@akiva: You might want to check out #C0CB40N8K http://whatthefuck.computer/blog/2015/11/01/on-the-balkinization-of-my-chat-communities/ is a better article on the troubles of IRC I think

When working with text, should a \r generate a newline by itself? Should "foo\rbar" print on two lines or one? Undoubtedly "foo\nbar" and "foo\r\nbar" should span two lines, but fundamentally is the behavior or \r a DWIM thing or should it be ignored without a following newline char?

I thought \r returned to the start of the line by itself.

That was the behaviour when writing raw ASCII interfaces.

@dominicm, oh I’m very well aware of IRC’s problems. I’m not advocating a return to it; I’m quite content with Slack.

Oh I know. Just an alternative view.

We're reaching the illing point of slack I believe. The point where we get kicked off like Reactiflux did

I’ve been wondering about that. 6,756 members and they’ve left us alone so far.

7.5k

was when they got Reactiflux

https://hackpad.com/Slackpocalypse-GRIaf1RgP5D

Let's make our own Slack based on Clojure and ClojureScript, then. /s

Seriously, though, I'm wondering why Slack's become so popular for open-source dev communities despite its limitations.

searchability, persistence, simple interface, basic code highlighting all out of the box

The problem is that Slack's free version has a 10k message log limit, and the pricing scheme that Slack uses for its non-free version is not designed with large communities in mind.

So searchability and persistence are completely null and void because 10k messages are quickly reached, and as I said, private messages are actually included in this. Some of my private convos are gone because of the message limit.

searchability is voided mostly by that, yes, but not persistence

Plus, as the article dominicm linked, they're prone to shutting down large Slack communities that aren't paying the bills because they're using the free plan.

persistence is most useful when you jump in and want to see what someone said a few lines ago

Oh, that's what you mean, I guess.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Also, basic code highlighting isn't much of a feature, Discord's got it too. Any Electron-based messaging app doesn't need to jump through hoops to get syntax highlighting, it's as simple as making use of one of the plentiful JS syntax highlighting libs.

can you also embed larger pieces of code in-line?

kinda
like
this

Yep.

then it's probably just a matter of luck on slack's part

Arguably, Discord's better than Slack. Searchability can be achieved through a bot that logs messages - Discord has a stable bot API now - and it supports pretty much every single thing Slack does. The only downside is that the channel system isn't really suited for us, as the Clojure community prefers to have on-topic channels for every single thing instead of bigger channels serving multiple purposes. I think that's the hitch.

On a Discord server, you are joined to every single channel you can access, with no way to opt out.

"Searchability can be achieved through a bot that logs messages "

that's no better than irc, then

ideally, complete searchability is built into the interface

There's also pinned messages and a mentions viewer. There's not a small possibility that the Discord devs will add an integrated search feature at some point that searches some amount of history. Wouldn't be as good as Slack's, still, though.

Given that Slack's paid plans actually save everything forever.

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html

I guess this article sums it up really well.

I think matrix is significantly better than discord

Simply because it solves the problem instead of making us beholden to a new entity.

Braid chat is pretty good though, I used it recently. Perfect for a company.

It's been discussed many times, in here and #C0CB40N8K (and many things besides, the whole community aspect of building a clojure community together, in clojure - how meta)When I founded Clojurians slack was the best tool for the Job, we have been slowly outgrowing it since then. However moving a nearly 7,000 strong community is no small feat

I'm a big fan of Matrix too @dominicm

I’ll go wherever everyone else goes.

unsurprisingly, Slack doesn't really offer any easy way to migrate people away from them