We use the ww.wp.xz.cn forums here to do most of our support. We have a live community chat available through Slack right now but we are open to an alternative. There’s already a Discord set up as well but it’s not something we have gone forward with yet.
You are always free to post here or if you have bugs, features, or ideas, you can post those on our GitHub.
Thread Starter
digio
(@digio)
Thanks for responding. I know you put in a lot of time on this all. Originally I signed up for Slack and I apparently got a free trial and was able to search through posts people had made.
Once the free trial ended, it no longer showed me all posts, but only newer ones (I think).
I considered paying, but when I saw the fee they wanted I quickly changed my mind.. I imagine that there must be some open-source free alternative that would work as well, but I do not know what that is just now. I will think it through some more.
There is an application called Streams that connects with the Fediverse that might work: https://codeberg.org/streams/streams
Since so many people are transitioning out of Twitter to Mastodon, maybe something that is accessible from the Fediverse might be a good alternative.
Unfortunately Slack doesn’t offer pricing for individuals, so the pricing you saw was likely how much it was to upgrade the entire Pods Slack. Pricing depends on active members, of which during the holidays has only been 46 so that’s 46 x $8.75 = $402.50 monthly — which is definitely over our budget and won’t scale at all since a select few donate and many are donating $5 a year.
Discord seems to be a great fit because it’s still pretty easy to get into using like Slack, plus it allows for things like Boosts which anyone can donate and they can be used to improve individual as well as the whole Discord experience for others.
I don’t think we have the luxury to be able to use anything less approachable for people, we want people to get on there and let us help them more easily. Anything that makes it harder for our team takes more time, anything that takes more time for people using Pods means they won’t donate or may not continue using Pods. 🙁
Thread Starter
digio
(@digio)
Do you have a Discord server?
The Discord is at https://discord.gg/GfZ4tGhRCy
It’s not in use yet so it’s not actively watched for posts.
Thread Starter
digio
(@digio)
They want a phone number to register. I tried to work around using a Google Voice number and it was declined. Bummer.
I only have the Discord instance set up to require a confirmed email, not a phone number. Maybe there’s something there with 2 factor auth? Or maybe they changed something in the sign up process. Sorry, it’s been a while since I signed up.
