I think talk of Telegram is somewhat muddying the waters here. Itās not currently suited to use in any official capacity - particularly because of the current limitation of 200 on groups - and Iām not sure anybody is proposing that we do so. Rather, we want to do the opposite, and move away from us using it for small discussions before it becomes an established, somewhat-closed, platform we use.
Iām not sure I totally agree. I use IRC, and getting started with Slack wasnāt any sort of a hurdle for me at all. It basically feels like a browser based IRC client with some extras sprinkled on top.
Exactly - it only increases fragmentation if we attempt to do the absolute impossible and cater to absolutely everybody who has, or might in the future, contribute to Community Ops, by using all tools simultaneously. The same argument (of fragmentation!) could have been (and probably still is) deployed by some people against Discourse. Itās only really a problem if weāre silly enough to try to use all of them for the same thing.
What if, then, we kept the IRC channel as a āhelpdeskā, where people outside of Community Ops, or those using our services (MCS, Discourse categories, etc.) can ask for our help, with Slack becoming the place where we discuss āinternalā things.
Iām not aware of any instance where the discussion wouldāve worked through Discourse, though, and most of the time those discussions result in a Discourse post, after an initial level of thinking, questioning, and refinement (and so on). Discourse and Telegram/IRC/Slack are fundamentally different kinds of communication tools, and canāt be used in the same way.
The problem I see with these discussions is not that theyāre not on Discourse, but theyāre not open for others to read in future or participate in, in their infant stages, when not yet on Discourse.
@tad mentions push notifications, and along with history, I think thatās one of the only ones. Of course - this could all be built on top of IRC. Most people will use a bouncer with IRC, and thereās no reason that the bouncer couldnāt implement those things. Indeed, there are such bouncers out there, like IRCCloud.
From my use of Slack so far, for all I know it could be powered by an IRC backend with certain features (history, push notifications, emoji [and emoji responses], file upload) built on top.