Yeah, go me this boils down to "what purpose does the mailing list serve?
Would that purpose be better served with an IM/chat/IRC type service?  If
so, is Slack that service?"

It seems that we have not really answered the first question, but that,
whatever that purpose is, it would not be better served by aught than
email.

The reason, as I see it, that email has endured for so long is that it is
really good at asynchronous communication, especially long term
asynchronous communication.  A message can arrive, be actioned or ignored,
and then found later for further action should the need arrive.

Slack is great for short term asynchronous communication that morphs into
synchronous - an app goes down, and it takes 45m for all parties to get
online.  It becomes easy to get up to speed on what is going on.  It is
easy to, shortly after the fact, reconstruct the steps of resolution, and
move on.  From my experience with similar systems, no one ever really looks
back past a month or so on this.

This list is not for mission critical communication - it is a background
process we occasionally look at.  Given that, email is still preferable, to
my mind.  It brings this, and many other, discussions into a single pane of
glass that allows for easy actioning (or not) on the time frame of the
reader.  It does not require a separate app or webpage to go to.  If email
were not already so central to so many bits of our digital lives, I doubt
the desire to avoid yet another service would be so powerful.  But, we have
SO many services we have to interact with, and email works so well for this
sort of interaction, that there's a lot of inertia to get over to make me
(or most others judging by this thread) adopt something else we have to
actively check.  Email is great in that it is passive - we already check
email, so the burden of one more thing coming into it is low (especially if
filters are  applied).

So while I think Slack is cool, I don't think it's a great tool for the use
case of this list.
On Jul 12, 2015 5:03 PM, "Cat Okita" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Jul 2015, Allan Irving wrote:
>
>> + last time I checked Slack was a IM replacement for teams. So it not
>> replacing IM or being different completely just is not true. Please do
>> your
>> research properly before talking rubbish for lack of the word someone used
>> previously?
>>
>
> Er... did you actually -read- the responses, or are you just suffering
> from a knee-jerk reaction to key words?
>
> You've asked about replacing an -email mailing list- with Slack, which
> you've just said is an 'IM replacement for teams' -- and unsurprisingly
> you've gotten a pile of responses boiling down to "email != IM".
>
> cheers!
> ==========================================================================
> "A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound
> desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to
> avoid getting wet.  This is the defining metaphor of my life right now."
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