Just for what it’s worth, slack is the entryway to most open source projects I use. It may not be a great medium, but it’s really fast to get set up, it’s asynchronous, and most importantly, it integrates with my existing workflows - I use slack for work, personal chats, etc, so that means if someone replies to me I get a notification in the same place I would for those other discussions.
I’m not a fan of forums. It feels harder to ask “beginner” questions, to iterate quickly on a conversations, etc.
I’d say if a software project has a slack I am ~10x more likely to consider that software for these reasons.
That said, I understand there’s a burden for these exact reasons. It’s a way for people to bypass higher quality messaging systems like, say, a templated Github issue. You’ll get “I can’t figure X out” type questions a lot. It’s the best/worst part of such a medium.
I can say as one example, I used to be quite active on Rust’s IRC channel when mozilla ran it and it was open without registration. They moved to Discord, and:I no longer participate. I actually hate IRC, but the fact is just that it was absolutely trivial to get started, and it integrated with my existing workflows, made it that much easier to work with. Rust also has a forum that is identical to dgraph’s and I’ve posted on it a total of, like, 5 times despite being an active user since just before their 1.0 release.
An alternative is fine, but I would I suspect any alternative is unlikely to simultaneously get at what slack has as benefits while also reasonably reducing burden.
Just some anecdotes!