Old projects and the free-software community

So, like IRC then? Granted file hosting isn't part of the IRC protocol per se, but in practice it seems to work okay with the mainstream clients.

I guess the implicit answer here is that the actual value is in them doing the setup and hosting, and in only allowing a single blessed client so you know everyone has the same feature set.

I don't want to seem too negative about this - I do value ease-of-use and simplicity fairly highly, especially for short-lived uses where the effort to set up a dedicated server is unlikely to be worth it; it's just that in this particular case the Slack people don't seem to offer any obvious upsides versus using, say, IRCCloud. There are obvious downsides though, which is why I'd expect their website to have a "why we're better" slant rather than simply describing their features as if they existed in a vacuum.

Indeed, trying to understand the purpose of this tool has left me even more confused about the article. It says "several people mentioned the difficulty of maintaining Slack channels for open-source projects", but it doesn't give any reason why those people are wanting to try. Reading around, it seems that Slack is designed for smaller closed chatrooms, not public open ones, and needs a hack to even allow open registration. That is, it's not even intended for this use case.

Given that the entire point of this article is about old projects trying to attract new contributors, and coupled with the perception of "constantly shifting "tool of the month" culture", I can't help but wonder if this might be a situation where the thought processes were along the lines of "I hear young people these days like using X. We should use X too, then they'll all be more interested" - without considering whether that was really a contributing factor in the barrier to entry, nor whether X is actually an appropriate tool for the desired use. It feels... kind of demeaning, like somebody awkwardly using some other culture's slang thinking it will make them fit in better.