I think it's important to recognize that users have different tastes and needs. Additionally, Gitter allows you to view the chat channel if you wish. It's also something that's publicly viewable and searchable from Gitter explore. It doesn't require the odd signup process that Slack has implemented. I can actually see my chat history for more than 2 days! But beyond that if you like Slack and its community then more power to you. We can certainly have a difference of opinion and preferences. -Ben On Dec 07, 2016, at 12:09 PM, Michael Walker <mike@barrucadu.co.uk> wrote: The Haskell slack seems to be working well, so regardless of the suitability of slack to open communities or not, I don't really see the advantage of fragmenting the community even further. Why would someone pick gitter over the two existing platforms that have thousands of users? They would be intentionally limiting the help they can get. On 7 December 2016 at 17:07, Ben Spencer <ben.richard.spencer@me.com> wrote: Hey Chris, As I've mentioned Slack isn't a good choice for open communities. It's really designed for businesses. On Dec 07, 2016, at 11:52 AM, Christopher Allen <cma@bitemyapp.com> wrote: For that, there's http://fpchat.com/ which is an established Slack community. The #haskell channel alone has 1,208 people in it right now. On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 10:50 AM, Tomas Carnecky <tomas.carnecky@gmail.com> wrote: Usability matters. It's easier to tell people to open a browser window and point them at a URL than tell them to download an IRC chat client and how to connect to the server and... On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 5:41 PM William Yager <will.yager@gmail.com> wrote: What are the advantages of this over the #haskell IRC on freenode? It's very active, usually with over 1500 nicks at any given time. I generally prefer IRC to any of these hip web chat solutions because IRC is client-agnostic and very rugged against companies folding or deciding they don't want to host a project any more. Basically the only way to kill an IRC channel is through social attrition, whereas any social value built up in hosted chat services might disappear overnight. The one major advantage of hosted chats over IRC is that they work better with mobile users, but I don't think that's very relevant for haskell dev. Will On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Ben Spencer <ben.richard.spencer@me.com> wrote: Why Gitter you might ask? _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post. -- Chris Allen Currently working on http://haskellbook.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post. -- Michael Walker (http://www.barrucadu.co.uk)