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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

posthog.com

131–140 of 223 posts

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#131

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

Oh certainly - I go ballistic whenever I see a Discord link for support or community

At the very least discord doesn't make threads which get lost in the channel like slack. But both suffer without tools like telegram which automatically catalogs all links, files, images, etc into tabs. But at the end of the day a chat system isn't meant to be documentation. It's meant to be chat. If you and me talk in the hallway, we wouldn't then tell a colleague oh yeah we figured it out in the hallway don't worry. We would try and document it somehow so that it's useful later.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.

What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well

It's the lack of verbatim search. I can't plonk an error message in quotes and have Discord return only comments with that. Instead I'm inundated with irrelevant comments.

This wouldn't be a problem if so many things didn't use Discord for support. It's being overloaded as a knowledge base, support forum, and community when it doesn't handle any of these functions well.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#134
post #2

Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability. The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.

I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.

Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#135

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#136
I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them.

Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to.

I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they use Discourse[0]. It could work like a normal forum for users who don't participate in the Fediverse, but for those who do you could post from your existing Mastodon/Lemmy/etc ActivityPub account.

[0]: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-a...

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#137

I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them. Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to. I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they…

Given your complaint, what benefit is there to building a forum on ActivityPub over just allowing ActivityPub as a login mechanism?

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7. Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that. Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix). It’s also not searchable on Google eith…

Its just running a quassel Docker container somewhere

Normal people don't even know what Docker is

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#139
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modern forum stack Genuinely curious, what would that be? From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search? Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?

I'm referring to the whole UX of it, really. The experience for mobile users, the "join community" process for new users, the experience for the community owner, not just moderation but how easy it is to start a new community. You can go and start a new Discord community in a minute. It's free and with no restrictions on the number of members. Anyone wanting to launch new forum software needs to compete with that. An…

This really describes the value prop of reddit, or something like it.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.

Only the username, the avatar is a paid feature.
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