When my employer adopted Slack, we saw benefit immediately. Conversations are searchable, file sharing is easy, and oh how I ? /giphy. It’s a great tool, but I don’t like it for open communities.

Slack was designed to be a company’s internal communication system. For that purpose, it’s great. It was not designed to be an open platform. For example, it is basically impossible for users to manage harassment.

Most people have one employer at a time. That’s not the case for hobby and interest communities. I have five unrelated rooms on Freenode IRC that I’m regularly in. For the most part, I manage that in one place. But each Slack instance I’m in might as well be a separate universe.

That’s not to say Slack is all bad. It is much easier to learn and use than most IRC clients. This is a significant benefit to non-technical communities. Creative Commons, for example, saw a large uptick in community participation after moving to Slack. Slack allows for a richness of community culture to develop in ways that text-only formats don’t.

But for me, particularly with open source communities, the less-than-public nature of Slack teams is a negative. People can’t join the communities they don’t know about. And if they can’t lurk quietly (by reading transcripts or joining the server anonymously), will they feel safe jumping in? There are lock-in considerations as well (my free software readers have probably been waiting for me to get to this point) that I think I’ll address in a later post.

Each community has to decide what is best for them. Like any other technology, Slack has pros and cons. The important thing is to weigh them before making a decision.