Clojurians Log v2

I don't think that news by itself is a concern to us. IIRC there was no explicit blessing, just a continued operation as per earlier agreements with earlier managers.

Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones) I'm sure our scale is wildly different compared to this community, but that comment on the radio-silence until explosion is what made my ears perk up. But yea perhaps we're isolated enough (and not really using many fancy features) where we wouldn't be a sensible target. And I guess we didn't get a surprise bill in the mail like the OP did as well

Might be comparable - they mention tens of thousands of teens, we have around 30k users (not active though - in total). And even if it all approaches us as a total surprise and the "deal" will be the exact same "give us all your money or else we delete everything you have ever had on this server", it's not like it's something we have a choice on. If they let us stay for free - we'll stay. If they decide push us out - we'll try to reason with them and, if that fails, we'll go elsewhere.

The clojurians slack is at the whims of SalesForce. They can make such a move any time and ultimately we have no say in it. That's the reality. What are the chances of that happening, I don't know. So far this slack always survived. Even if we acknowledge the uncertainty, you'd need someone to care to the point to lead a transition. The admins here have expressed they don't have the will or resources to lead that transition, which is understandable, they are administering this slack in their spare time, for free.

> The admins here have expressed they don't have the will or resources to lead that transition Ehm... What does it mean exactly though? To "lead the transition"? We've said it multiple times that Zulip is great and people should consider using it.

We've said it multiple times that Zulip is great and people should consider using it.You're right and I agree with that option, Zulip is up and running for years and is IMHO much better than Slack. > What does it mean exactly though? To "lead the transition"? One can put different levels of effort on this • do nothing • respond to questions with your opinion (as you have) • drop an #admin-announcements • announce the sunset of this slack, thereby forcing people's hands • ... So by "leading the transition" I mean actively pushing people to a different platform. Many won't switch unless publicly announcing or forcing their hands

i do acknowledge that thats a very very scary/risky operation

We cannot announce a sunset because it's not yet sunset. We don't want to force people because ultimately it's their choice. There are a lot of people who'd rather not use anything than move away from Slack. We've discussed it so, so many times. There's literally nothing we can do apart from manhandling users or quitting ourselves.

@p-himik I'm not judging nor asking for any additional effort on your part, just giving @sludwig.dev additional context so he understands the catch-22

Yeah, but you were replying to my question about "will and resources". :) I do have reasonable will and resources, I would personally do a lot to make things happen here - but there's simply nothing I can do that wouldn't be a net negative for the whole community at this point in time.

As another Admin here, I'll point out that every time this discussion comes up, I suggest folks move to Zulip. The SciCloj folks moved there. A lot of Calva support is done there too. And the nREPL/CIDER crew use something other than Slack as their primary support channel I believe. But as Eugene says, we can't force people to move to Zulip. Some people really don't like it. Over the years, various people have tried to set up new Clojure communities. It's hard to get traction. Zulip is probably the second-largest community at this point. Slack have already made changes to their APIs that broke the two archiving bots here -- content is no longer mirrored to ClojureVerse's log system nor to Zulip. That all broke 6-12 months ago. No volunteers have stepped up to fix it because keeping those things alive is a big commitment. If SalesForce stops sponsoring us, we would go back to the free plan -- as we were for years before we managed to persuade the CEO of Slack to sponsor us (and reaching out to SalesForce's CEO was how we continued that sponsorship after the acquisition). One of the big problems is staff turnover at Slack/SalesForce -- not one single person we have talked to in the past still works there, so any communication has to start from scratch every single time.

> If SalesForce stops sponsoring us, we would go back to the free plan Assuming they don't decide to screw us in a way that's described in the article in the OP: > they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history

That article talks about a special -- paid -- deal with Salesforce which doesn't apply to us.

If you have a special commercial deal with a company, they're usually free to adjust it at will. If you have sponsorship -- like us -- they could force us back to a free plan. If they change their T&Cs so that free plans have stricter limits on users, then we'd have an issue. They've already made the free plan a lot less attractive by actively deleting content older than one year (it used to just hide older content).

And, again, if anyone is concerned about our Slack community's longevity, please migrate to Zulip. Zulip have an explicit OSS plan that we use there. Now, of course, Zulip could also screw over the OSS communities it supports... but I've not heard any rumblings of that, and I think that's one of Zulip's USPs since Slack does not have an OSS plan.

@seancorfield I loled at "ScoCloj", wonder what could that be

A typo - SciCloj, https://scicloj.github.io/.

@p-himik I know, hence the lol