Slackpocalypse

What's the Slackpocalypse?

A while ago (late 2015) slack closed down the reactiflux community when they hit 7500 members. We currently have ~4500 (as of 2016-01-10). Not sure on the rate of growth, but anecdotally it seems to be increasing.

We're worried about slack doing the same thing that they did to reactiflux to the clojurians group. There's some other reasons we're interested in moving (mostly chat history and general anxiety around how slack's business model might affect communities like ours).

Paying for slack is almost entirely untenable due to the cost involved (several hundred thousands annually), and they don't seem to be particularly interested in our use case. Also, requiring members to pay for themselves violates our goal of inclusivity.

What are we going to do?

Presently we're evaluating more free/supportive alternatives, both free as in beer and free as in freedom, as well as starting to build our own platform on clojure/script. Depending on if and when we get get shut down by slack, we'll move to the clojure chat app, or the chosen alternative. If we find a sufficiently compelling alternative, or if the clojure version gets "done", we'll move to that.