History

The Future of Coding community started in June 2017. Seven years ago! You can see Steve’s first commit on the website here.

Steve moved on and I came in as self-professed “steward” in January of 2020.

At the time, there was growing dissatisfaction with Slack. We ran a community survey, both to collect general statistics about our membership and to gauge interest in moving our discussions off of Slack to a different platform. The results of the survey were presented in Episode 46 of the podcast.

Only 29% of people prefer Slack. 28% were ambivalent. 43% preferred moving off of Slack, but didn’t agree on where to move.

57% would be okay staying on Slack. So we stayed on Slack.

A few things have changed in the time since this survey.

1. I’ve been “steward” for longer (4.5 years vs 2 months). I’ve learned a lot about our collective norms and values, and hopefully earned your trust.
2. Participation in the community has stabilized. We see roughly the same numbers now that we did back then. There’s a core group of longtime members (maybe 50 or so) who do the most posting, lots of folks who stop by for a little while and share a few links, and a substantial number (200+) of lurkers.
3. Mariano, Kartik, Jimmy, and Lu are helping out with moderation.
4. Slack has been going through increasing degrees of enshittification.
5. We’ve built some tools to counter the above.

Values

Here are some values.

1. Prefer small, hackable, composable pieces over monolithic, sealed, one-size-fits-all.
2. Prefer individual agency over centralized, prescribed rules.
3. Prefer FOSS over proprietary, closed-source.
4. Prefer polyglot, prefer experimental, prefer kicking the tires.
5. Prefer open data.
6. Prefer longevity over ephemerality.

Slack

Pro:

• The way we use it, it’s a fascinating hybrid of chat and forum. It doesn’t feel like any other platform I know of. It’s a really, really happy medium.
• We can use it for free.
• It’s a known quantity. Everyone who is currently a member is willing & able to use it.
• It’s not terribly ugly, not terribly buggy, not terribly slow.
• Polished, regularly updated clients for all platforms.

Con:

• The free plan holds our discussion history hostage.
• The paid plan would be prohibitively expensive.
• It’s an enterprise-centric proprietary tool. We can’t make it our own. They are making it worse.
• Separate from the web. You can’t reasonably link to posts. Search engines can’t index.
• Kinda ugly, kinda buggy, kinda slow. It’s a big, heavy, bloated enterprise app.
• Basically zilch for moderation tools.

Alternatives

Zulip

Pro:

• We can use it for free.
• The organization behind it is self-sustaining. Not perverted by venture capital or private equity.
• Comprehensive features. You can split and merge threads. Rich moderation tools.

Con:

• Extremely chat-focussed. Meant for quick, ephemeral conversation.
• The main web client is visually chaotic.
• Mobile clients exist, but they’re bad.

Discourse

Pro:

• We can use it for free.
• Comprehensive features. Lots of admin tools. Plugins. APIs. Mailing list mode. RSS feeds. Chat.

Con:

• Conceptually chaotic. Too much structure. Tags, categories, subcategories. Tons of different views. Confused information hierarchy.
• A heavy JS app.
• Also somewhat a hybrid of a forum (mostly) and chat (a little bit), but not in a way that feels good.

Merveilles Forum

https://forum.merveilles.town

I’m not going to do a Pro/Con look at this. Rather, what’s going on here is inspirational.