stumbled across this slack like app https://gitter.im says free for communities…

I think gitter fails because you can't create a "directory" afaik

it's a per-repo thing.

We have several Clojure rooms setup on Gitter but no one uses them (because it just isn't as nice as Slack).

A few FOSS Clojure projects do have active rooms on Gitter tho' -- Onyx, CIDER...

Gitter fails on the management/moderation side of things pretty badly compared to Slack.

Maybe gitlab will make it viable though... we'll see

@seancorfield not surprising with $2M in funding vs $540M. But of course those funders want more than that back.

I mean, what ever was gitter's sales pitch? How did it make money?

"we will try our damndest to get acquired by one of the hosted-git providers"

That worked out well for them, then.

@dominicm I think being trivially integrated with GitHub was the main selling point.