Who is indie hacking for Slack?

I built https://AllyBot.io - inclusive language checker - for Slack! Previously, also built https://uppit.io. It's a good platform these days and is maturing more and more on the dev-tool side of things.

At my previous job we hacked an internal kind-of-stack-overflow integrated in our Slack.
People had a form to ask structured questions in the channel. Then they were prompted with FAQ, common issues, and similar answers in the past in case it could solve their problem before getting engineers involved.

It was pretty awesome and I am seriously considering building it if it was to pick interest!

I have a utility which allows me to do a couple of things for the community weekly newsletter.

• Resurface the top 15 posts in the slack group ( ranked by replies/reactions ) and then I pick the 5 to feature
• List of the top 5 users based on the most number of posts

I found this to help other members to get an idea of the discussions happening on the slack group.

Here's an example post

But as I said, the product is half baked and only for personal use. Happy to share more details if you are interested.

Thanks for sharing https://onebar.io/. It looks like something we could use because we have a free account and our messages are now at 29k. There is a lot of value hidden in those archived messages 😑

AppReviewBot (https://appreviewbot.com) is built entirely on top of Slack at the moment as a way for app developers to get their iOS App Store reviews as soon as they occur. I built it mainly for myself but the Slack app directory drives a decent amount of new users.

My thoughts - from where I have found Slack communities useful (mainly as a Dev)

1. If there are lot of info to broadcast, to a set of audience (i.e, in case of OneBar.io), the info is wiki, audience is team.... which is pretty much an every day use case .. so there will be good frequency of content... used by someone

2. Another use case type, I found helpful is ~ where there is a burning problem (usually a code that does not work) and I could get help from someone online than waiting anxiously from Stackoverflow.

3. I have not used, but have seen and wondered to be a good interesting product, is like Jira updates etc.... but there are many of them already.

@rosiesherry Could u pls throw some light on how exactly you envision using Slack for Rosie.land ?

I participate in a dozen of different Slack communities and I personally feel like Slack is actually a weird choice for the job. It's really great for work and I believe in it there, but the nature of communication that happens in community Slacks is much different of that in the work environment.

A typical community Slack holds 1000-s of people, most of which are inactive. Those who are active use a few channels, mostly for slow random discussions. Slack is a pretty heavy tool for that and they don't use any advanced features of it. Plus, because Slack has a separate workspace for everything and you have to explicitly add it in your app, most people just don't do that and forget about the community right after sign up.

One exception where I think Slack works well are large open source projects like Kubernetes. There people use pretty much for work and use all the features designed for work.

For something smaller than a 1000 people open source project I'd really look into other tools. I heard Discord is popular for gaming communities and I personally use Telegram a lot which is, surprisingly, also often used for this purpose. You can also create a cozy corner on Reddit, though it's not gonna be chat based.

The sales for founders accountability group runs on slack, and our daily updates/accountability tool is integrated with it. Working well so far, but a lot more functionality to build.

What would your Slack community do?