Chat service for the TA community - volunteers wanted

[Theodox]

Our slack channel has been a big success, with almost a thousand participants and a lot of great discussions.

Unfortunately it has one glaring problem – there’s a lot of great information there which scrolls off into oblivion. We can save important conversations today using the \discourse post command, which is very useful – but not as useful as being able to search for a conversation from a week ago.

So, it’d be a good idea to see if we can find a slack alternative that has the immediacy and mobile-friendly UI of slack, but doesn’t charge a per-month-per-user fee for archiving.

There are several free or almost-free alternatives that are worth considering. Here are some of the alternatives that have been suggested:

• Zulip – used by the Python community, and free to open source groups. We’ll need to figure out if we qualify
• Mattermost – very similar to Slack, but can be self hosted. We should be able to do this for about $20/mo using our existing hosting setups
• Rocket Chat Another slack-like that can be self hosted.
• Discord – free, not clear how long their archives extend or how long they’ll be able to stay free. Lots of people already have the client.
• Riot.im – another self-hostable one, with encryption

There almost certainly others too.

It would be great for the community if we could get some volunteers to check these out and report back with pros / cons and practical advice to help us choose between them. We’d want to get a sense of…

1. If we’d have to self-host or not. A free cloud service would be ideal, but might not exist.
2. Can we get free or low-cost hosting as a nonprofit?
3. What’s are the self-hosting requirements? And is the admin something we can handle?
4. Hows the UX and UI, and are there good mobile clients

So – who wants to help out?

[Lethendris]

I think discord is the best among them.

[Theodox]

FWIW slackarchive.io now seems to point at the github repo for a slack archiving tool. We could try to set up a server running that to keep our history alive, though we’d still need to pay for storage and hosting of that.

[Theodox]

Another one, this time based on blockchain: Keybase

[Theodox]

View in #community on Slack

@lkruel: We have a couple of really good discord servers that work great

@gamato: I would also agree that discord is a great solution, plus provides additional services (voice, video)

@laurent_d: Prefacing this with I really like discord as a service it’s a nice evolution of Skype by the way of slack.

Large servers I feel are less than ideal only being able to mute a channel but always being in it especially with a system similar to here with a lot of channels is annoying/overwhelming at times.

I don’t know how much it’d occur with this group but, from my experience with one with currently over 7000 users, moderation tools are severly lacking especially on larger servers. The ability to edit and remove messages without a trace of it’s not within the last 10 messages is one of my biggest frustration.
… that went on longer than I thought it would

@ozzmeister00: Totally valid concerns! That’s a really good point about moderation

@theodox: We have 950 users, more or less
though rarely more than 100 on at once
I think the ideal thing would be to try spinning up some test servers so we can get feedback on the different ones.
the Zulip one might be free for us, I’m going to email them and see
@bob.w said that the Python team is using it, I think
PS would-be volunteers should probably respond to the website post, it would be too ironic if this discussion scrolled off the end of the slack :0

@chrislesage: If you star a post, it remains in your personal starred history. In case anyone says anything important you want to save/reference.

@theodox: Ooh, that moderation thing is kinda serious. We’ve had one or two time where we had to scrub something problematic and I’d hate to have that get messed up because people were not online when something bad went down
I’m not sure if everybody else can see this page: https://tech-artists.slack.com/admin/stats
but some interesting takeaways:

1. We scroll out completely in under 30 days now (13,000 messages in the last month, we get 10,000)
2. 20% (!) of traffic is DMs
3. we’re using 4.3 gigs of storage, I guess for file uploads?
4. DAU is between 160 and 190, less than I expected.
5. 934 members total

@chrislesage: Nope, only admins can see that page.
DAU = daily average users?

@bob.w: yeah

@chrislesage: I personally don’t think messages disappearing after 30 days is a very compelling reason to transition, in itself. If you love the data, let it go. I’m in another big Slack where things are usually gone in a few days. It’s still a very successful, active place.
I’d follow to Discord, but very little chance I’d install some weird 3rd chat app on top of the pile.

@bob.w: Personally I hate that we’re losing good info, and good solutions to the maw of slack. /discourse helps a ton, but we solve stuff in random offhand conversations here that folks don’t think about saving.

@teessider: I personally star a LOT of posts

@bob.w: So, I never knew that staring a post kept it safer, but that feels like a dirty hack more than a solution

@chrislesage: I’m not saying that’s a solution. Steve was worried volunteer responses would get lost.
Starring is pretty hacky, since some people tend to chat using multiple short lines. Also, it doesn’t capture the context, replies, etc. And if you star it all, it is reversed in the history, and difficult to read anyway. But I’ve saved a few cool tips and tool recommendations here and there.

@theodox: slackarchive.io seems to be gone for good – the address now points at a code repo on github

@gamato: https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams

Introducing Keybase Teams

@theodox: @jeff_hanna will love it, it’s based on blockchains! but it does have a 1000 member limit and we are at 948 right now. I’ll copy it over to the website thread for people to investigate

@gamato: well keybase is opensource, so it could be something adjustible (would have to look into it)

@bob.w: blockchain!

@jeff_hanna: Cryptomining

@expansivemango: discord seems to be pretty popular… the allegorithmic server has 825 people and i was able to scroll back two months of history before getting bored.

@theodox: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6z9ajh/why_is_everyone_moving_from_slack_to_discord/

reddit: r/discordapp - Why is everyone moving from Slack to Discord?

TLDR - money.

@chrislesage: 948 people won’t transition along with you. All the dormant accounts will be gone at least. As well as anyone not interested in a new platform.

[RobertKist]

We had an in-house Rocket Chat server which was pretty close to the Slack experience. Setup is pretty easy as we used the Docker image. Windows client is pretty polished and stable. You could host it on AWS or similar cloud based service.
The only thing to look into would be backing up the MongoDB database it relies on.

[Theodox]

Does anybody have a linux or OS server with a fixed IP we could use to try a test of Mattermost?

[g.t]

I don’t have that, but why not use a cheap cloud instance?

[Theodox]

We currently pay for our web hosting using donations, so we don’t have much spare cash for a cloud server. We’re actually finishing up the process of incorporation so we can be – potentially at least – tax deductible. But right now, no spare bucks

[g.t]

Makes sense! I’ll let you know if I can come up with anything.