Chat Service Options for Projects

Overall IRC usage has steadily declined in the last decade from a million to less than half a million users. However, the Freenode network (popular for open source, prior to a mass exodus to Libera.Chat in 2021), continued growing until 2016, when it dropped from 100 thousand to 75 thousand average logged-in users.  IRC is one of the oldest chat protocols designed for group communication and real-time messaging. It is a text-based communication platform primarily used for chatting and file sharing.

Slack is a modern team collaboration tool designed for workplace communication. It combines real-time messaging with file sharing, integration with various services, and team-based organization.

Pro: many projects share a network and user accounts are optional, so users can jump across multiple communities effortlessly.

Con: learning curve to master IRC fundamentals; many clients (web, desktop and mobile) to choose from with varying features and useability; desktop clients are often blocked by corporate firewalls.

Pro: natively web-based and easy to use, with official clients for desktop and mobile.

Con: users need to create a new account for each community they want to engage with.  A separate “inviter” service must be used to allow public self-signup.

IRC “bots” join channels to interact with them. Extensible plugin-based bots can be used to run tools like the popular MeetBot or to write custom integrations.

Slack has a marketplace of integrations, which are standalone software components built against Slack’s web services, often supporting popular products like JIRA.

IRC is an open protocol with many networks, such as Libera.Chat, providing entirely free service. Chat scrollback is stored in clients with no limit restrictions, and logging bots can be used to capture and store public channel history accessible via the web.

Linux Foundation IT can handle channel registrations and granting of “op” and “voice” permissions to members of your community, and can host and manage any logging or notification bots.

Slack is a proprietary product. Slack offers a free tier with unlimited users and unlimited public channels, but no private channels and limited chat scrollback. Their paid tiers do not support unlimited public users in a free or cost-controlled way.

The Linux Foundation workspace (linuxfoundation.slack.com) is not available for project community use. Projects must have a separate Slack workspace, which will be entirely independent from the LF workspace. Projects using a paid Slack workspace must work with finance to set up billing that workspace.