This is not about what the community team uses, it's about what the Rust project and community offer to the general public.
I don't think that's a good approach. It means excessive work adopting the solution to the wider project later and basically saying "invest your time at the chance of being ignored", which I feel is not necessary.
Also, I don't think there is a "this is how open source works" and even if there were, Rust does quite some of those things differently already.
Slack is for private orgs. You have to be invited to the channel to join it. They make your email address visible to every other member in the channel because they assume you all know each other. I made a mistake once in joining a "public" slack that auto-invites all applicants, and as a result got my email added to a bunch of mailing lists for related topics as well as invited to a bunch of other slacks by bots.
Community group chats are great, but don't try to force slack into this role, it wasn't made for it.
That is a good point.
The private nature of Slack is also my main criticism there, it just isn't build for any public group (I've also got huge problems with the interface).
Here's another question: would a mattermost instance be fine for Slack fans, too?
My personal gripe about IRC is that there may be more than one conversation thread going on at the same time on a channel. At times it's really hard to follow who's replying to whom (and sometimes people participate in more than one conversation!). Prefixing your replies with nicks you address is pretty much a requirement.
Is there a messaging platform that has a sensible support for conversation threads, without moving them away into private? If there were, I'd strongly consider switching over.
Just a quick follow-up, since I see this thread starting to light up again.
The plan now is to fold the comments together and put out an RFC. Since adding a Slack channel, and making the Gitter channel more official, will take more resourcing, the core team asked me to make a more formal proposal.
I have a draft, but I'm currently on vacation. I hope to post it sometime soon.
Discourse supports threaded conversations and does push notifications when new messages are posted to a thread you currently have open. Rust has an officially-supported instance at https://users.rust-lang.org/.
Something we may want to look into is a Gitter/IRC bridge. Neovim has one set up, and it seems to be working well for them.
I’d like to mention Riot.im (based on the Matrix protocol) as another alternative, since it has a good IRC–Riot bridge.
Thanks to Scott Olson’s post, “Switching from IRCCloud to Matrix”, I was able to get set up with an always-on connection to #rust-beginners in <5 minutes.
At minimum, I’d suggest mentioning Riot.im at Community - Rust Programming Language next to the link to Mibbit, since many beginners unfamiliar with IRC’s approach to asynchronous communication, tend to log into Mibbit, ask a question, and then leave after a while.
Just FYI for those interested in Rust on Slack: Someone setup one over here https://rust-slack.herokuapp.com and it currently has ~280 members or so.
Maybe I’ve come here late, but there’s already a Rust Discord Server with 900 users in it. It seems pretty active.
(Link to server and post below)