As an FYI, I’ve been “participating” in both the Riot/Matrix and Discord Clojure setups to see how those work. Discord has a pretty serious scalability issue regarding channels: any channel created on a server automatically has everyone as members — you can either set notifications for an individual channel to “none” and have it still show up as a regular channel, or you can “mute” it (which is sort of like leaving… except you stay in the channel and it just hides the channel). And the notification setting menu is not designed for more than a handful of channels per server (nor is the UI as a whole). Given we have 400+ channels, Discord would be (completely) unsuitable for us unless (until?) they improve how channel membership is handled.

Someone said that on larger servers, you manage channels via bots which sounds unnecessarily complicated (well, compared to Slack).

Matrix is a long, long way behind Slack on UI/UX (but a lot depends on the client you use — Riot seems to be the best? Or at least it has native apps for most platforms so it’s the most mature? It’s still really horrible to use IMO). @martinklepsch is going to walk me through the moderation/admin facilities at some point (not tonight — I’m off to watch TV!).

@seancorfield Apparently Discord has channel grouping coming soon, it’s in a pre-release now I believe, but they said it’s still experimental as they try to figure out how it should work.

It also will soon have screen sharing, which would be awesome for support.

I agree about Matrix - I know it’s under active development but it has a long way to go.

I'm not sure channel grouping will fix the UI scalability problem (but it will help a bit). Yeah, screen sharing will be nice (Slack has that for paid teams -- based on ScreenHero which was awesome).

As long as I can have a “Things I care about” group and an “Everything else” group I can collapse, I’ll be good.

A band-aid on a poor UI/UX, but probably effective at that level. Channel membership and muting needs a better solution IMO. It's a big problem that every time anyone creates a new channel the whole world is dragged into it and then everyone has to do something to mute or adjust groups.

Right, I’m making some assumptions - that I could identify the default group (“Everything else”) and that I can control notifications by group.

At my age I should know not to make assumptions like that.

But that seems like obvious functionality. With that, it would work basically like Slack does now for me.