As the Haystack community grows, we are noticing we are out growing Slack! In this doc you will be able to read through our reasoning about why we will migrate to Discord. You will also find our research on comparing Slack and Discord.

Background

The main motivations for these are the ‘community’ functionalities that Discord provides which aren’t as straight forward on Slack. We have a growing number of (active) users in our Slack workspace which would mean if we do want to make the change, doing so sooner rather than later will mean fewer challenges in the future.

We have made this decision because we see a future for the community which would mean using Discord would make more sense. Rather than only focusing on whether it makes sense now we have come to the conclusion that Discord makes more sense for a future where we want to be more active on our community channels.

Motivation

The following features of Discord make up the core of our motivation to migrate. Some of these might not be features we start using immediately but they are certainly features that we would see ourselves using in the future.

(PS: A discord ‘server’ is the same as a Slack ‘workspace’)

• Joining new servers if you already have a Discord account is easy
• No message limits! On our current plan with Slack we are limited to 10k messages. This will not be the case with Discord
• There is the concept of Roles which will make it easier for community members to spot deepset people. This also gives us the possibility to add more roles in the future and also for community members to ‘subscribe’ to topics that they are most interested in.
• Dedicated and persistent voice chat rooms which we would like to start using to host more informal and frequent sessions with our community. These channels will remain active and you will be able to see who is in there at all times. This will allow us to have quick in person discussions where needed too. ****
• Upcoming events can be communicated much easier with the a persistent Event reminder people can refer to.
• Moderation tools will become increasingly important as we grow.

Overall, the decision is based on what type of environment we want to provide our community when they go to a space for chatting.

What’s next?

We will send out invites to our new Discord server to everyone who is currently in our Slack workspace. Following that:

• We will keep our Slack active for a few months so if you miss the migration announcement you won’t be left alone in Slack 🙂
• For anyone who messages on Slack we will reply to their question and send an invite to Discord
• We will schedule some office hours in Discord for you to drop into and have a chat with us about anything you would like to know about our migration