Should be move the community IRC from Slack to Discord

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:

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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?

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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.

See their blog post here: Your Place to Talk. Video games are about people. They have… | by Jason Citron | Discord Blog

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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

As already mentioned - the main disadvantage of the discord is the absence of threads.

Discord don’t have any reasonable solution for it.

In my opinion, it is better to close the slack altogether and leave only the forum - this will be much more useful

Your are absolutely right there however I believe I have at least a reasonable workaround:

  1. Breakout multiple channels for various topics (doesn’t matter how many could be 10 or 100, we won’t have 100 channels lol)
  2. Use a reaction role bot to allow users to set their own specific permissions/roles based on what they are interested
  3. 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.

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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

Hi !

I’m agree with you, Slack is poor of functionality and community roles, and Discord is growing and can be a very helpful solution on many points :

:white_check_mark: PRO :white_check_mark:

  • You can add moderator, mentor, support, … any roles for any users
  • You have an unlimited messages, and this is important when you have a big community like Strapi’s now
  • Slack is slow… and bug frequently, you can’t chat with many people without launch a call and wait than everyone is connected
  • Discord is moving forward to be a professional solution and replace other “pro” tools day after day
  • You can parameter your account to display custom name, information, … by discord server or keep your “default” account information
  • Only one account allow you to access to many servers (but this can be a “CON” when you need to separate professional / personal account)
  • Unlimited channel, and groups
  • Instant vocal sharing, useful to discuss with others and join discussion when we want

:no_entry: CON :no_entry:

  • You need to have a Discord account (oh, an other network…)
  • You need to upgrade your mind, and try this “new” professional solution, their are flag as “gamer community” for now, and this need to change !

Personally, I’m using Strapi’s Discord server with my “personal” account, and I configure it to share only what I want.

I hate Slack, but I’m using it everyday because of no choice, but Discord doing the same thing, with a better infrastructure and a fairly pricing.

Don’t be frustrate and try Discord !

PS : (In my company, I’m also working on this subject to migrate from Slack to Discord)

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I’m have discrod and slack, but discord don’t have threads.
You write many pro items - but I don’t need no of it.
I’m need only threads.

You can actually use discord without registration.

I don’t use slack and I don’t provide support on it just because it is not organized at all.

This feature will be add soon, so you’re right, I’ve not set this to CON or PRO because this feature is in un-temporal moment :heart:

My vote’s for DIY Mattermost – I’ll take the control anyday.

For a hosted solution, I’ve not noticed mention of Gitter. (Did I miss it?)

Its free unlimited history, full slate of integrations, threads support, and now being part of Matrix seem attractive options.

No, nothing’s perfect.

And, full disclosure – I personally abhor Slack, and generally pass on the gamer-centric Discord as well.

And you probably want to “pick your corporate overlord” …

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 :wink:

Not all comunities have the skills to run their own server, I don’t think that is the case for Strapi.

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.

This is all my 2 cents of course

Yes we are more than capable to run alternative software, but there is a cost there. Both in the cost of the software (depends), and the cost of maintenance; we did opt to self host the forum as we wanted direct access to modify if as needed from the core level but at the cost of infrastructure and devops time.

For the moment the forum does not require me to constantly monitor it from a human perspective and I’ve automated almost all the primary maintenance tasks minus major version updates.

That is certainly a risk yes, but there are other reasons we are opting for discord.

The primary driving force for the move to Discord is the platform we have chosen for our StrapiConf which integrates Discord as the main chat service, the discussion about moving our entire community to one platform (Discord) has stemmed from that.

For some it is easier to have real time communication about topics, a benefit that Discord would give us is the freedom to spin up ad-hoc online meetups like AMAs or debug sessions in Voice/Screenshare channels (anyone could). I used to regularly hop on Twitch and stream while I worked through some GitHub issues, play some music, and let people ask questions if I had some free time. I would certainly love to continue this; both because I find it fun and because it puts a “face to the name”. Others on the Strapi team also are looking forward to this.

We will never charge to access our community, I say that strongly, never. But yes if a business needs to chat with us and Discord doesn’t feel professional, this is why we have enterprise licenses with enterprise contact methods and a support platform for that type of communication.

Our community platforms don’t push any enterprise standards because they aren’t designed or meant for that.

Indeed, our forum is the place for that type of conversation, not any IRC chat.

Considering the fact that you want to use more Voice/Screenshare channels, well just use Discord, that is a no brainer. Running your own server would be a pain, and Discord is so much better with voice channels than Slack that is hard to compare.

I think that what I got wrong was that I focused all the attention in the IRC without considering StrapiConf and live AMAs.

Is actually a great idea to have the conference in the same place than the community chat

I have closed the poll as it has run it’s course for the past 7 days.

Thank you all for the information, we will collect and parse through it all and work on a prototype plan to show before we initiate the move.

My input:

Discord is the way to go in my opinion, the first thing I did when I visited the Strapi website was ctrl+f for any discord server and was sad to see there didn’t exist any. Today I got pinged for the strapi conference on Slack and found the discord link and talked to DMehaffy about it being a better solution than Slack.

Discord saves all the message history unlike Slack which deletes everything after X amount of messages, Discord is easier to use, an easier UI/UX for the eyes, many customizable options like moderation discord bots or a ticket system like how the TypeScript discord handles several help channels (I saw a screenshot of that bot above here too). The role system makes you ping everyone with a certain role if you need help with for example @react ( I think Slack has this too actually), Discord is moving from gaming purposes to a more professional solution so expect more formal new features and so much more.

You can even use BetterDiscord which makes your Discord run with custom scripts, but I heard that’s against ToS so its bannable so use with caution.

Also I read here most of the reasons against Discord is that it’s hard to search/find anything and I absolutely disagree. It’s so much easier to find specific stuff, you can ctrl+f in any channel, type the name of the person who sent a message and say if it needs to include any image or link they have posted.

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