Which service should Reactiflux move to?

[benigeri]

Update: Reactiflux is moving to Discord. (more info)

Wondering why we have to leave Slack? Read this.

I will try to periodically update this list to match what everybody is saying. If you would like to add a contender, please format like all of the others. That way I can easy append the list.

And thanks to @elwayman02 for a comprehensive comparison chart

The winner

Discord

Website: http://discordapp.com/

Pros

• Amazing product, has been great for chatting so far. Lots of people like it better than Slack.
• Instant invites make it so easy for people to join the conversation. Easier than any other service.
• Moderation tools will come in very handy. We're lucky we've had no spam, but that is eventually going to change. I'd rather have moderators than making our community invite only.
• Free and no limits.
• Voice chat is awesome.
• Easy to go from one server to the other,
• Team has been very open and supportive. Their app is built in React & Flux & React Native
• Hosted

Cons

• Some people might not be able to access it at work. (Please let me know if you can't access it so that we can try and assess the severity of this.)
• Search on the roadmap, but not yet built
• It could vanish (but they are backed by some of the best VCs in the world, and seem to have good product market fit)
• Having lots of channels get's noisy, and there isn't a way to shortlist channels. There is a very strong likelihood this well be addressed before the end of 2015.

Didn't make the cut

Gitter

Website: http://gitter.im/

I'm going to get on the phone with the this week. Hopefully they can alleviate some of our concerns.

Pros

• Proven scalability (Free Code Camp has > 50K users)
• No limits for users or search or archive
• Very OSS friendly company.
• Most of us already have GitHub accounts
• Hosted

Cons

• Lots of us have complaints about Gitter's apps being sub-par. Site + apps are not as good as Discord
• Since Gitter channels/rooms are based around Github organizations/repos, it's unclear whether a Reactiflux community should even exist. See (DUPLICATE) Moving from Slack to another service #17
• I think more of us have Slack open by default than Gitter open by default
• No voice
• No moderation tools

RocketChat

RocketChat is an OSS Slack clone. Key differentiator is the fact that it is OSS.

Pros

• Seems like it's pretty full featured
• Has voice and video
• OSS / self hosted. Could be a benefit in the long run
• RocketChat can help us migrate slack account
• Lots of ways to sign in (social + username/password)

Cons

• Apps are not as polished as Discord or Gitter
• Self hosted, but the RocketChat guys offered to set it up for us
• Several users have encountered issues signing up and logging in
• Some of the mentioned features are still being developed (multiple orgs, slack migration)

Facebook @ Work

Website: https://www.facebook.com/help/work

This would be a very different communication model. Instead of channels (chat rooms), we would have a group for each topic. The conversation would happen around posts.

You can still chat with small groups or individuals, but we lose the notion of big, open public chat rooms.

Pros

• Facebook is obviously a solid, performant product
• Really good search, no limits
• We can have much better medium/long term discussions, for when chat is not sufficient

Cons

• This is an early idea and is not definitely possible. We don't have any confirmation from Facebook.
• We lose big chat rooms.

IRC

There's already a #reactjs on freenode.

Pros

• At least some React people already use IRC
• Free and no limits

Cons

• IRC clients are not great products
• If you quit your IRC client you will miss out on any mention and DM. So you need an irc proxy (which only power users really use), or you will need to keep the client connected at all times (impossible).
• Also there is no sync to mobile.

Zulip

Website: https://www.zulip.org/

Pros

• No limits

Cons

• Product is not as good at others
• We need to host it ourselves
• Not being super actively developed
• High switching cost, everybody needs to create new accounts

Mattermost

Website: http://www.mattermost.org

Pros

• No limits, no lock-in
• Looks well designed, product is promising

Cons

• Still not as polished as Gitter or Slack
• We need to host it ourselves
• High switching cost, everybody needs to create new accounts

[petehunt]

IRC? There's already a #reactjs on freenode

[fubhy]

There is also ChatGrape. I know the founders and could talk to them about this. https://chatgrape.com/

[oren]

👍 for IRC on freenode

[robbestad]

I think IRC is great option, but I desperately need a better IRC client for the Mac. Even mIRC back in the 90s was better than Colloquy is today.

[frederickfogerty]

Someone posted a quick poll in the slack room, maybe this should be moved to the first comment, or a new one made. http://strawpoll.me/5715176 Credit @RWOverdijk

[benigeri]

@frederickfogerty thanks for the link. Poll is a great idea, but I think it's important to discuss our options a little more before we ask people to vote.

[bimawa]

PLS add all channels on IRC mirror

[frederickfogerty]

@benigeri Agreed. I'll leave it there just to get initial opinions

[Daniel15]

There's always the possibility of using multiple services (eg. IRC for real-time chat and Facebook@Work or some forum system for long-form posts). Using software to its strengths would probably end up better than a "one size fits all" solution. Additionally, a very large number of open-source communities already use IRC, so the consistency would be good (rather than having IRC for most other communities and something special just for Reactiflux).

For real-time chat, my vote would be to use IRC on Freenode, along with a nice web UI such as KiwiIRC on reactiflux.com for people that don't want to use IRC through their own client. If KiwiIRC doesn't have all the features we like, we could always fork it. It seems to handle large rooms pretty well though.

I was going to add my previous comments from #reactiflux-dev in this Github issue, but Slack doesn't let me scroll back that far, and unfortunately I don't have the history saved in my IRC client (I've been using Slack via IRC this whole time). Classic Slack.

[benigeri]

IMO all of the IRC clients, including KiwiIRC are a huge step back from Slack or even Gitter. Happy to be proven wrong if anybody knows of a really awesome IRC client.

[bimawa]

I use WeeChat for terminal its openSource and very high uptime.

[0rvar]

The problem is that if you quit your IRC client you will miss out on any mention and DM. So you need an irc proxy (which only power users really use), or you will need to keep the client connected at all times (impossible). Also there is no sync to mobile. IRC is not really an option in my opinion.

[oren]

@awestroke $5 a month on digital ocean. apt-get install tmux weechat

[benigeri]

@oren it's never that simple

[bimawa]

@oren +mosh