Proposal: Consider switching community from Slack to Discord

[jeanduplessis]

Today we use Slack for community conversation. Unfortunately, due to the free plan restrictions, it isn't possible to access older messages, some of which are helpful and informative. The free plan only retains the last 10,000 messages.

A paid version of Slack is prohibitively expensive for a community of 10k users.

An alternative we should investigate is the use of Discord.

Tech communities have started using it instead of Slack due to its accessible pricing model – default usage is free. Paid plans allow individuals to upgrade if they want added features and do not rely on the server owner to carry the cost. While it originally gained popularity with the gamer community and was heavily optimized for that use case, it has become more focused on communication in general.

[jeanduplessis]

I've created a Crossplane server on Discord for us to play with in evaluating it. You can join it with this link: https://discord.gg/HqjZUVqz

[jbw976]

I wasn't able to join that Discord @jeanduplessis, this is what happened:

• it asked me for a display name, I entered jbw976
• it asked me for my birthday, which I started to enter but it interrupted with a captcha
• it interrupted that captcha with a "we need your phone number to verify"
• I entered my phone number and it sent a verification code which I entered
• This seemed to succeed, but then it asked for my password which I don't actually have yet
• I cancelled that and it sent me back to entering in my birthday and that resulted in an error message of I have to validate my account first
• Now clicking the invite link says "invite invalid - This invite may be expired, or you might not have permission to join" with a link to these reasons: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001556852

Are others having having successful experiences trying to join? I wonder if there are settings that could make this process smoother, e.g. I don't think users would want to enter their phone number.

[jeanduplessis]

Hmm, I was already a Discord member and since I created the server I didn't experience any of that. It does feel like a lot.
@jastang how was your experience signing up?

@jbw976 It says you joined. Did you make it in eventually?

[markandersontrocme]

I've been a big fan of the Backstage Discord server. The invite process for them works pretty flawlessly.

@jbw976 would be curious if you have to do all those steps to join it? https://discord.com/invite/backstage-687207715902193673