I use Slack for work and like it well enough, but I can't really think of a single thing that Slack does better than Discord. From an admin/moderator perspective, the level of control over user permissions and organization of channels that you have is so superior on Discord. I guess Slack Connect is kinda nice, and they give you helpful ways of saving items for later and setting reminders.
Overall they need to be separate because if I get a slack notification I know it's for work and discord it's not. But if Discord launched a thinly rebranded alternative for work I think it would be excellent.
The main thing that bugs me about Discord, you are tied to one email account where Slack you gan sign into different slack groups with different emails.
I successfully moved a small, <100 member, 2 year running, private Slack, to what now is a growing Discord community 3 years ago and haven't looked back.
Administration has been far easier. The bot ecosystem is thriving, both open and closed. Although, the 1 feature I truly miss has been exporting convos.
No doubt, if building community is on your mind, go with Discord.
Definitely not Discord. It doesn't scale well past a certain activity level. It feels spammy with most communities and what's worse is it seems to be trying to displace forums, but the flow just doesn't work.
Most of the communities I care about eventually end up splitting to 3-6 servers, with about 20 daily active channels in each of these. Discord just doesn't give you the peripheral vision to figure out what's important.
Slack has its own problems, but the emojis are free.
The killer feature for me that Slack has over Discord is the ability to hide images, so I'm not stuck being distracted by some random person's obnoxious animated meme.
I've always been intrigued by the promise of Matrix, have tried it out multiple times in a span of 5 years. I see it getting adopted by a few open source communities as well, and last I checked they were working on a golang implementation of the core server. However everytime my issue has been it's very slow. Curious what do you use it for ?
historically Matrix has been painfully slow, but these days Matrix 2.0 is in dev which outperforms Discord & co. https://matrix.org/blog/2023/09/matrix-2-0/ has more details
Overall they need to be separate because if I get a slack notification I know it's for work and discord it's not. But if Discord launched a thinly rebranded alternative for work I think it would be excellent.