[unethical_ban]

What do you use if not slack? OPs advice is standard best practice. Respect peoples time by not expecting immediate response, and use team or function based channels as much as possible.

Other options are email of course, and what, teams for instant messages?

[jasonpeacock]

I’ve always that forums are much better suited to corporate communications than email or chat.

Organized by topics, must be threaded, and default to asynchronous communications. You can still opt in to notifications, and history is well organized and preserved.

[jasonpeacock]

The bullet points for using Slack basically describe email (and distribution lists).

It’s funny how we get an instant messaging platform and derive best practices that try to emulate a previous technology.

Btw, email is pretty instant.

[nottorp]

If you work in a team, email is limited to the people you cc: while a convo in a slack channel can have people you didn't think of jump in* with information.

See the other point in the article about discouraging one on one private messages and encouraging public discussion. That is the main reason.

* half a day later or days later if you do true async, but that's fine.

[dijit]

I am neutral in this particular topic, so don’t think I’m defending or attacking or anything.

But aren’t mailling lists and distribution groups pretty ubiquitous?

[nottorp]

But - from the people you actually want to get to contribute - emails come with an expectation of a well thought out text. IMs ... less so.

I've been working across time zones via IM and email since ... ICQ.

I'm probably biased by that but I consider email the place for questions lists and long statuses with request for comments, and for info that I want retained somewhere. While IM is a transient medium where you throw a quickie question or statement or whine every couple hours - and check what everyone else is whining about.

[dijit]

I have now been roped into talking more about a topic I have no interest in and am completely ambivalent to… :/

But clearly, thats cultural.

If you keep your eyes on the linux kernel mailing you’ll see a lot of (on topic) short and informal messages flying in all directions.

If you keep your eyes on the emails from big tech CEOs that sometimes appear in court documents; you’ll see that the way they use email is the same way that I’d use slack or an instant messenger.

Thats likely because its the tool they have available- we have IM tools that connect us to people we need (inside the company)- making email the only place for long form content, which means its only perceived as being for long form content.

But when people have to use something federated more often, it does seem like email is actually used this way.

[unethical_ban]

I get it, email accomplishes a lot. But it "feels" like a place these days for one-off group chats, especially for people from different organizations. Realtime chat has its places and can also step in to that email role within a team. All my opinion, none too strongly held.

[ale42]

We use self-hosted Mattermost (team version, i.e. without limits but no enterprise features like LDAP). Fine for a small team (around 40 active users here) where you can script account actions via the API, probably not fine when users become a lot more, or you might need access to the compliance functions for audit purposes, etc.

For us the free version of Slack was insufficient, the commercial one too expensive, and anyway, given that it's a cloud-based system, it's not compliant with our internal rules for confidential information (unless we can get some specific agreement with them). On the side, there is a bit too much analytics/telemetry in the Slack client.