This last feature I'm pretty excited about. (future) still not generalized, but on a local branch, I've been using an option to set a channel with a language, and have all incoming messages translate via Google Translate. (future) hack to relay emoji reactions via editting a 'prosthetic attachment' in Slack. (future) interop with Mattermost possible. relaying of 'user is typing' messages on Slack. edits and deletions going through most platforms.

rethreading of Slack messages between instances. Some of the nifty things it supports (to various degrees): Works for: Slack, Zulip, Mattermost, IRC, Telegram, Gitter, Rocketchat, XMPP, Steam, Twitch, Riot, and some others. It's not quite federation, but I've been contributing to an amaaaaazing bridge tool called Matterbridge: You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at least you've got some chat channels to go to. but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular.Īnd one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful online presence. Scala has Discourse forums, like for example. It does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. They promised it at some point but nothing came of it.Īlso, I do like Discourse ( ). I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. You can have off topic conversations, you can make jokes, you can make friends. people are afraid of being wrong but chat is more casual, so in my experience more people end up participatingĬhat has other benefits. people with problems are bad at describing those problems - this is why StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the intentĢ. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects you're talking about are insanely popular.ġ. That's because my time as a contributor is very limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets.Īnd you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for months before I replied.

Spectrum vs slack vs discord