[zyxley]

Many new FOSS projects are now using Slack instead of IRC, with a variety of methods for auto-inviting members of the public instead of Slack's intent of manually managing users.

Another popular one now is Discord, which is Slack-like but anecdotally better for large sets of users because of a more robust admin/permissions scheme.

[jcurbo]

I use Discord for gaming (which seems to be their main market?) and it is amazing how nice it is. I wonder if Slack could just buy them and integrate the voice features into Slack, or introduce their own similar functionality. The voice stuff is seriously very nice and something that Slack doesn't do at all.

[sciurus]

Slack has voice in beta.

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/216771908-Making-vo...

[jcurbo]

That's good to hear, I hope it is as streamlined as Discord because it really just works there. It's also free in Discord (although I don't know what their business plan is) and according to that page it'll be part of the Standard plan and above. (group calls, that is) But I understand if they're targeting different audiences (business vs gamers).

[brazzledazzle]

Slack bought screenhero and is apparently working on integrating the screen sharing and audio into Slack.

[flurdy]

Most FOSS projects I am involved / interested in seems to use http://gitter.im, though a few uses Slack