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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

posthog.com

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

#111

Post by donohoe »

I think this is a good move (leaving Slack) but without knowing more internal info I think it could equally be a bad one.

The issue I see is they are building their own in-house solution. That’s a project in itself - and time not focusing on the core products.

It could have been mitigated if they used on off-the-shelf solution as a foundation, but instead they are re-inventing or rebuilding login/regi, user management, moderation, threads, etc from scratch - with the bugs that come with it. They at least considered it and would be interested to know their rationale.

That’s a lot of internal resources. Time will tell if it’s worth it.

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

#112

Post by octacat »

If someone wanna build an XMPP modern open source UI, we could could cooperate with building the missing features on the server side with MongooseIM.

The open source clients are currently pretty outdated. Matrix protocol has nice UI clients though, but not XMPP.

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

#113

Post by CM30 »

ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines.

If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information online again.

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

#114

Post by CM30 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #21
stvsu wrote: post #12

Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!

What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.

Well for vBulletin specifically it's that the software was bought out by a company called Internet Brands, who got rid of the original team and screwed up the last three versions of it.

vBulletin 4 is okay, but 5 and 6 are poorly coded, extremely inefficient and full of bugs even today.

Some of the original team went off to create XenForo, which has basically replaced vBulletin for most large forums now, though that itself has its own issues.

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

#115

Post by Kye »

jayflux wrote: post #108
andrepd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.

It's the real time chat all the things people want to search are moving to.

Minecraft mod? "Find us on Discord!"

Hot new indie game? "Find us on Discord!"

Interesting little open source project? "Find us on Discord!"

30 year old forum shutting down? "Find us on Discord!"

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

#116

Post by lnxg33k1 »

jayflux wrote: post #107
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC

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

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

#117

Post by gassiss »

lpapez wrote: post #71

Laravel does this with their Laracasts forum and it's great. It's the first place I seek answers for it, before ChatGPT and before StackOverflow. You simply can't beat well moderated public forums when it comes to historic search.

true, I do the same when I'm looking for truenas or proxmox answers

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

#118

Post by xfalcox »

rtpg wrote: post #54
fuzzy2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's dozens of forum apps available, both classical and endlessly scrolling. Discourse is well-known but suffers from extreme feature creep. Flarum, myBB, NodeBB, Vanilla, … And then there's also closed-source apps.

How is Discourse's customization tooling? phpBB's ability to let ~anyone go in and add random stuff as plugins was really powerful back in the day IMO

There are many plugins, check https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin/22

The flexibility of Ruby makes it kinda easy to change behavior.

Full Disclosure, I work there.

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

#119

Post by popinman322 »

andrepd wrote: post #95
ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.

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

#120

Post by LorenDB »

watwut wrote: post #91
shafyy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. At least use GitHub Discussions.

Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.

You don't need a phone to do 2FA. You can use a TOTP desktop app or a Yubikey.
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