Fluree is moving to Discord

The Fluree community has seen substantial growth over the last year.
With the velocity of growth and the big goals we have for the community,
we need a new home.

Discord has become an ever-present tool for communication on the web. The Fluree community has been on Slack for the past several years and for the most part we have been satisfied by the platform. However, over the past year, we've seen significant growth and as we've grown, we've begun to run up against some of the shortcomings of Slack as a platform for an open community. As we imagined where we want to take the Fluree community going forward, it became harder and harder to see how we could modify our vision to fit within the bounds of Slack. We needed a new platform for our community. After investigating the alternatives, we found Discord to be an extremely attractive option with all of the benefits provided by Slack and a ton of new functionality to boot. We did some preliminary internal testing, then tested the waters with a couple weeks of beta testing (shout out to our Beta testers!) and found the experience to be even better than we had hoped.

So, we made the exciting decision to migrate our community on over.

Why Migrate?

No message limits

The primary limitation in Slack is the message limits. If you weren't aware, Slack only allows up to 10,000 messages per workspace. There are over 700 members in the public Fluree Slack and the amount of chat happening meant that we were only able to see messages within about a 6-month window. As our community grows, that window will only shrink and the knowledge shared within this space will be lost at an accelerated pace. Discord has no message limit.

Voice chat and screen share

Another big point of differentiation between the two platforms is the availability of voice chat and screen sharing. Discord has a ton of features around this which we will begin to take full advantage of. We want to enable our members to self-organize and work on things together using the Fluree Discord as needed. This will enable just that. Not to mention the functionality the Fluree team can use to host events and activities from with Discord. (We have some fun stuff planned for this year!)

Open by default

Another issue with Slack for an open community is the way channels are structured. Channels are hidden by default and require a member to be invited or actively search for new channels to join. This is not the way Discord is set up. All channels are public by default, which creates an easy path to exploration and cross-pollination, with good tooling for a user to manage notifications per channel or category as desired. We think this is better for an open community and are excited for this change in structure.

Better moderation tooling

Fortunately, this hasn't been an issue thus far, but moderation is a vital part of community management. Creating a safe space for all of our community members is extremely important to the Fluree team and frankly the tooling for moderation in Slack is practically non-existent. Discord provides functionality which will enable us to create the spaces we want and ensure a welcoming, helpful, and safe environment for all who choose to join us.

Timeline

Here's the plan for the migration:

1. Thurs. Jan 6th: Open Discord server to the public.
2. Mon. Jan 10th, and Fri. Jan 14: Fluree DevRel team will be available for questions in the Discord to assist with the new tool.
3. Mon. Jan. 31st: Close public Slack channels to new comments. Begin migrating private channels to shared channels where needed.
   • We will migrate private support channels to shared Slack channels from our internal Slack workspace.
4. Thurs. Feb 3rd: February Office Hours to be held in the new Discord server!!

Of course, the team will be available for any questions in both Discord and Slack for the duration of the migration and are more than happy to assist where needed.

We are extremely excited for this new chapter of the Fluree community. There will be bumps in the road as we migrate such a large community, but we are confident this is the right choice, both for the long term health of the Fluree community and for Fluree itself.
Keep an eye on our Twitter in the coming weeks for an invite link to the new Discord server. If you're in the Fluree Slack, we'll
be making an announcement there as well.

We look forward to seeing you in the new Fluree Discord!