Changes to the Kubernetes Slack
kubernetes.dev30 points by gmemstr 19 hours ago
30 points by gmemstr 19 hours ago
Just isn’t practical to use Slack for open communities based on it’s pricing structure, but isn’t practical for Discord to exist based on it’s Profit and Loss statement.
Gotta be some way to split the difference and make money with online community chat without paying north of $8 per user.
I'm sure they considered hosting matrix or zulip, I wonder what the estimated monthly cost of that would be for a community of their size
For Element, I suspect they'd be best off using Element Server Suite (https://element.io/server-suite) which are the official helm charts for Element, Synapse and the various component parts. To scale elastically they'd need the Pro version, but we could provide them with a discounted license of some kind (but not free, given Element isn't profitable yet and we need the $ to actually work on Matrix...)
If anyone reading this wants to talk, hit me up at matthew at element.io (or @matthew:matrix.org on Matrix)
Yeah but what scaling/deployment layer should they deploy it on? I vote for Azure Service Fabric.
at 250.000 users they're going to hit specific limits very quickly, and frustratingly, proper sysadmin skills are (I think) nearly completely eroded from our industry.
This leaves us with expensive offerings despite a pretty static load (a-la; cloud).
Back in the day, burgeoning sysadmins would have cut their teeth on projects like this, but sadly they'd need someone quite senior at this point to avoid major pitfalls.
I'm not even sure myself how I would prevent the abuse of uploaded images; both in terms of rate limiting new accounts and the potential harmful material that might be shared. -- And I am one of the sysadmin types who cut their teeth on problems like these.
I think consideration may have been limited by the fact that (AFAIK) Slack only provided a week's notice of this change, which has left the Kubernetes volunteers trying to act quickly to avoid losing data which isn't easily archived (private channels and DMs)
How is IRCv3 doing these days? I remember it was supposed to address all the pain-points people had that made them want to use Slack, but I haven’t heard of anyone using it in years. Seems support for its feature-set is pretty decent: https://ircv3.net/software/clients
It works pretty well, but there's no money in IRC - and the people who like it the most have no desire to upgrade clients.
So, the "best" experience remains with either "The Lounge", or weechat. Neither of which are comparable to Zulip for UX or Slack/Discord for UI.
I was on the Kubernetes slack and I’ve found it much better than any of the multiple horrors that I’ve expected in Discord. It was even (somewhat) searchable.
But in the end, I never really relied on it for finding information, and am kind of sad that people keep creating chat communities instead of searchable forums.
I also think people overrate chat for actual learning or resolving issues. Even back in the IRC days, asking a question almost never yielded an immediate reply—-quite often you’d have to come back the day after and ask again, or check your DMs on screen overnight.
Forums let you ask and check for replies later, or search for similar questions, or even (shudder) get an e-mail reply, and Discord does exactly none of those things in a way that I find effective or productive.
I would hate to see them move to Discord over Matrix. I know Matrix has its issues, but Discord is inviting the same issue a couple years down the road. Besides, Matrix could use the attention of those talented devs using it every day!
4 days notice period to archive everything? Not a good look for Slack and/or the k8s working group (if they had known earlier already).
Turns out there was no notice. So it's Slack pulling the rug in an aggressive way: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/issues/8490#issuecom...
I wonder whether Discord will at some point start selling a "Discord for Business" product. Just adding SSO would get them 90% of the way there.
i don't understand how people use discord though.... it's somehow worse than slack at organizing information
Github issue for discussion: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/issues/8490
Can’t be a good sign financially or technically that Slack is unable to operate a 250 000 person instance.
I think technically they can. It’s because they’re downgrading them to a free service. I’m going to venture to say that it’s a money grab on a previously generous gift by slack.
> particularly since our Slack is one of the largest and more active ones on the platform
does sound like it's causing issues that they don't want to deal with if it's not earning them money
Tis' the season to rug pull at slack
> Slack, a Salesforce-owned workplace messaging app, recently blocked other software firms from searching or storing Slack messages, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing a public disclosure.
https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals...
No money gained because they move off from Slack.
On the contrary, not hosting them means they're not losing money either.
It's win-win for them. Either they pay (they won't/can't), negotiate to pay ($$$ at least)- or they move away, all of which increase the amount of available resources for Salesforce.
Perhaps k8s could roll its own Slack replacement. Sound crazy? Consider git: born of specific needs of Linux kernel plus a struggle to use commercially available tools.
If you squint there are similarities to the situation that led Linus Torvalds down the build-it-yourself path. What a tool like Slack “is” is pretty well defined, and they’re not being evil but are just unable to support a very unique community in k8s.
Owning its own tools helps the community own its own destiny.
git was a tiny crappy content tracker linus, one of the most prolific C hackers in history, did in a couple of weeks. it wasn’t even a version control system nor intended to be used directly, merely to make his personal life easier after tridge enraged larry.
“Normie focussed multi platform api-driven rich text media chat system” is 100x that work and unrelated to k8s’ existing ocean boiling.
I’m not saying they should; only that they could.
Nothing about it needs to be normie focused.
“merely to make his personal life easier” is the key. What made it what it is today is - after the first barebones release, it was worked on until it was useful enough to be worked on by more people; pretty soon there were a few folks using it, and eventually the snowball effect led to it being maintained by a motivated group of folks, which eventually leads us to today.
A collab tool doesn’t need to be built from scratch. Existing options include IRC, Matrix, Zulip... Maybe one fits the bill already.