I am interested, too 
Something funky happened here with this initiative… Wondering why.
- Google Groups post here on January 9th, 2015, 6:45am UTC, by Markus Maier
- Reddit thread here posted on January 9th, 2015, 2:52pm UTC
I think a public Slack would be a lovely compliment to the community, and much more approachable than IRC for most people. The team at Socket.IO did this a while back, and it’s a good experience/community.
Thoughts?
Replying to myself because, as a noob, I could only have two links in my post :)…
This is Guillermo’s post, and this is how they integrated it, and I’m sure he’d be happy to share the how-to.
much more approachable than IRC for most people
That may sound harsh, but I think people who find using IRC difficult are not a good fit to be web developers.
But if you guys do feel the need to use something like Slack, why not give Rocket Chat a try? It’s free, it’s working well and it’s built with Meteor.
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I’ve been hanging out on meteor/meteor in Gitter, that works for me. I also created a secret channel for Meteor+React devs (trying to keep it small).
the thing with IRC is I have been running irssi in screen for quite long time with ICQ gateway etc, but these days I would really prefer slack 
There already are quite a few Meteor related slacks, like Meteor2015 or Learn MeteorJS Properly. But except for MeteorChef slack channel which as I see is pretty active, the rest fail to generate any significant conversations.
Diversifying Meteor Slacks even more serves no purpose imho.
Just to give the perspective of the community team at MDG:
We looked into creating an official community slack channel a few months back and decided that it didn’t make sense.
This article highlights some of the reasons why: http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html
After this article was published (and perhaps in part because of it), Slack limited team size to 1,000. We have thousands of users in this forum, and didn’t want to create an unsustainable slack team which we would have to figure out what to do with down the line.
So that’s the current situation with meteor and community chat options. IRC is currently a community-driven alternative for those who prefer synchronous communication, as well as some of the unofficial slack channels mentioned above.
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I still feel it’d be cool to have a central Meteor channel. I guess meteor/meteor on Gitter is the closest thing right now? (I don’t like IRC personally, just find it a bad overall user experience). What about using Rocket Chat?
Try:
https://forums.meteor.com/users?period=all
which gives: 5406 users in total of all time
Past quarter active: 1219 users
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Ouch!
I take it all back!
It was 1 thousand active last quarter 
So how Rocket Chat scale ?
We have 2.5k+ members in Learn MeteorJS properly FB group and the Slack onboarding process is really PITA.
Any1 know if Rocket Chat can scale to higher counts and joining is more automatic without need to code whole API process for us ?
Regards
Robert
Maybe I am a bit late, but what about a rocket chat instance hosted on galaxy. @sashko talked about apollo and working togehter w/ the rocket chat team. This could be used as an opportunity to test and get more knowledge about how things work under load and what could be improved.
all this while the whole community has one place for instant messageing.
or is this already happening and I’ve missed it?
cc @nickcoe
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Are we about reinventing the wheel?
Honestly, why don’t you stick to the real chat network - IRC?
Two years from now there will be another “new hyped” web chat product again. Are you all going to move there then? What if #slack isn’t free anymore? It is not about riding the newest horse it is better to ride a reliable one 
IRC is scalable, free, open and simply reliable. Splitting up the community by using different chat tools is not a good idea - IMHO. It weakens the community.
Just my two cents.
@meetfred I’m on Slack ( http://slack.themeteorchef.com), Gitter ( https://gitter.im/meteor/meteor) and IRC (#meteor on freenode) everyday and what I notice is that IRC community is gradually slowing down, while Slack and Gitter stay pretty active. IRC is clearly losing this battle, which pains me as an op, but I can totally understand that.
Too bad Slack is divided into #general, #random, #help, #beginner-help, #intermediate-help and #advanced-help with people asking beginner stuff on #advanced-help because they don’t want to feel like beginners. It makes it pretty inconvenient to help people, especially on phones and low end desktops where Slack isn’t that fast.
Anyways, all of you guys are more than welcome on #meteor irc channel (server chat.freenode.net). And to Slack and Gitter too. 
Also, don’t forget that it’s not only about getting help from others. It’s about helping others too!
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I just started a Meteor chat server on Discord. Details here: Meteor online chat! Open to everyone, no invites needed
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