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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to straight up disagree that open source communities should use Discord. Michael Greer lists a lot of great advantages over Slack, but that is not sufficient. In particular I think open source communities should have 1) threaded discussions that are 2) searchable results on google. (for hopefully self evident reasons)

Discord has neither.

I don't have any influence over these giant communities but if I were starting them from scratch I would put them on https://spectrum.chat because it explicitly solves these issues. (no affiliation) Now the network effect makes it a lot harder. I would encourage -new- open source communities to check Spectrum out.

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I'm a fan of the open source Zulip for how it does threading. Those threads should be linkable and searchable, but I'm not sure.

Zulip's threads are linkable and searchable.

https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source has more detail on Zulip for open source projects.

> In particular I think open source communities should have 1) threaded discussions that are 2) searchable results on google. (for hopefully self evident reasons)

Open source communities that communicate via mailing lists do have threaded discussions that can be found via a Google search. Though the websites they link to have a rather limited interface for viewing the discussion. NNTP gateways like gmane make it much easier to read through the threads (though it would be better if the web pages presented a more HN or reddit type view of the discussions).

sounds like you agree?

> In particular I think open source communities should have 1) threaded discussions that are 2) searchable results on google. (for hopefully self evident reasons)

So mailing lists then? OSS communities have been using them for years, they even have offline browsing and offline search. There are a number of user interfaces available from online ones like google groups or gmail, desktop readers, terminal apps and even editor plugins.

The best one I've found is using a news reader with the gmane NNTP endpoint for browsing those mailing lists.

Just today I experienced the frustration of a pull request linking to a conversation on slack that I couldn't read.

lol, how did the PR submitter expect you to be able to access his slack messages

I'm a Reactiflux admin. We are VERY happy with Discord!

I had this discussion with Max Stoiber (founder of Spectrum.chat) on Twitter a couple months ago [0] . I agree that threadedness and searchability are nice features of Spectrum, but I'd say that both a forum-like searchable model and a real-time chatroom model have a place, and that the use cases only partially overlap.

[0] https://twitter.com/acemarke/status/953804604046749696

and i totally respect that you are happy with it. this is merely my opinion, and why I've tried Reactiflux a couple times and it has not stuck for me. Key question for you is: how many of me are there out there?

> I'm a Reactiflux admin. We are VERY happy with Discord!

Are you in any way being compensated to say this? I don't expect you to disclose the details here, but I will at least ask. Publishing this blog post I understand that it is important for Discord to win over open source project to their platform. As users, developers are often early adopters and "organic" influencers.

I think you should give https://riot.im a try. It's open source and federated and has IRC bridges.

I am absolutely in no way compensated for _anything_ I do with Reactiflux :) I hang out there in my free time and answer questions because I like helping people learn about React and Redux, and I posted that comment because I truly am happy with Discord.

I had no idea they were even writing that article until I saw it posted here on HN.

Not sure what else I can say to prove that, but it's true :)

for the record i disagree with this kind of very tenuous tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. there isnt even an economic incentive here. we should be free to speak our minds without disclosing the presence of vested interest even in super inconsequential cases

I don't get it. How does a chat without a threaded conversation model able to manage a large number of people effectively? Have you ever taken a look at chat that is fully threaded? As far as I know, Discourse was built by keeping gamers in mind who care mostly about what is happening right now which is not the perfect fit for an open source project.

Sometimes if there's a bunch of people chatting at once the conversation can get a little crossed-up, sure, but most of the time there's only one or two specific discussions going on in any given channel. It helps that we have a _lot_ of different channels for different topics: #general, #need-help, #redux, #webpack, #functional-programming, #testing, etc.

its not like the mass community of users get to decide, the people who started reactiflux got themselves on the react docs first and so it becomes pseudoofficial. then over time you just get the benefits of network effect.

You can search for things that've been said on Discord, albeit not with Google.

Spectrum looks similar to a 2011 text message client, and a niche platform is less welcoming than something that a good portion of people already have an account on.

> Spectrum looks similar to a 2011 text message client

This just isn't true. Compare [1] to [2]. Nor does it look like VB, phpBB, etc. from 2011.

[1] https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/30/the-top-6-best-instan...

[2] https://spectrum.chat/sketch?thread=5ee6de28-e347-4c0f-950d-...

> .. a good portion of people already have an account on.

Ah yes, my N accounts for N communities on Slack.

It has the bubbles around what each person says, which is the style that many of the chat apps in your link have as well.

OK, they are flat bubbles now rather than shiny blobby ones, but it's the "bubble for everything someone says" that makes it look dated.

I hated the "bubbles" look back then and always used themes that just presented text as text, with possible unobtrusive delimiters between people's comments. Like Slack and Discord do.

yes search within-app is not enough. i would like universal search for issues/errors that i encounter with a particular technology. this is one thing stackoverflow definitely got right.

im not concerned with the looks. and this niche argument is pretty weak, every platform incl discord starts somewhere.

Vuej and React have traditional forums. But I get what you're saying. When I was using Aurelia, I had huge problems because it was just on gitter.

see, i'm a professional react dev and i didnt even know about the react forum until you just mentioned it. why is there reactiflux AND this thing?? how does that make sense?

Somewhat different use cases? Reactiflux is all about real-time discussion and helping answer questions (although admittedly there are times when the answers come in asynchronously several hours later). The React.js forums are... well, I guess for discussion, but really haven't ever gotten much attention.

Besides, Reactiflux is a totally independent group - started by the community, run by the community. We've had several Facebook employees come in for Q&A chats, but we're not an "official" part of React in that sense.

(Note: I'm a Reactiflux admin.)

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