[vemv]

I've long held the opinion the best chat app is no chat app, i.e. delegate everything to your favorite issue tracker and other forms of knowledge keeping (e.g. Git commits, design documents).

Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly.

I'd wager that this approach will be increasingly obvious as more people burn out from messy remote settings - many of which were improvised due to the pandemic, yet are here to stay.

It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I work for a company distributed across the world with ~200 users in our 'watercooler' channel. I can't think of a better alternative to Slack that would enable everyone to stay in touch and feel part of a community. Email, forums, or — god forbid — enormous video chats would be overkill.

[ThalesX]

How do you feel about writing this in a community spanning thousands of people across tens of countries and providing only a fully ‘literate’ approach as per the GPs comment?

[PikachuEXE]

I think there might be a term for it - Async-First Communication

You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/

[vemv]

Good resource, thanks!

I'm familiar with the term (as popularized by http://asyncmanifesto.org/) but perhaps 'async' is not enough of a self-sufficient term. Something can be async but also happen to be poor.

[PikachuEXE]

I agree and there are benefits on some sync activities too.

Being better is another thing after we understand and adopt necessary concepts/strategies like 'async'. But without those the ability to improve would be more limited.

[fnord123]

> It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.

What's the biggest OSS project you know of with no IRC, Discord, Slack or other chat presence?

[vemv]

The question is loaded because while a OSS project might have chat "presence", it doesn't mean at all that its organisation revolves around said chat medium.

Chat is more often a support channel.

When you keep in mind the scarcity and distribution of OSS maintainers, the need for asynchony will be evident.

(If you want an answer: multiple 1k+ stars projects I'm a maintainer of)