Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

> Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.

The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content remains useful and findable later.

(We also have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer content), as well as GitHub.)

Dev teams also benefit a lot from having an async way to discuss bigger issues that require thoughtfulness and long form answers, especially remote teams. There's a reason mailing lists are still somehow alive and well in open source projects that have been remote first for decades.

We're using discourse internally for this (in conjunction with matrix) and it's allowed us to have discussions I don't think we would have otherwise had.

The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire. (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being instanteous is just a convenience )

What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit, phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided to move to a more transient form of communication for everything.

In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is spreading, and we're running into development of technology that has a limited set of experience behind it.

What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there rather than completely scrapping them)

Author here. Thanks for submitting!

I wrote this a year ago as my employer was starting up their forum[0]. While we have since added slack, the forum is the main support mechanism for our community (people who pay us money get support tickets).

I still stand by that choice for:

  * SEO
  * durability
  * question quality

I can't recall the exact numbers, but something like 5-10% of our overall traffic is to the forum.

0: https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/

I think "less capable moderation tools" is really underselling how purposefully useless and nonexistent Slack's moderation tools are for open communities. I cannot overstate how terrible Slack is in this regard.

To be clear, I really and truly don't fault them for this: Slack's always been clear that their focus is on business communication, which is a totally different animal when it comes to moderation needs. Discord is nearly infinitely better in the sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still considerably far behind the resources I've got when moderating a large Discourse instance.