Exploring new chat solutions for the Scala Community

I recommend that anybody who is active in the online Scala community — that is, who likes to be able to chat with other folks in real time — check out this discussion thread.

The tl;dr is that the Scala community used to run on mailing lists, once upon a time. There was eventually a good deal of discontent with that, for various reasons — it worked poorly for realtime, generated too many notifications, tended to be spammy, and so on — and so, a fair number of years ago, we moved to Gitter as the primary place for us to talk about Scala and its ecosystem. There are currently a lot of Scala channels on Gitter.

(This was later supplemented by users.scala-lang.org and contributors.scala-lang.org, the two official forums. Those work decently for persistent discussions, but aren’t really right for realtime chat on fine-grained topics — different tools for different purposes.)

The problem is, Gitter is dying. It was never the best-supported product, and since it was purchased by GitLab it has basically become moribund. Folks have been frustrated by that for a long time, but the straw that is about to break the camel’s back is that they are discontinuing their native-app support (at least for iOS), which many folks depend upon. So a lot of core members of the community are looking at being unable to use Gitter in a reasonable way, pretty soon.

So the question is, what are the alternatives? For realtime online text discussion, there are really two popular alternatives at the moment: Discord and Slack. The above-linked discussion is hashing out the pros and cons of each system (suffice it to say, neither is clearly perfect), and Scala communities have been set up in both.

If you have an opinion, and especially if you see alternatives that are clearly better than either of those, I recommend checking that out and chiming in. Please don’t get over-invested one way or another, though: for things to come out well, odds are we’re going to have to make some compromises.

Speaking for myself, while I personally prefer Slack, I think the high priority is not to split the community — we’re likely to avoid miscommunication and hassle if folks are mainly in one place. So let’s try things out, have a robust discussion, and hopefully we can settle on one primary location for the Scala world to hang out, filling in that ecological niche…