Move chat to slack?

[gigabo]

I really prefer slack over gitter. Noticed that lerna's on slack. Now I'm jealous.

I propose we move the public chat to slack.

Pros:

• Can have multiple channels (announcement/discussion/development/...)
• Can have private channels (e.g. contributors)
• Can do non-spammy reactions. Seems trivial, but actually useful (e.g. vote-style up/down)
• Handy for those of us who are already on slack all day
• Generally more polished. They've got the $$$.

Cons:

• No github SSO. A new account for a lot of people
• Most github projects seem to be on gitter, so it's probably more familiar to a lot of people
• Limited message history on the free tier
• We're already on gitter, so there's some work involved in moving

For me the pros outweigh the cons. Thoughts? Opinions?

[doug-wade]

I love Slack, and I'm totally in favor of moving to it, but I think we need a solution that has open registration, or a way for new users to "let themselves in" to the chat, and iirc, Slack doesn't have that. How do new users that want to ask a quick question get access to our Slack channel? (ed: I just joined the lerna slack channel; that flow seems pretty reasonable; how do we set it up?)

[mtsewrs]

How about discord?

[gigabo]

Looks pretty easy to set up slackin for slack auto-registration.

[gigabo]

@mattiasewers - Yeah, there are a few other potentially good chat setups out there. Given the market dominance of slack (and my personal bias 👹 ), though, I'd be hesitant to jump from gitter for anything less.

[mtsewrs]

@gigabo yes you're right, but discord is probably easier for new users to join.

[jamen]

I've used both Slack and Discord for a good amount of time, and I still like Slack a lot and would prefer it. It's just unfortunate they're not more open to the community aspect of things. But as @gigabo mentioned, there are things like Slackin that make it really easy.

[gigabo]

@mattiasewers - Yeah, that's a real concern. I hadn't realized that lerna was using a custom registration setup.

Like @doug-wade said, though, it's really easy to auto-register for their slack org!

If all we need is to set up a host running this somewhere, that's not a huge barrier.

$ npm install -g slackin
$ slackin "your-team-id" "your-slack-token"

[gigabo]

Huh. Looks like babel's on slack, too.

[gigabo]

@aickin - Noticed your vote on the 👎 side. Anything to add to the "cons" list?

[egid]

I helped set up slackin for another project. It's been solid.

The only downside, imo, is that popular projects on free plans start losing access to message history very quickly.

[aickin]

Noticed your vote on the 👎 side. Anything to add to the "cons" list?

Nope, I think you pretty much summed it up. Please see it as a weakly held 👎; I don't care that much and am happy to do what others decide.

[hairthing]

@gigabo FYI your quoted thumbs down got counted as a vote