Is Chat the new Forums or are Forums the new Chat?
Hi indiehackers community, I’m new and interested in your thoughts: when it comes to chat within community platforms, which is best; forum style (Discourse) or chat style (slack, discord) how do you evaluate
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I like both, but things to think about if you're deciding:
Really insightful, thanks for sharing! it seems forums are better for the long term
I think a healthy mix of real-time chat with Slack or Discord and a separate place for longer-form content that you want to preserve is a really good way to go.
Good content as well as long questions and threads get buried in chat so quickly that I think it's hard to go with just real-time.On the other hand having the real-time component can feel more intimate and and boost the engagement quite a bit.
This is best imho: asynchronous with threading. I run groups with thousands of participants. Slack and Teams are just too noisy. Read more here https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ Disclaimer: I don't have any stake in zulipchat, nor do I have any communities in zc, but I really like how they lay this idea out.
Similar to https://twist.com/! I haven't gotten the opportunity to really try it out -- all the orgs I'm a part of are stuck on Discord or Slack -- but it seems to be the way to go.
twist looks quite interesting @wwsalmon thanks for sharing
You might find https://playgroup.community interesting (I'm the dude who builds it) — Its structure is a mix of Slack and old school message boards and it's all async. Still early, but a few brave early adopters seem to like it 😀
Looks like there are lots of products chasing the same idea -- must be a good one :)
slack is a
financially irresponsiblechoice, long-term, for community:https://www.indiehackers.com/product/yen/simple-pricing-shouldnt-be-this-hard--MB_cBzSkixoVxTqew5H
interesting post, just for clarity, you're saying slack is not good for bigger / growing communities as its a per user model?
i think that's what i wrote, right? perhaps i wasn't as clear as i need to be...?
https://peerboard.org is the best :)
I think it depends on what kind of community you have. Things lack Slack are great for fostering conversation and engagement in my experience in being a part of communities centered around a product/topic.
That said, if the topic is more serious/professional a forum structure seems to work better.
i think i would agree with you to some extent
Forum based is best with a Slack or Discord for a virtual watering hole. That's what I do with http://indiestack.co/.
Thanks for sharing looks interesting
Forum-style discussions are definitely better for me. I think chat platforms are terrible for reasons I explained here.
When a product offers only a community forum based on Discourse or Slack, I don't even bother checking it.
Thanks for your thoughts. I think I agree with you to some degree, forums can feel more controlled where chat is very much the Wild West. I’m wondering if the type of community being built influences the choice
What do you mean by the type of community?
I mean there are communities for different purposes, e.g. gaming , where voice is important, meetup groups where maybe chat is best etc
I see, thanks. Yes, voice and real-time interactions do have there uses. What I don't like is sticking to only one channel for all types of interactions.
What things apart from forum are important To you
Good product documentation, FAQs, and a company blog are also important to me.