RFC: Migrate from Slack to Discord

[jakeburden]

Description

Let's use this RFC to evaluate and discuss the benefits and disadvantages of moving from Slack to Discord.

Context

Slack loses messages due to scrollback of our free tier. In order to preserve messages, we'd need to upgrade to the paid tier:

$6.67 USD per person, per month, when billed yearly
$8 USD/person, per month, when billed monthly

We currently have 100-250 active members, and 974 members total.
We can lower the total cost by pruning inactive accounts and switching our standing as a non-profit (though this is a tedious task.)

Benefits of migrating to Discord

• Free (with message preservation)
• Some io members report that this would be an "app consolidation" (e.g. they are already mainly using Discord)
• Flexible moderation features
• Useful features for IRL meetups such as events.

Disadvantages of migrating to Discord

• Not all members will make the switch, either due to missing the updates or not wanting to move to a new platform.
• Need to configure IO bot to echo a message about the change.
• Need to configure the Discord server.

Data to collect

• Who would find migrating to Discord to be beneficial? Who would find it to be a pain point?
• Is Slack scrollback bad? Would having long-lived messaged be helpful in the IO community?
• Would it be possible to collect money from willing members to pay for Slack? Tom is already covering costs where needed, Jake would be willing to contribute also.
• Would incoming members prefer to be on Slack or Discord?

[mzagaja]

Although some work on our part of Slack is amenable to granting non-profit status we should have capacity for up to 250 MAUs. We currently have around 100. I think this would be the smoothest update if it's possible. See https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Nonprofits-discount for info on this.

[tcopple]

Some io members report that this would be an "app consolidation" (e.g. they are already mainly using Discord)

That'll go either way. For some this will mean less windows for other's more.

Would it be possible to collect money from willing members to pay for Slack? Tom is already covering costs where needed, Jake would be willing to contribute also.

Happy to pitch in as long as I'm active.

[lourinaldi]

Good to see organizers these days who actually give a shit and are interested in doing more than sitting on their hands. LGTM!

[danbernier]

We should definitely not move to discord until we chase down the shifting facts on Slack's non-profit discount. There's no downside.

If we do have to pay, I agree emphatically with others that it cannot be a barrier to membership. Accepting donations towards the bill is a nice idea and I'm willing to pitch in too, but I'm not in love with this option, mainly because of the logistics of moving money around, remembering to pay, and relying on goodwill.

We currently have 100-250 active members, and 974 members total.

Before we move, I'd like to see a histogram of users by how many weeks ago they last logged in. Setting aside the folks who log in daily users, are most of those ~800 people active but only every 3 months? or are we mostly looking at accounts whose owners have moved away from the community? If we move to discord, I'm much less worried about someone who hasn't logged in in 4 years than someone who hasn't logged in in 4 months.

I agree with @tcopple that app consolidation isn't a win either way. Also, depending on where you stand, either discord is very complicated and slack is familiar-ish, or discord is cool and slack is old and dusty. I don't think we should be swayed in either direction by this kind of reasoning.

If we do move, we should leave a message in each channel directing folks to the new discord. Because of the scrollback vanishing horizon, we should also have IOBot listen for messages and auto-reply with the directions, WALL·E style.

Final point: I agree with the organizers that we should have this conversation somewhere we can refer back to, since it comes up regularly. I think, in the end, this can be a clear choice to make.

[jakeburden]

Anecdotal data point: I reached out to the community engineer at Netlify who is moving the Jamstack Slack to Discord, he shared his perspective in this thread:
https://twitter.com/domitriusclark/status/1463214721750999048

[mzagaja]

For reference here is a screenshot of our weekly actives over time from Slack analytics:

As far as I can tell there isn't a way to tell how "stale" a member is.

[treznick]

Can we take a step back and frame the problem we're trying to solve here? Moving to discord may be a good move however I want to frame the conversation around the actual issue?

@jakeburden maybe we should move this RFC to an actual document in a PR so that we can comment on it and suggest changes? Happy to pair on this.

@lourinaldi to be frank, if you don't have anything constructive to add to this conversation kindly refrain from commenting. I recognize you have a lot of strong feelings about newhaven.io but throwing implicit invectives does nothing.

[jakeburden]

@treznick Yeah happy to move this to a doc PR.

Also, got another interesting data point. Someone with an IO account (at-Chris) claims they'd participate more if IO was on Discord.

[Quinncuatro]

Additional data point from one of our own that spun off their own community on Discord.

[danbernier]

Joan says:

I’m relatively new to the community, and mostly lurk, but FWIW, I think losing scrollback is almost a feature, not a bug. IMO things we chatter about don’t need to be recorded for all of posterity, and if we did end up going go pro, I’d hope we set up relatively short retention policies as a default.

matt:

I am not sure what the options are, but my opinion would be this should vary by channel. Being able to surface a ruby or javascript issue from years ago is highly useful. Do or should we retain our chatter in #random past a month? Probably not.

mkitz says, re: Slack:

Pro would allow us to set message and file retention on a custom basis, workspace wide or per channel. We can even set it to throw out prior edits of comments. We could also turn on the ability for individuals to set their own retention preferences for threads/DMs and private channels they are a part of. So like maybe idgaf but @Joan wants all her messages thrown out after 30 days, they can set that. However, none of the individual member settings affects public workspace wide channels, which we primarily have. But we can say 'random throw out at 30 days' 'job board keep 6 months' 'announcements keep forever', etc

[jakeburden]

Denver Devs moved to Discord.

Denver Devs is moving to Discord.
Why?

1. Slack is reasonably not developing community-focused features because they are a business tool. Discord has been pivoting to building for communities and has been doing an excellent job with it. Moderation tools and training, community discovery, and more will help us create a safer and more engaging space. To quote Joey from last week’s thread, “Slack “allows” this community to exist, while Discord “encourages” it.”
2. Discord has a great set of free features for communities, namely: complete chat history. Unfortunately, ephemerality isn’t as valuable as I once thought. New users join us, only to be greeted by channels of nothing. One of the main requests I hear from new users is upgrading our Slack so that they can see what’s been happing. Welcoming someone with basically zero context and zero ability to gain that context is not an enjoyable experience and dramatically impacts our retention. We also have an extensive collection of smart people here who have given excellent advice over the years, and it’s a disservice to everyone to lose that.
3. Engagement in this community has been declining steadily over the last year-plus. The way we work is changing; managing our mental resources has changed. Slack’s pace and message limit are not conducive to many, even most, conversations.
   There are more points to make, but that covers the core reasoning. I wholeheartedly believe this move will help new users and existing users alike, especially by giving us the history and context we’re missing out on and providing more clarity around where to look & what to do. In addition, many larger communities exist on Discord (a lot of them developer-focused) and have already vetted it as a fantastic community chat tool.

[tessacrowdis]

Hi there, I just wanted to drop my 2cents and say that I don't really use Slack due to job changes resulting in my inactivity. Discord has been a part of my life for the last 5 years or so and I've joined several communities through Discord for things I'm interested in. I can't say that I've used Slack for any communities besides NewHaven IO being the exception.

I also feel like the chat channels in Discord could be more beneficial with open rooms for video/voice. Not only does Slack not have a feature like that, but I believe you can't even do screen sharing on Slack without a paid plan...

Anyways, if we made the swap to Discord, I am sure I would be a more active user. I agree with many points above that I don't feel the need to re-parrot.

[caseywatts]

Hi! Cross posting this from the Slack thread.

DC was discussing the pros and cons of switching to Discord in the past year, too! Here is our summary doc in case it helps:
https://www.notion.so/happyandeffective/DCTech-Chat-Migration-Considerations-583bf1e479294d969e81c29157d89533

Of course what you all think is way more important than what DC folks think, but I thought it might help with the discussions here some!