Gitter

Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google).

I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it.

It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to algolia.com via the SSO plugin. Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. To stay on top of answering questions and moderation, we used the Discourse API to publish new messages into our Slack. All-in-all I would say we were happy with Discourse - the only caveat would be that it's very helpful to have technical knowledge as well as Rails knowledge in order to get the most out of it.

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

We run a major community project named as @Donut which is an #OpenSource social platform which allows communities to set up their own social environment and @slack platform drives us through the best experience of community interaction. Though we have been using some Open Source Interacting platforms like Gitter and Zulip but the fact that Slack exists and is such an essential tool, it’s really helped us with scaling and still feeling connected to one another across remote places with various teams with appropriate features in it.

The #User-Friendly Slack brings all the organised conversations at one place giving a prospectus to feel the better user experience on desktop.

Followings its pros:

• Allow creating of various channels which can be best suited to organised #projects, #teams and #events.
• Allow multiple tools and integrations such as Google Drive and GitHub
• Video Conferencing addition helps teams to organise meetings.
• No limit for addition of users and its free.
• Allow threads to keep side conversations from derailing the topic or project at hand.

The most crucial thing it supports the best security and protection with 2 factors authentication.

We haven't found a better way to communicate directly with the core contributors and developers for many open source projects we utilize on GitHub (Scala, Scala-js, Sinatra, Apache top-level projects, just to name a few).

It is a solid piece of software that appeals to us who have used Slack in the past, and the tight integration with a single GitHub repository or organization for each Gitter room just makes sense in our eyes. Gitter

Many GitHub communities are on Gitter. It's a great place to ask and answer questions related to open-source frameworks and libraries. Gitter

Using Gitter for open source talks and directly communicating with contributors. Gitter