We’re doing our best to secure and scale Secret Chat! It’s self hosted (Rocket.chat), well organized, and has been pretty effective for our purposes. However, there have been a few requests to explore other channels as well - including Discord. We need a single obvious home for our critical developer, node operator, and committee communities. And we need to decide if it will be here or another platform!
In my mind the priorities for any platform we choose should be:
clear, obvious, and active home for developer / node support
easy for committees to collaborate and create
very high engagement (minutely basis, not daily)
easy onboarding of new community members
Looking at the primary choices for channels, there are some pros and cons.
Pros of Secret Chat:
self hosted and easily manageable
open source
Cons of Secret Chat:
challenging UX (esp on mobile)
standalone server (have to sign up separately, not use existing logins)
Pros of Discord
easy to assign roles
better channel visibility / discovery
ez bots for administration
Cons of Discord
no threads (yet)
hard to start private channels / DMs
3rd party platform
I want to start an open discussion here for anyone who would have a strong preference one way or the other. Please add your thoughts on other pros / cons. Generally speaking I’m for channel consolidation, but this would be a very important decision.
I feel like Discord probably wins out just for sheer engagement levels. Yes, it’s nice to have threaded convos on Rocket Chat, but I feel like you need to go where the people are.
Although there is no perfect solution, I vote Discord because of the existing user base, ease of use with the desktop and mobile app and channel segmentation. I use Discord with other crypto projects and it seems to work good enough.
Not sure there are any other viable options. We require channel management for this to be successful. Telegram is nice for an always-on high-level community chat but it’s terrible for organization / coordination.
I’ve really come to appreciate RocketChat and the current setup - but I am guessing for new users RocketChat may be more unfamiliar/not as easy to return to compared to discord. Thus, my vote is for discord, even though this old cat doesn’t like changing locations so often.
Easy management, we can build channel sections and more tools.
Plus community can boost discord as much as they want, rather than a single entity consuming cost to maintain and sustain it.
Also secret community meetings can be done on discord through the channels ( ), effectively rendering jitsi and maintaining jitsi redundant.
The one con with Discord threads should soon be gone, as Discord has teased multiple times that threads are coming #soon ( i would speculate before end of year but that’s just me).
Rocket chat is ok for smaller teams, but I have noticed large lags with increased usage by multiple people.
We vote for Discord as well.
Most projects that were using rocket, slack, element, etc. they moved to discord for it usability.
Roles, channel arrangements, 3rd party integrations, easy to join server, mobile app, desktop app, no lag, etc.
The first setup will take a bit of time, but after that only need to select roles, which can be automated too.
It can hold “secret” chats
(yet)
), effectively rendering jitsi and maintaining jitsi redundant.
