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#community-development
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2022-01-10
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Lukas Domagala12:01:31

I’ve just started looking into http://matrix.org and wanted to connect element to slack. It seems we would have to enable the bridge: https://element.io/element-matrix-store. Is this something you are interested in?

seancorfield20:01:32

@domagala.lukas Only under very controlled circumstances, if at all. We've tried it before in limited channels and the bridge into Slack was pretty awful and created a sub-par experience for folks using the Slack side because of how traffic from Matrix came in. Enabling a one-way bridge from Slack to Matrix would be less controversial.

seancorfield20:01:44

(we essentially have a one-way bridge from Slack to Zulip already, where @zulip-mirror-bot pipes messages from channels here to topics under a single stream in Zulip; but that bot has to be invited to each new channel to enable the bridging)

Lukas Domagala20:01:54

@seancorfield thank you! After playing with the matrix client it's not that great anyway. Piping everything into zulip so I don't have two clients sounds way better.

seancorfield20:01:16

I like Zulip a lot. I like that it can be completely keyboard-driven and I like the stream/topic organization (and actual threads are coming "soon" I believe). But I just pulled the stats for both this Slack and the Clojurians Zulip and there are about 5x the active users here and between 7 & 30 times the traffic in terms of messages. So it's a big difference in terms of audience/usage.

seancorfield20:01:01

And now we have a Pro plan here, sponsored by Slack itself, we don't have the history/feature limitations that folks used to complain about.

p-himik20:01:44

To advocate for Zulip a bit more - correct me if I'm wrong, but there was no promise in making the Pro plan a perpetual one, right? And also, Zulip is open source. (That yellow "PRO" plaque right above the huddle panel in Slack pisses me off - were it open-source, I would've removed it long ago).

seancorfield20:01:27

The Slack Pro plan sponsorship has to be renewed every year, correct, so it is at the will of Slack.

seancorfield20:01:01

The Zulip hosted version is only unlimited because Zulip currently offers that free to open source projects and that's how they currently view us. They could change that policy. Then we'd be looking for other companies to pay for and maintain hosting "our own" Zulip install.

seancorfield20:01:45

And as we've seen from several Clojure-related properties that have closed down over the years, trying to find a secure, long-term sponsor for any project can be tough...

seancorfield20:01:43

Don't underestimate the costs and effort of supporting a large community like this, should that suddenly fall on "the community".

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p-himik21:01:01

No, of course not. My point is that the baselines are there, and while both platforms can change them (although this might be a subject to whatever legal agreement Zulip and its servers for OSS are in, as well as Slack and its free tier servers), and Zulip baseline is simply better in our case. They didn't have to change anything to make it better - it's already perfect.

seancorfield21:01:03

There are quite a few people (maybe "lots") who much prefer the Slack UI/UX over Zulip, so even when we were on the restricted free plan, they preferred to use Slack over Zulip. We've had years of opportunity for folks to migrate from Slack to Zulip and, as noted above, folks overall still prefer Slack.

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seancorfield21:01:41

We saw growth on Zulip in 2020 (from 100 active users to 200) but during 2021 it stayed steady at 200 active users. The active user count on Slack has already remained pretty steady at 1,000 users FWIW.

p-himik21:01:24

I know. :) That's exactly why I think more should be said about Zulip, especially when there is something to say. Many know that Zulip is not for them, but many don't know it even exists, let alone that it's a viable alternative.

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