TIL about another community on Slack who is now being asked to pay thousands to preserve basic functionality 😬
Proprietary tools that offer a lot for free, without fail, will squeeze you. And unfortunately, because of their nature, a lot gets left behind when you inevitably migrate.
When we select tools for our communities, we need to think over longer time horizons.
FOSS options like Matrix for chat and Discourse for forums are the better bet.
Quite often a community quickly goes the "easy" route, free options find them. The Ads and the easy usage of a commercial tool are just better.
Why run your own, if you can go effortless into this, which they already know.
That means -> do we need to ramp up marketing in FLOSS? So people KNOW there are tools.
Do we need to run some megalomanic instances that provide free service?
Do we need to do better and get back to universities, so they see them?
@josh
And on the other side, I have quite often seen some well meaning volunteer quickly click a google solution or whatever for a group. Cant be so hard to setup, right?
So what do we do about this kind of stuff? Momentum to move is huge.
Github and others show that there is real interest. And all the accompanying infrastructure (Mailinglist? Hell, even Email is hard) is not always a priority
Idk how many of FLOSS people do infrastructure. But seeing big hackerspaces on google groups speaks
@josh I am not a Slack fan but TBH the Matrix/Element pricing model is not great, especially with the level of support provided for the cost. The Element pricing model feels like it was designed for a corporate context (i.e. pay per seat) versus a community context (i.e. pay for actual resources utilized).
The Matrix/Element pricing model basically feels hostile to success. If I grow the amount of people using my tool, even if resource utilization does not increase, I am financially penalized.
@josh@dalias Discourse is all kinds of awful with the Javascript dependency and lack of a (actually featureful and properly working) mail or NNTP-based alternate interface though.
I spearheaded the move etc, but where the discussions on samba-technical from 30 years ago are still with us, will folks be able to find the "why", beyond the commit messages for the past decade in another?
@josh If you are using a hosting provider for your Matrix server, recommend setup under your own domain, not as a name under the provider's domain. Recently had to move providers, but cannot migrate from mycompany.provider.com to matrix.mycompany.com so forced to start with a fresh server, loosing previous chat and room history.
@josh Yep. My long-running Slack group of friends just moved to a private IRC server because of this. I mean, we were never going to pay so I guess it's a good business move. 🤷 https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/
@josh yep. I'm on a private Slack that we just acknowledge that every once in a while we need to go on a gif cleaning hunt, and that the history is lost forever unless there's a lawsuit and we'd lose.
For everything that we care about, we need to do the extra to own the data. Sigh.
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