has history, search, a bunch of clients (including mobile ones) – has bridges to IRC, gitter, and many more. – Not polished as slack, however it looks to me good enough to have a conversation
Phillipp
Using it for quite a while and I don’t really like it. It’s really really really slow and often messages are delayed for hours or even days.
kpanic
It happened to me in the past, not that much in these days.
That’s why I said that we “could give it a try” (maybe I was not clear) in the sense to experiment with it.
And slack keeps partial history if you don’t pay for it.
OvermindDL1
Has anyone messed with https://zulip.org/ as of yet? I ran across it recently, seems interesting as well.
Zesky665
Aren’t there any elixir/erlang based chat apps out there that can accommodate this community?
njwest
The Elixir community is active on Discord