Three years ago I created microblogging.slack.com to chat about indie microblogging and Micro.blog. There have been many great discussions in that time, and I appreciate everyone who has contributed or helped other members of the Micro.blog community. But to continue to improve Micro.blog regularly, I need to focus on fewer support channels.
Daniel Jalkut and I talked about this on Core Intuition 421. It is not sustainable for me to work on new Micro.blog features at the current pace as well as be responsive in Slack. If someone has a question about Micro.blog, I want to point them to the best place to get a thorough answer, and that’s email.
Slack also has a couple problems:
- It’s a proprietary platform that doesn’t fit well with our goals for Micro.blog. For example, you can’t have your own domain name for Slack, which makes migrating away very difficult.
- Because the search is limited to only recent messages, it is less useful as a resource to new members.
Last year, Jean MacDonald and I considered replacing Slack with Discourse. We may still do that, or it may be that forums around microblogging should best be run by the community rather than an official channel of Micro.blog. There is also a great IndieWeb chat accessible via Slack.
This weekend, I’ll be closing the current Slack. I will export all the data for backup — just in case we want to rebuild it in the future, or make the messages searchable — and then I’ll completely delete the Slack account, unless I can find a more elegant way to handle shutting it down or pausing it.
Thanks again to everyone who has participated in the Slack community, sending feature requests, helping others with Hugo theme questions, and just being supportive of the mission of Micro.blog. See you on Micro.blog!
