Slack as an ephemeral communication medium

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@ZeLonewolf

Slack is a real-time chat platform more akin to IRC, not a deep archive of the project. If it “goes away”, we would of course have to find a new service to use for real-time chat (of which there are many options), and I’m sure this would be very annoying. But even in that case, we would not import Slack history into some hypothetical successor.

For now, the comparison to IRC is inaccurate because we actually have a deep archive of Slack, unlike with IRC. I also don’t think there’s much of a chance that the chat history will ever be transferred to another chat platform due to privacy concerns, as not everyone will make the leap and may not want their writings accessible to essentially a different community under different terms.

I think preserving history in that sense would be foolish anyways: inevitably, the next chat platform will also experience scaling issues or enshittification and we’ll find ourselves as nomads once again. To the extent that the history matters, we could find ways to keep a snapshot of the existing archive accessible to Slack users or some subset thereof, for peace of mind, but otherwise we should make a break with the past and move on.

I appreciate the brave talk about completely walking away from the chat history, but I think setting up a static archive that OSMUS controls would make a migration to a different platform more realistic, because we can then move to Slack’s free tier as a forcing function for treating Slack as an ephemeral medium. It takes off the table the main asset that Salesforce leverages to lock us in and charge us real money. It would buy the community time to do all these aspirational things about documentation at our own pace, since it’s not like we’re all employees who can be assigned that work on a deadline.

@ZeLonewolf

While folks have found it useful to be able to deep link into Slack, nobody should assume that these are forever links. If you want permanent linkable content, use this Discourse server or the wiki.

Unfortunately, in the last few years, it has become a not uncommon practice to cite a Slack discussion by URL or even just by a vague reference inside of a changeset comment, as justification for a change that, by the mapper’s own admission, was significant enough to require consulting the community.

While we shouldn’t be demanding a permanently publicly inspectable chain of custody regarding every decision about every edit, we unfortunately have seen many cases where someone comes along much later and tries to relitigate a decision on purely procedural grounds. I think these changesets demonstrate the point that we need to reduce our reliance on chatrooms for decisionmaking. Any chatroom should only be a place to brainstorm, and maybe arrive at a consensus if it’s truly not a big deal, but it needs to be documented somewhere more durable.

I tend not to go out on such a limb that I need to cite discussions as “sources” on changesets, so to me it’s usually enough just to explain the objective rationale directly in the changeset comment. But if you feel such an urge to have a consensus back you up, that consensus should be more meaningful than “per Slack” and more human-readable than https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C029HV955/p1702532841853939 or https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C029HV955/p1705089930917689?thread_ts=1705088891.570609&channel=C029HV955&message_ts=1705089930.917689. If your changes really have merit, you should believe in them without hiding behind an anonymous link.

@Minh_Nguyen

However, for the time being, I also defend mappers who cite Slack conversations as justification for their edits, because they are literally following the guidelines. If we reach a consensus that the guidelines are outdated, then we change the guidelines for decisions going forward, and recreate that paper trail to the extent possible.

By way of an update, the guidelines have changed to deemphasize Slack and other chat platforms:

@mvexel

Hi all, I attempted to clarify the organized editing policy wiki with regard to the role of third-party platforms like Slack. Let’s please work together to keep improving the visibility and clarity of this wiki page.