Pilot: Look at alternatives to Slack

[joemcl]

Required Information

Description

Let's look at alternatives to Slack

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Problem

We have been hitting Slack's 10,000 message 'paywall' for awhile, and unless we want to pay up, we have no access to conversations older than 10,000 messages, and in some channels, that can mean conversations from even earlier this year. See the screenshots below for examples of the problems we're having.

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Benefit

We won't lose our accumulated knowledge, conversations and 'institutional knowledge', which relates directly to "our core goal of getting money out of politics and/or the symptoms it causes"

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Plan

• A small workgroup evaluates alternatives like Mattermost, Discord, Rocket.Chat, others based on agreed-upon goals for a platform like Slack for progcode use
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Decision Making

No decision to be made yet, other than to pursue the evaluation to alternatives

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Optional Information

Reference link(s)

https://www.mattermost.org/ , https://github.com/discordapp , https://rocket.chat/ to start

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[joemcl]

and see earlier discussion at #203

[TheRealAlexV]

Another alternative; Augment Slack so that it's limits don't effect us as badly.

Why: Moving a large community that works mostly in Silo's such as this one can lead to huge headaches. Ultimately you won't want to shut the slack off and tell people to move to So-and-So app. That will result in losing half of the community.

How: The major and pretty much only limitation of slack is the 10,000 message pay wall. As we grow, that limitation will become much more glaring and obvious. How do we defeat this? We setup our own channel archiving solution and make those archives available to the public.

https://github.com/dutchcoders/slackarchive (Archives ALL messages, even the ones hidden from the 10,000 limit, archives new messages. Has a slack like web interface. Searchable)

[joemcl]

Hi @stephenscapelliti I'd like to re-up this and get it on an agenda for the next operations meeting...