Should be move the community IRC from Slack to Discord
Yes
No
Yes, but with comments
No, but with comments
0voters
As a general reminder, this move would not impact the use of this Forum which will always be our core community platform and community “help” area. This only impacts our IRC.
Currently we are discussing internally within Strapi if we should move our community IRC (Internet Relay Chat) from Slack over to Discord but we wanted to get community feedback before we start building out that plan or move forward with it.
Please feel free to vote on the poll and if you have any comments feel free to reply with them. Negative or positive comments are welcome, please just remember to be respectful and constructive and following in line with our Code of Conduct.
As always, with love <3 from the Strapi team.
Edit to clarify some reasons (these are not all of them, and we will have a lengthy blog post about it if we move why we want to move)
The 3 biggest reasons are simply:
10,000 message limit in free Slack. We can’t upgrade to a paid plan as it’s per user / per month or about 88,000 Euro/month with the current number of users
Lack of fine grained permission control to give members more advanced community management features
Lack of moderation and community management tools / limited to 10 app integrations.
Common “No” reasons (from below and the Slack thread):
User isn’t on any Discord communities currently => vs a number of users where Strapi is your only Slack community
Slack is way better than Discord for threads etc I feel. Also I find a lot more companies use it for support
We would address this by having topic scoped help channels and not just one general channel. We used to have this in the Slack before but due to people not respecting the channel topics and no way to “moderate” it without giving someone full admin access to the Slack we opted to simply delete them.
On the topic of support, this is non-issue for us as we handle:
Bug Reports / Feature Requests => Github
Feature Requests / Roadmap => Product Board
Enterprise Support (Not community) => Our Support platform (currently in beta)
Community Support => This Forum
Discord is just a community space to chat for the community in a real time way, it would not be a support platform nor an enterprise space (though we always welcome our enterprise customers in our community spaces and actively encourage it, many of our community members are talking to our customers already in Slack and they don’t even know it ).
Totally understand if this is an unpopular suggestion, but just start the discord server and see how it goes. Maybe even just invite only to start with? Hopefully you don’t make a switch and regret it.
If / When we make the move it will roll out in phases and not be a hard switch. Even then the Slack would probably remain for a few months while we phase out certain channels and eventually all of them but the #general which is locked to Strapi employees to give notice we have moved.
Another community from a tool we at Strapi use called Orbit did something similar that we will probably base the move on. You can see their blog post about it here:
No, for reasons that were outlined above including threads. Slack is the more professional product and it’s a lot easier to manage, search and communicate ideas, issues and problems. Discord is good for multimedia (VC) as well as being more dynamic for hosting chats or discussions. Unfortunately Discord isn’t well designed for history, search or finding things.
Until the Strapi community becomes more vibrant and dynamic in conversation, I would view Discord as a downgrade.
EDIT: To add onto this, maybe the team could look into removing certain plug-ins or information that is duplicated to prevent message bloat on Slack…such as the feed channels that come from the forum?
I should also clarify and share this blog from the Discord team as of last year. They are currently removing the “Gaming” Community branding and are move more towards just a general Community platform.
I can tell that some people want to stay away from Discord just because it’s been known to be a community for “gamers” and that you can’t do anything else serious with it.
I actually started a poll on twitter about this just before you guys made this announcement. I wanted to check if people avoid using OSS if they have a Discord community. Maybe it will be useful to see the votes: https://twitter.com/razvanilin/status/1373970324186824708
Your are absolutely right there however I believe I have at least a reasonable workaround:
Breakout multiple channels for various topics (doesn’t matter how many could be 10 or 100, we won’t have 100 channels lol)
Use a reaction role bot to allow users to set their own specific permissions/roles based on what they are interested
Show/hide channels based on that role.
An example of this would be similar to the Sub-categories we have in the Discourse:
Strapi Backend
Strapi Admin
Database SQL
Database MongoDB
Frontend Vue
Frontend React
Frontend Angular
Frontend Gatsby
We create “help” channels for these, each with their matching roles, hide them by default, and configure the bot with reaction roles to let users pick what they care about. Only interested in Vue? You don’t even have to look at the React, Angular, or Gatsby channels. They just simply won’t show up for you.
Something else that comes up with the topics of bots, there are a few that can dynamically create/assign temporary rooms, all completely automated by the bot. When your done it archives it for a period of time and then clean it up/forward all the message to an archive channel (for search purposes).
What Discord gives us is the freedom to be creative with the community server, while I agree the forum is useful I don’t want to remove a community platform for no reason. We won’t delete the Slack if we didn’t have a viable replacement for it. Sure removing the IRCs and forcing our community on the forum would benefit us (Strapi) because all that content is now indexable by search engines and thus increases our SEO, but it doesn’t entirely help the community (could argue it may help in certain areas of users who do try to search for an answer before asking a question, but that type of user isn’t something you get by force).
Much like the above concept, we also know people don’t like getting pings (either @everyone or @here) so we would probably also consider a reaction role bot to allow users to get very specific pings.
Only care about new Strapi version releases? @ping-releases
Want to hear general Strapi news? @ping-news
How about requests for feedback (like this forum post) @ping-feedback
Our goal is to give you, our community more control of what you are interested, Slack doesn’t offer this.
If you feel the need to split, split into another Slack channel. I agree with several points of view already written below. I just wanted to add as we at Ultrahack have a team Slack account, and a public Slack account for community.
I am not in any Discord channel. I am ok with Slack. We should still maintain slack regardless of its limitations. It is way more professional than Discord
I agree with @Gayrat, I stoped looking at the chat now for some time now, I rely only in the Forum, why do we need a chat?
But if we need a chat, I agree with @huna, why not Matrix to be more in line with the open source comunity?
Both apps are looking to be bought soon (Salesforce for Slack and Microsoft for Discord) and they may change stuff to the chat to integrate better with the comercial interests of their respective companies (integrating it to XBox live or wathever) this is why they are buying it.
So maybe we are taking a decition in moving grounds, and 1 year from now Discord puts a paywall for bigger comunities or something, same for Slack, you just can’t tell.
Hopefully we can take control because we have amazing open source projects that make running a server easier, whether is a chat or an API
I get that is extra work, and I like the approach of Strapi to not be hard core open source everything, and take the most efficient rout when possible. But maybe this time (like with the Forum) is a good decition to take the future in your own hands, and not rely on this big companies that will very likely change a lot in the comming years.
I feel using slack vs discord because “professional is almost irrelevant” Even as a developer I don’t sit and go oh man I’m not going to their support chat because they are using discord, that’s not professional. Honestly, if I need “professional support” I’m not gonna ping the one or two guys who work for Strapi on Slack or Discord I’m going to be finding a POC to the team themselves via the website, whether email, GitHub. The chats are just that, chats, a quick way to quickly get community input on a problem or thought I’m having.
@Gayrat Honestly if threads are what you need and why you insist they stick with Slack over Discord then you’re at the appropriate place for it anyways.
To me feasibly for Strapi to stay with slack from a business standpoint they are going to have to do more to make money to be a worthwhile investment for them. They could just simple charge for Slack access, at which point they’d probably lose a lot of people because lets be fair, most of us wouldn’t pay for that, i’m a hobbyist so maybe my opinion doesn’t matter but i still don’t think most employers would be like well lets fund them so you can chat. Of course there are other ways for them to generate revenue to cover slack costs but again something will be sacrificed. I love strapi but as i stated i’m a hobbyist, i’d simply turn the other way and find the next headless CMS that exists, and i’m sure there are smaller agencies and business who’d feel the same way. Wordpress thrives still for a reason, the cost to entry is free.
).
PRO 
CON 
