After many discussions we’ve decided it is within the best interest of the project to move our chat platform from Slack to Discord.
Why are we doing this? Since initiating the project we’ve been using Slack, which has proved more than adequate for the task at hand. However, Slack uses a freemium model, which is fine but the free plan is limited to only the last 10k messages, 5 service integrations and an unmentioned limit on the number of users!
All these might not seem a big deal, especially for a small team or project, but they have started to affect us in a negative manner as our user base and message traffic has grown. For quite some time now we are losing critical knowledge every day that goes by as we have reached the 10k limit for a long time. Every time anyone sends a message (no matter how big or small) the 9.999th one gets lost in cyber space. At the time of writing there were 36k messages lost!
The search history is also limited by that number and it is not feasible to collect messages before they are lost and provide a search tool for such an archive.
Upgrading to a paid plan at a cost of 7.25 USD per user is simply not economically viable for this project, or for that matter, any Open Source project (but this is just my humble opinion).
Considering that we are keen to maintain a chat-like experience(*) for our community (which has proved a great option) we started looking at other similar platforms.
From all the alternatives that were considered (and presented to the community members for voicing their opinion) Discord seemed the best available alternative.
It’s free (really free it seems!); has no limits on users or message history; provides chat and voice messages; it’s hosted on secure servers; has a tremendous user base which proves their claims on responsiveness and robustness; allows integrations with our own bots and has a bunch of client apps for all the major platforms.
So here we go: farewell Slack, long live Discord! Join the community.
Important links:
– Client apps all the major platforms
– Windows 10 UWP apps (MobileDiscord and Quarrel seem to be the best ones)
(*) Being chat-like experience the opposed to a traditional forum-like experience that feels too static and slow to the modern standard.
