1. Most who have been around a while and seen all the previous attempts to get people to move over there. 2. Not even when we were using the trial version of Slack, and it hid messages after a few days, was this happening. I think Slack is very convenient for many, who are using it at work and in other projects. I find Zulip a bit confusing myself.

> Most who have been around a while and seen all the previous attempts to get people to move over there. > Oops, didn't know it has been attempted already, sorry. > I think Slack is very convenient for many, who are using it at work and in other projects. I find Zulip a bit confusing myself. > Oh that's true, Slack is familiar. In theory it's easier to follow Zulip conversations because they're organized into threads by default but yeah the UX is not as simple as slack's so I get what you mean.

> Oops, didn't know it has been attempted already, sorry. Oh, don't be sorry! How could you know? Clojurians Zulip is keeping a log of all conversations here. If Skack downgrades us and hides our messages again, I think that might be the moment when enough momentum for a move would build up.

Also, I use slack for work, so it’s more convenient for me to have one app rather than two.

It is very common for an engineer to think: "I see advantages of B over A. Everyone should thus obviously see these same advantages of B over A and want to switch from A to B." This is not true. In this case (where A is Slack), there are many advantages of Slack over Zulip that also exist.

With respect, that's a bit condescending :) Perhaps my original post was a bit naive. Let me try to rephrase... Psychology/inertia/convenience/familiarity are obviously a factor (the same argument stands for mainstream programming languages but thank god we have Clojure, right? ) but Zulip, unlike Slack, was designed for communities like this one. The drawbacks of Slack have been covered before - I've seen posts here and there- and I'm ideologically opposed to what it represents but I'd like to also hear the arguments in favor of it. My question was meant to spark a fruitful discussion about whether a Slack alternative would be viable or clearly out of the question. It was genuine and, I believe, a sensible proposition. > there are many advantages of Slack over Zulip that also exist. > So it seems and I'd love to hear them if you're interested in the conversation!

Even if it feels fragmented, I think communities existing across platforms is a sign of the community's health, not a flaw to be fixed. One would not expect, for example, to have all of JavaScript's dev community on a single Slack instance. Clojure discussions can and should exist in multiple places. It's nice to know the Zulip instance is there as a potential alternative to Slack if the platform becomes unfavorable for us, but expecting a mass migration of a community that has organically grown here just because of the factor of FOSS + software features is, to me, not very realistic, and would probably damage the community if we attempted to force it.

Good point about fragmentation vs "biodiversity" and I agree that a mass migration is a bad idea. Any migration would have to happen mostly organically, perhaps with some very subtle nudge from channel owners with strong opinions. E.g. the data science channel urges users to ask questions on zulip. That's how I created a Zulip account in the first place.

It's worth pointing out that Zulip also has history/search limits unless you pay for it (or host it yourself) but they have a policy of offering free hosting to open source communities without those limits, unlike Slack.

A lot of alternatives to Slack have been proposed over the years. The community repo on GitHub has some of that discussion summarized. Some of it is in the logs for this channel elsewhere. [edited to correct DYAC, now that I'm at my desk and not responding on my phone!]

My desire for folks to move to Zulip is mostly because of the loud minority who dislike Slack for various reasons... But they still stay here (and complain) because this is the largest, most active community.

I'm active here, on Zulip, on ClojureVerse, on Ask, on Reddit, and on SO. I used to be active on IRC before Slack and that's really the only community I no longer check in with.

There may be a few other, small communities that I don't know about... There was a Matrix one but I don't know if that's still active?

Ooh, TIL about the hackpad archive on GitHub. Currently checking it out, thanks for drawing my attention to it!

> Ooh, TIL about the hackpad archive on GitHub. > Care to elaborate?

https://github.com/clojurians/community-development/tree/master/hackpad-archive

> A lot of alternatives to Slack have been proposed over the years. Including at least one (maybe two?) written by Clojurians folks explicitly for that purpose.

If we had a decent one written by borkdude, I bet everyone would start using it. :melting_face:

Everything he touches seems turn turn gold.

Might be a question for the next State of Clojure survey if it’s not already. Preferred chat platform. Now that Slack’s been acquired and its old CEO (who gave us access) rode off into the sunset I am a little concerned.

I will add https://guide.clojure.style/ to the documentation section I think.

https://groups.google.com/g/clojurescript hasn't had any posts since August '22 -- is it still considered active/useful? I don't have much visibility into the cljs world so additional resources for that community would be helpful.

@seancorfield this content seems to overlap with the https://clojure.org/community/resources. I don't know, what do you think?: Would it make sense to maintain the Clojure site page and then just point to it? Or is there value in having both pages?

@UE21H2HHD It's tricky. There are a few things on clojure-doc that aren't on http://clojure.org but there is a lot of overlap. There are plenty of things on http://clojure.org now that weren't there when clojure-doc was built and I'm trying not to duplicate content but to surface the http://clojure.org content when it is there. I don't know 🤷:skin-tone-2:

Ya sounds a bit challenging. Sorry, was not in any way being critical of your efforts, just trying to be helpful.