Migrating the Haystack Community to Discord

In the past few months, our Haystack community has started to grow considerably. With that, we are in a position where we need to think about what type of space we want to provide our community members moving forward. After much consideration, we concluded that we are outgrowing our Slack workspace. We then decided to migrate the community to Discord. In this short article, I will walk you through our reasoning. Later, once we’ve had some time post-migration, I will write about our experiences too.

Why and Why Now?

First of all, it’s probably best to explain why this all came about now. The simple answer to this is ‘the earlier, the better,’ or for those who think it’s already quite late ‘better late than never’ 😊. During these few months, we’ve had the opportunity to think more about our future and where we see the community heading. When we paint ourselves a picture of that future at deepset, we see a few things:

• We see ourselves working more closely with our open source community.
• We see more informal virtual events where we may drop into persistent channels and have quick live coding sessions, chat about upcoming features, and really meet some of our community members.
• We see a space where community members can actually hang out with like-minded people rather than simply contacting a support channel.

With all this and more, the question ultimately came down to the tools we use to make all of this possible. As we announce this migration, we’ve also shared Our Migration to Discord document with our community. Here, you will be able to see, in detail, all the research that went into comparing Slack and Discord and our detailed rationale. 

How?

This migration is for our community. As the people who will be affected by this migration, we think our community deserves a good explanation as to why we’re going through with it. So, our first step is sharing this article and Our Migration to Discord document with you. For some time, we will enable comments on this document and we will do our best to answer any of your queries and worries about the move.

It won’t come as a surprise to most that we are not the first team to consider and go ahead with such a migration. The team from Orbit also made a similar move last year. We’ve taken a leaf out of their book for this process and a good amount of our migration strategy has been based on their article Migrating Our Community from Slack to Discord: Tips & Lessons Learned.

Our overall strategy, from deciding to move to actually making it, can be broken down into these pillars:

1. Internal research: compare tools and come up with a final decision.
2. Configuration: set up our Discord server ready for migration day.
3. Community awareness: make sure the community is well informed about the move and be open to discussions.
4. Onboarding: plan for when people start joining.

What now?

As you read this article, our Discord server is ready and active. However, we are not going radio silent on Slack. We will keep our Slack workspace live for some months to ensure that anyone who reaches out to us gets a reply and is then informed about Discord. 

We will also keep comments open for a while on Our Migration to Discord document. Here, you will find a detailed comparison between Slack and Discord. Your opinions matter to us, so please feel free to comment on the document. 

Next, we will arrange some office hours in Discord, where we will invite you to join and ask us anything you would like to learn about the migration. Following the first few months after migration, we will share our learnings with you too. 😊

Here’s to a bright future for the Haystack community 🥂!

Join the Haystack Discord Community!