Hi,

we’re currently using Gitter as our chat system where we have two chat rooms, one mostly for users to ask questions and one to discuss development issues.

We already discussed moving to a different chat system two years ago as part of a discussion about creating the janusgraph-dev channel where Slack and Discord were mentioned as possible alternatives to Gitter [1].

This discussion about moving to a different chat system didn’t lead to a consensus so we stayed on Gitter. However, in the meantime TinkerPop has started a Discord server [2] which is getting more and more popular (~400 registered users right now, compared to ~250 in January). I’ve also recently noticed more and more JanusGraph questions being asked there so I wanted to bring this topic back up and suggest that we migrate to Discord.

Here are some advantages I see in favour of Discord:

• Same platform that TinkerPop uses -> should make it easier for users
• Discord seems to be becoming more popular for OSS communities*
• Built-in support for voice chats

A downside of Discord is of course that people need to create an account for it whereas a GitHub/Gitlab/Twitter account is enough for Gitter.

Any thoughts on this?

* I don’t have numbers to back this up, but Jan mentioned it already in the discussion two years ago and Discord itself lists a few big OSS communities [3].

[1]: https://groups.google.com/g/janusgraph-dev/c/5Fp2tQNn_Po/m/WdmLRf3WAgAJ

[2]: https://discord.gg/ndMpKZcBEE

[3]: https://discord.com/open-source