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Announcing Rabbitmq Community Discord Server

· 2 min read
Michael Klishin
Michael Klishin

RabbitMQ now has an official Discord server started by the core team. If you prefer Discord to Slack, feel free to join it and discuss all things RabbitMQ!

Introducing RabbitMQ Community Discord Server​

Thanks to Gavin Roy, the RabbitMQ community has had a place to communicate, help each other and collaborate: our community Slack.

Today we introduce an official Discord server. It will be an alternative to Slack.

Why come up with an alternative?​

Slack is a great tool that works for many teams and companies. However, open source project communities operate differently from how corporations operate.

Most importantly for us, open source community members decide to join or leave at will. The process of joining a chat platform should be quick and involve the core team of the project as little as possible. Slack was built around the idea of a tightly controlled environment where a small group of people invites others. This approach has its merits but not how open source communities work.

Over the years, open source projects have come up with several applications and strategies for users to invite themselves to Slack. This usually works reasonably well but said applications have to be deployed, monitored, maintained. For a small core team with a several orders of magnitude larger community this can become a pain point.

Why Discord?​

Discord is a community platform successfully used by various open source projects, for example, Elixir and Rust.

There is no need to maintain a self-invitation app and invitation links can be configured to never expire.

On top of that, Discord has several features that make a lot of sense for open source communities: a public catalog of server, tools that help you describe and communicate code of conduct to the new members, a very flexible member permission system, and more.

This sounded like an exciting alternative to try, so our team decided to set up an official server for RabbitMQ.

When will community Slack be shut down?​

Assuming that Slack does not limit the free tier plan in ways incompatible with our needs, there are no plans to shut down our community Slack. It will co-exist with Discord, just like it co-exists with the official RabbitMQ IRC channel on Libera Chat.