UGT! So a couple of things coincided. I got a sponsorship from Cognitect, and in conjunction with that, I really wished I could look up some discussion from long ago here in slack. I’m aware of the clojurians log, but let’s leave that out it for now. I would be happy to use some of the sponsorship from Cognitect to help foot a bill for a paid version of the Clojurians slack. I have no idea how to move forward, nor what a the bill for a paid version of the Clojurians slack is, but I’m willing to entertain the idea for a while.

just as a side note, may be you are aware of the log at zulip? it doesn't go back beyond some point i guess (and there are channels that are not registered for logging), but i use that sometimes when there are breaks in the clojurians log.

Hey, that's a great idea! Given that there is some funding available, how about funding a paid version of Slack so history is maintained etc., I'm aware of other alternatives, such as zulip etc., yet, this is where the community is (for better or for worse)

https://medium.com/@jedwatson/slack-and-oss-communities-130489aae8 I guess this problem is greater than the Clojure community.

https://slack.com/intl/en-no/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Nonprofits-discount

Clojurists together is a non profit I guess…

I think that even if we would manage to get through all loops and hoops to pass their requirements for non-profit we would still be staring at a bill for insane amounts of money.

That might very well be.

Their cheapest plan ("Standard") is $7 per user per month; we've got about 20k members. So if we get the 85% non-profit discount, it'd be 20k 7 0.15 = $21,000 per month. So unless they're willing to work out some sort of special deal (or unless Cognitect's giving you a lot of funding), that seems dramatically out of reach (and seems like a completely ridiculous amount of money for what we get). Congrats on the sponsorship! [EDIT -- see Sean's post below]

That’s ridiculous. And way out of anyone’s league.

It still surprises me that people keep bringing up the "let's pay for Slack" question given that it's no secret that it would be ridiculously expensive. The per-user cost is per active users though, not total. I just checked the upgrade page and it says

$8 USD
1,063 members
1 month
$8,504 USD

Clojurists Together is probably the only avenue to get Slack's non-profit pricing but I'm not sure how many people would rather they paid $1,300 to Slack instead of to Clojure developers for OSS work... 🙂

My bad, I missed that it was active users -- sorry to mislead y'all!

yeah the nonprofit discounts seem intended for non-profit workplaces/organizations to use for internal communication, not public discussion chatrooms. unfortunately

Maybe we can all pay for ourselves? 8 dollars a month is comparable to Netflix and I spend more time on here than Netflix

The trouble IMO is that that won't work for everyone -- drives away students, folks in low-GDP countries, and casual users. Part of me wishes we could impose a gradual slowban on the whole community to just slowly make it less and less pleasant for people and drive them away to other Clojure venues 😜

True (it would exclude certain groups, which would be a shame)

Thinking like an engineer, not a policitian 🙂

There's a reason I'm an engineer 😁

But @andy.fingerhut if you can convince everyone to shift away from the slack, I'm all in favor of it!

I don't claim to think like a politician very well, either 🙂. I have noticed that it is very easy for engineers to fall into the pattern of "I think alternative B is much better than A. Every right-thinking person should agree with me and independently choose B over A when presented with a choice. Why don't they?" (and yes, this is not really just engineers, I know -- I just notice it more among engineers since that is mostly who I have discussions with)

Slack has advantages that are easy to dismiss or ignore.

Yup. That, exactly. Ever since we set up this Slack as an experiment, we've had a small but steady stream of people saying "Slack sux! Why don't we all move to <insert-free-service-de-jour>?" and the answer is nearly always "A Clojure community already exists on that service and people are free to use it if they wish".

The right sidebar on r/Clojure (Reddit) lists several Clojure communities that people are using already. IRC still has an active core of Clojurians. Discord, Matrix/Riot, ClojureVerse. And this Slack and Zulip.

As one of the long-time Admins here on Slack, I'd be perfectly happy to see "everyone" migrate to Zulip (I'm not an Admin there) 🙂

Slack definitely has advantages, and is a pleasure to use day-to-day. The tragedy, though, is that most people come here to answer questions because it's where the largest number of people are, and the answers to those questions are rapidly lost to the world. That's an enormous wealth of Q&A that just vanishes, leaving Clojure beginners feeling as though they don't have a good place to find answers to their questions. So they come here and ask the same question that's been answered a hundred times before. Everyone's making reasonable choices in the context of this local maximum; it's just a crappy situation.

Certain groups make Zulip their main place, like the scicloj community

I'd be all for a big push to zulip but I understand why people might prefer slack (frankly I prefer slack's ui but would be thrilled to be forced to move). i do think it's not a small amount of damage done by the fact that most of the content our community generates isn't searchable by default (for no real reason besides coincidence )

(also I understand it's not necessarily easy to make such a push actually work)

there is now also ask.clojure - maybe if someone has a question and answer that's not on there, post it there for archival purposes

(not sure if that's the right way to use ask.clojure)

I certainly have used the zulip mirror a couple of times to search the Slack archive

Example: this is how to search for the history in the malli channel: https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/180378-slack-archive/topic/malli

there are some benefits to a chat channel where replies are ephemeral.

I imagine if as an admin group, there was a push to move to another platform, it might help in adoption. Asking directly maintainers to move to zulip etc

How long would it take for unmoderated spam to convince people it’s worth it to move somewhere else? 😅

i'm kinda against that. people go where they want to go. admins aren't (edit) particularly more influential because they're admins. they're just spam removers and maybe help to quiet things down if they get a bit heated

Right. It’s clearly not important enough to warrant decisive action

But if you want to upset the status quo, hoping people will choose something else is usually not a winning move

I like slack because it has all the people I want to talk to, the community is high quality, and I like the UX.

If you want to take a persuasive approach, rather than trying to undercut the quality of Slack, a motivated individual (not me) could create a survey that included a question like "If the majority of people you wanted to talk to about Clojure were using Clojurians ZulipChat instead of Slack, would you prefer that?", perhaps even questions on multiple such services. If you found that it was actually true that some large percentage would prefer that, you could announce a "Hey, let's all try using service X for a day!" day, and see if it takes off. Please, think persuasion, not coercion.

Sorry if someone already suggested this, but have anyone considered migrating to Discord?

I think the point is that nobody can force a mass of people to migrate to anything

yeah. i'm here because this is where most people are

next side project: a zulip client which attempts to exactly mirror the slack ui 🙂

Personally I would have no problem with Discord, but that is also proprietary and maybe comes with limitations?

We, from Emacs lsp-mode, are considering migrating from Gitter to Discord, there are some opensource libs/packages using Discord like doom-emacs , Dart-Code , Flutter and it seems to work pretty well

@ericdallo I thought you were in #lsp too? Perhaps I'm missing out on all the fun? ;)

Actually, there is a Clojurians Discord already :thinking_face: with 1400 members https://discord.gg/J35QqQ7M

ooh

As I said above: > The right sidebar on r/Clojure (Reddit) lists several Clojure communities that people are using already. IRC still has an active core of Clojurians. Discord, Matrix/Riot, ClojureVerse. And this Slack and Zulip. That Discord community is already promoted on Reddit.

@ericdallo You mentioned Gitter, which reminds me that there are quite a few Clojure orgs/rooms on Gitter as well, aside from the Emacs folks.

For anyone who needs history for personal needs, the mods were kind enough to add the IRCCloud app integration when I asked for it a while back. That means that you can get full history of the channels you’re subscribed to, and DMs, for $5/month. I’ve been doing that since I occasionally need history for support purposes.