Shall we move to Discord?
Shall we move to Discord?
Welcome to Dev Shorts. I'm waking up from my deep slumber. Issue #24 talks about the a messaging platform confusion, few interesting articles I read this week, and a MLOps OSS Project.
Slack and Discord are great messaging platforms in their own way.
Slack is the official next-generation version of ever-loved IRC. It has penetrated every startup and corporate house, despite being a SaaS or non-OSS service.
So many OSS projects, COSS companies use Slack as their communication platform. They create a Community Slack workspace to facilitate real-time interactions between users.
But, off late, I feel Slack is becoming more aggressive in pursuing conversion of free workspaces. Almost all new features are paid and not even available on a limited-rate basis.
For example,
Slack Huddles can be an excellent feature for OSS project contributors to discuss a potential issue/feature.
Slack Workflows helps with the moderation of communities. Easy onboarding of new community members. (This alone created an ecosystem of apps to serve communities)
Previously, invite links for slack workspace never expire until 2000 people, now reduced to 100.
Each of them, a feature of its own could be made accessible or limited for Communities. Instead, it just keeps Slack’s growth undeterred. (Here, I’m not discussing the 100k message limit, SSO kind of SaaS features!)
That being said, when I spoke to multiple colleagues, community members, and friends in the industry, they all opined that Slack is an enterprise messenger and more focused on Teams than Communities. Discord is well suited for Communities.
And then, the discussion starts, “Shall we move to Discord? Why should we not?” 🤔
Like Slack, Discord could limit its features on servers in future. It is just that Discord is more moderate; many tech communities have built their base on Discord.
Both Slack and Discord are closed to the public. The content or knowledge shared is not searchable, unlike Discourse, Gitter, or linen (the new entrant)!
Interesting blogs I read this week
Opensource Project
Feast is an open-source ML feature store from Uber’s Michelangelo machine learning platform team.
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Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽