Changes to Kubernetes Slack
12 points by gmem
12 points by gmem
As someone who spends a lot of time there, I’m not convinced this Slack provides any real value and shouldn’t be moved to Discord. It’s an absolute flood of information, often random noise from around the internet. I think the project would be happier if they moved more of their communication to the forum that already exists here: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/
Or we could use a threaded communication model like Zulip that will help organise the mass of incoming communication; which also has the benefit of being open source.
Yeah, it’s a large bummer that the proposed solution for a proprietary platform kicking them out is… moving to another proprietary platform. Surely self-hosting a chat platform is not that hard? Surely hosting, a chat platform, is not that hard for the Kubernetes folks?
(This is a bit, and I do recognize that there are all sorts of reasons not to self-host - but the point about proprietary platforms still stands. Not that I’m actually a part of this community, or affected by this change. It wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of Kubernetes’ core audience didn’t care.)
The Hanami/Dry projects have used various open-source options for this (Gitter, Zulip, Discourse chat) but ended up making the same decision to move to Discord because the bottom line is, it’s more important to go to where the people are.
Signing up to Zulip is like two clicks to login with GitHub or whatever. If someone isn’t willing to take that step to get involved, what’s the point in desperately chasing them to proprietary platforms?
It’s about as many clicks as to log in to discord!
Has discord yet decided to become an. OIDC provider? Or would that hurt their dominance as a chat platform?
Seems like there is some OIDC support in the Social SDK at least.
Could be possible, though I haven’t checked ToS; and in this instance the migration would be for slack users anyway, so less relevant.
https://discord.com/developers/docs/social-sdk/authentication.html
I think a Discourse is probably way easier to manage and run and you’re probably not losing out that much from going async (even if I think Discourse also has a chat mode for when you need to talk to somebody).
Can’t wait for the day Discord starts doing the same and everyone decides to migrate to whatever VC-fueled bloatware is popular in that moment.
Again.
I genuinely don’t understand why Matrix has not caught on for chat community use cases like this.
I see posts like this very frequently. Slack and Discord are both poor options for running communities. Slack’s too expensive (and limited on the free plan). Discord is a great product, but your entire community is subject to the whims of where Discord decides to take the platform.
I’m not a daily user of Matrix, but it seems from the outside to be mature enough for these use cases without sacrificing flexibility.
How is moderation on Matrix? More than once I got notifications that @-ed everyone in the room with obscene content.
I think that for large and free-form communities, Discourse forums may be the best.
Matrix is about as far from low-friction as you can get. The last time I tried to join a matrix channel to report an issue with a project I gave up due to issues with the client I tried to use. I’ve previously hosted Matrix and really wanted it to succeed but in my experience it’s by far the worst option for usability. Even IRC is easier to use.
I realize there are happy path combinations of client, server and settings, but there are far too many unhappy paths for it to ever gain critical mass.
I’m not a daily user of Matrix
That would probably be a reason why. I personally use Slack every day for work. I check Discord maybe once / twice a day for all community stuff. I don’t want to maintain another client.