Changes to Kubernetes Slack (Kubernetes Contributors blog)

[Posted June 16, 2025 by jzb]

The Kubernetes project has announced that it will be losing its "special status" with the Slack communication platform and will be downgraded to the free tier in a matter of days:

On Friday, June 20, we will be subject to the feature limitations of free Slack. The primary ones which will affect us will be only retaining 90 days of history, and having to disable several apps and workflows which we are currently using. The Slack Admin team will do their best to manage these limitations.

The project has a FAQ covering the change, its impacts, and more. The CNCF projects staff has proposed a move to the Discord service as the best option to handle the more than 200,000 users and thousands of posts per day from the Kubernetes community. The Kubernetes Steering Committee will be making its decision "in the next few weeks".

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:10 UTC (Mon) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link] (8 responses)

Have they looked at Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/#). It's even available under GPL 2.0 license (https://www.discourse.org/about). I'm am member of some projects that use Discourse, the although certainly not at the scale of Kubernates. I don't know enough about Discourse to weigh their requirements listed against Discourse's scalability, but it is an open source option, if it does meet their requirements.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:18 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link] (4 responses)

I'd expect Discourse to scale fine, as it is already used heavily for large communities like python, with many tens of thousands of members.[1] The bigger question is about what interaction style they want, as Discourse is essentially a forum, which provides a somewhat different experience to chatrooms like Slack or Discord.

[1]: https://discuss.python.org/about

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:21 UTC (Mon) by gf2p8affineqb (subscriber, #124723) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah. Discourse is a different thing. LLVM for instance has both a Discourse as a forum (replacing mailing list) and a Discord as chat (which makes the similar names quite annoying).

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:36 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link]

Looking further down the discussion thread, kubernetes actually already has a Discourse instance, but it apparently doesn't get too much active use, at least not for on-going development activities.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:25 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link]

For some even more extreme examples, OpenAI's discourse has 959,000 members[1] and Epic Games has a whopping 4.6 million users![2] So 200,000 kubernetes users should be very doable.

[1]: https://community.openai.com/about
[2]: https://forums.unrealengine.com/about

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:23 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Discourse _does_ have a chat feature, although it's quite primitive compared to Slack.

I really wish Matrix (or, hey, sure, a suped-up version of Discourse chat) would take aim at what Discord provides — their "servers"are really quite nice for community-building and I totally understand why projects are drawn to it.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 22:36 UTC (Mon) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

There's also Zulip, it's open source and popular in some circles. Lean and Rust use it, although I'm not sure if those reach the same scale as k8s.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 18:53 UTC (Tue) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link] (1 responses)

We already have a Discourse: https://discuss.opensource.org/

It hasn't caught on as a replacement for synchronous chat. Today, it's mostly used by our Asian user community.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 18:54 UTC (Tue) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link]

Feh, wrong link!

https://discuss.kubernetes.io/

OSI also has a discourse. It's a really good platform.

Cull membership and pay

Posted Jun 16, 2025 23:00 UTC (Mon) by film_girl (subscriber, #134009) [Link] (1 responses)

Discourse isn’t really a viable replacement for how the Kubernetes project seems to use Slack, so to me, the solution that makes the most sense is to:

A) Cull the number of Slack users down. Deactivate anyone who hasn’t logged in 30 days (or whatever criteria works best here) and restrict Slack usage to active contributors and maintainers. Then work out a deal with Salesforce to pay a reduced fee for access. I would guess the vast majority of users in the account are inactive or are not involved directly with the project.

B) Move to Discord or potentially Discourse for social activity. Restrict the Slack usage for people who need to talk about commits and maintainers.

C) Price out what it would cost to have a Matrix or other OSS collaboration tool instance running on infrastructure maintained by the LF or CNCF (including salary for a sysadmin). If the figure is less than what Salesforce wants to charge, consider a migration to one of those solutions. If there isn’t an appreciable difference in cost, stay with steps A and B.

It is unfortunate that Salesforce isn’t offering a gratis plan to the community project anymore, but it was probably not a good idea to let anyone access the Slack instance like it was IRC. Especially when you’re a flagship project of an organization with a $300m annual budget (meaning some amount of money can be spent on infrastructure tools).

Cull membership and pay

Posted Jun 17, 2025 23:47 UTC (Tue) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link]

Slack does not provide, or support, any tools for membership culling.

Mattermost

Posted Jun 17, 2025 4:23 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Mattermost is another FOSS alternative to Slack.

Mattermost

Posted Jun 17, 2025 13:01 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I use Mattermost and I like it. However, I believe the free edition has started to limit the number of users on an instance to something like 5000, which is highly annoying.

I guess you could compile it yourself and remove the limit, but still...

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 4:52 UTC (Tue) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (7 responses)

I think I will never understand why some projects insist on jailing themselves and all their users into totally closed and non-indexed nor searchable platforms. Sometimes some useful information might have been exchanged there but will never be seen by search engines and will never be found by someone facing a similar problem. When you add to this the fact that such platforms tend to purge contents after a certain duration, that's pathetic.

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 6:27 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (2 responses)

Exactly. Silos.

Watching this discussion...

- Slack!
- No! Discourse!
- Better! Zulip!
- No, no! Discord!
- Mattermost!!

The most infuriating part: we're the nerds. It is self-inflicted.

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 8:16 UTC (Tue) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link]

Discourse is at least perfectly indexable even if there are parts of it that are frustrating. Ultimately it's just "modern" forum software. And it's free software, self-hostable, and has support for mailing lists.

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 8:22 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Would you expect IRC channels to be publicly logged (by default. There are always per-channel settings)?

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 10:10 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

Kubernetes is free software but isn't really a community project right? Just a project google started. So it's normal they wouldn't really care about principles.

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 11:06 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

It's the gif reaction support. Nothing beats the serotonin hit of a well timed animated gif reaction. And Slack made it really easy to converse via animated gif.

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 11:46 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Sometimes some useful information might have been exchanged there but will never be seen by search engines and will never be found by someone facing a similar problem.

This is a growing problem even for nominally "open" platforms -- when everyone and their dog has a badly-behaved "AI" scraper that combined DDoS on your resources, your only recourse is to start blocking crawlers (along with large swaths of the internet)

Why closed, non-searchable platforms ?

Posted Jun 18, 2025 20:32 UTC (Wed) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

I have definitely heard the sentiment that people want questions they ask _not_ to be indexed publicly or searchable, and do not want to use a platform where this is not the case.

I think it actually does surprise people who are not deep within the FOSS community that this is not the norm; every so often someone shows up on e.g. a Debian mailing list trying to get an old post removed because they're embarrassed by it or just don't want it to show up on Google for their name. (Now that GDPR is a thing, I wonder if these requests are being made and successfully processed behind the scenes.)

And, of course, nowadays there is the phenomenon of LLMs indexing any content that's on the web. For-profit proprietary search engines at least provided a service that was universally acknowledged to be valuable. Now that indexable, searchable questions and answers are being slurped up by LLMs, people have more mixed opinions.

So I think it's sensible that projects offer a platform that is not publicly indexed for ephemeral conversations. There are always other fora (pull request discussions, KEPs, Stack Exchange, etc.) that are indexed.

There's also no shortage of fora that will always be closed and non-indexable, like asking a question to your coworker in person, the hallway track at conferences, etc. And of course people can just decide not to ask questions and fiddle with things themselves until they find an answer (or give up and take another approach). You are not at all guaranteed that removing a place for ephemeral conversations will turn them into recorded conversations.

(See also https://xkcd.com/979/, which is about the effectiveness of an indexed, searchable discussion platform that preserves discussions for at least eight years.)

Someone else's computer

Posted Jun 17, 2025 5:30 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (guest, #17118) [Link]

Well, that was to be expected. Being on the mercy of some cloud service means they can change the rules at any time.

Short notice?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 7:01 UTC (Tue) by egb (subscriber, #163244) [Link]

Four days' notice seems like an awfully short amount of time for a sizeable portion of users (channel owners, private chat owners too?) to take action when catastrophic data loss is on the line.

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 13:54 UTC (Tue) by lyda (subscriber, #7429) [Link] (12 responses)

Wish they'd consider irc. So much easier to use.

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:04 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (9 responses)

Thanks, but no thanks.

There's a difference between being easy and being primitive, and IRC is on the wrong side of it.

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:32 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (8 responses)

Slack certainly has a lot of whiz-bang features that IRC does not. One wonders, though, if instead of adopting Slack and other proprietary alternatives the community and companies behind things like Kubernetes had put their resources into improving IRC or an IRC-NG, where we might be today...

I will admit, I'd prefer to be using plain IRC rather than Slack any day, myself. I never really thought IRC was bad, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it. However, I am generally happy with text-based interfaces and I concede my tastes are hardly representative of mainstream users.

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:41 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

The ability to move a topic to its own thread is a killer feature IMO. Slack was early to that, but Google Chat, Discord, Mattermost, etc. all have it now (and Zulip is built around it; not sure if Slack got its inspiration for the feature from there). Reactions, images, etc. can all be emulated with some encoding of the messages sent around (cf. iMessage reactions becoming their own SMS messages when rendered on Android devices), but the threading is a distinct jump in usefulness to me.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 14:59 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Yeah, a lot of people like its threading. I am not a big fan -- but that might be more of an implementation thing than disliking threading, per se.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 10:48 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Slack is searchable. In large companies, it tends to become a sort of "knowledge base" with solutions for typical internal problems. My friend is working on a plugin (of course, AI based, sigh) that extracts this information into a wiki.

IRC's main flaw has always been the inability to look at the previous messages.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 12:41 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Lack of threading is also an issue with IRC.

irc

Posted Jun 20, 2025 7:20 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Message length is also pretty severely limited in IRC on the protocol level.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 12:28 UTC (Wed) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not about desire of whiz-bang or aversion to text-based interfaces (neither of which are my traits). It's about persistence, threading, forwarding, side-channel metadata (receipts, typing notifications) and other ways in which it is possible to make *human* interaction more pleasant than what is afforded by a bidirectional sequence of delimited UTF-8 messages.

If that's considered "whiz-bang", then I'll have to respectfully but firmly disagree.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 14:58 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

Heh. A lot of the features you list here (e.g. typing notifications) are things that I immediately turn off if possible or don't care for Slack's implementation (threading). I could go on at great length over beverages about some of the bad communications habits I think Slack encourages (not all of which, to be fair, are absent or mitigated by IRC), but I (again) acknowledge I'm probably in the minority on those opinions...

But my larger point still stands: I think it's a shame that a lot of communities coalesced around the idea that it was better and easier to embrace Slack than work together on an IRC upgrade or replacement that had all these features people want.

irc

Posted Jun 20, 2025 14:59 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

+1. I wish in the ~25 years since the last IRC RFC was published (https://www.irchelp.org/protocol/rfc/) we'd seen collaboration and participation in improving on the previous work on the protocol. Perhaps a new community will spring up to do this, as well as continue in the interesting process of RFC-based evolution of the Internet.

I mean, if IRC was started today and had these stats (https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php), it would be a significant event, no? ;)

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:48 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

I do too. It feels like IRC, as a standard, as a protocol, and as a communications medium, could evolve to address some of the biggest objections.

I'm still on Libera.chat. There is a community of some helpful, some snarky, enthusiastic people on Libera.chat. (Libera.chat is the inheritor of the community IRC service formerly known as "Freenode".) Cheers!

irc

Posted Jun 19, 2025 15:28 UTC (Thu) by rcampos (subscriber, #59737) [Link]

I love irc and I still use it today. However having to be online to see a message in a channel or mention doesn't work anymore.

Irc-ng and cloud and whatever can emulate it, sure, but there isn't any GOOD offering that I'm aware of for that.

Is there any?

Rocket chat ?

Posted Jun 23, 2025 19:31 UTC (Mon) by starox (subscriber, #168285) [Link]

At $dayjob, we use rocketchat: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat

It is pleasant for me.
The app interface is somewhat heavy for threads.
Anyone have an opinion on it ?