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Open-source chat apps

There are a variety of tools open source communities use to chat like Slack, Discord, Matrix, and IRC.

The best chat tool depends on accessibility, community preferences, and cost.

Slack for open source communities

Slack is a good option for some open source communities, especially when most users are already using the application on a daily basis for their day-job.

Slack does have some big downsides:

  • invitation links expire and need to be refreshed constantly
  • it is very expensive
  • free plan deletes messages older than a month

We should aim to respond to all Slack conversations. Lots of answers should be to just encourage the users to create a GitHub discussion or send them a link to a blog post. Slack conversations are more work than GitHub discussions because they’re not indexed by Google and disappear after a month (so the same question keeps getting asked).

It’s best to encourage community members to answer Slack questions, so we don’t have to do this work. We should monitor Slack stats via CommonRoom, identify the top community contributors, and directly encourage them to keep answering questions / give them OSS care packages to say thank you.

Discord for open source communities

TODO

Matrix for open source communities

TODO

Piggybacking on existing open source communities

TODO

Conclusion

TODO