as we head into the new year, one thing i personally would really love to leave in 2024 is the “90 day Slack messages hidden” problem which has proven incredibly frustrating and has caused the loss of a tremendous amount of information from this community.
the most obvious remedy would be to pay to upgrade the community’s subscription to Slack’s paid tier, but this would likely be prohibitively expensive and suck up a lot of money that could be allocated towards funding contributors to Swift and its ecosystem itself.
i personally also have deep misgivings about Slack, as they seem to retain all of our communications indefinitely, including private DMs, which they use to train AI models. this data is not accessible to us after 90 days, and there exists no means for us to request that it be deleted, which means our data has effectively been stolen once the 90 day visibility window lapses.
so as an alternative, i’d like to propose that we adopt Zulip which includes unlimited mobile notifications and search history and is supposedly free for open source projects. most notable, the Rust Community seems to be using Zulip for their real time communications.
in 2025, i propose that we decommission the Swift Slack Workspace and switch to Zulip as our official messaging host. WDYT?
Like the other suggestions to move to Discord or Mattermost etc, it's a problem of inertia and corporate governance.
Inertia is not a major problem to overcome - there's nothing stopping you from setting up an organisation on there and encourage people to join. That's how the Swift one started. If fact, I encourage you to do so!
The main issue is going to be persuading corporate IT that installing the Zulip/Discord/Mattermost/insert your alternative client here app is fine or the website is OK. The reason why Slack works so well is that it has already been approved so you don't need to go through the pain or trying to persuade IT and legal that you can use it. And that needs to be done for all the corporations that you want to encourage to join.
there’s a big difference between Zulip and Discord, my personal suspicion is that Zulip is going to be a much easier “sell” than Discord.
the problem of “inertia” is exactly why i think it’s important to explicitly say as a community that we are sunsetting Slack and recommending a different platform. otherwise people are going to just keep using the Slack, and we’ll end up with another xkcd 927 situation.
put another way, it’s a short term inconvenience to switch platforms, for a long term gain. if we don’t give people a reason to switch, they won’t bother to join a different platform or install another app. it’ll just add another platform to the portfolio of apps we need to monitor.
I was involved in moving another tech community off of gitter so have a few learnings and opinions on this subject that I would like to summarize here:
Discord
Most tech communities are using this so easiest option to setup and get people to use it
Functionaly works really well
main issue is conversations are not public and indexed by search engines
UX different so takes time to get used to it and puts some people off of using it
Matrix
ability to create a space is great allowing having a channel for each project grouped as a space
A lot of tech communities on there especially open source and FOSS
can be bridged to discord easily
requires extra moderation, spamming common
if using a public server like matrix.org , slow ! But does work
I am actually surprised Apple/Swift communities have such a low presence on here and to support FOSS/Open source this would be my chosen platform
Rust
They actually use both Zulip and Discord. My understanding is Zulip used for governance and contributors and discord more for users of the language. See this.
i understand that Discord has a lot of the desired functionality, and a better UI than Zulip, but it has a certain reputation for being “non work-related”, so something tells me that having a Discord tab open is going to be frowned upon in some workplaces, in a way that having a Slack or a Zulip tab open isn’t.
(of course, if you’re the boss, nobody cares if you’re looking at Discord in the office. but i’m young enough to remember how it felt being an intern under surveillance at my first tech job.)