Gitter is also a great example of excellent integration and general design that keeps developers from having to do busy work like setting up a GitHub <-> IRC bot. I use it for my own projects, too.
Gitter seems to be indexable by search engines. My experience using it as part of open projects has been mixed—the UI isn't great and the notification system is, in my experience, unreliable—but if you're worried about your messages being discoverable, it might be up your alley.
I used Gitter for a small open-source community for several years, but we moved to Discord just because it substantially reduced friction for non-technical user support. Not necessarily the biggest issue for many software projects, but for user-facing projects it was impossible to get people to sign up for Github accounts and connect to Gitter just to ask us a question. Discord has super-low-friction onboarding that really makes it easier for people to give feedback and troubleshoot issues.
I co-maintain an open source project on GitHub that's somewhat popular (>1.5k stars). We set up Gitter because I preferred Slack which my collaborator didn't use, and he preferred Gchat which I didn't use, and Gitter looked like a reasonable middle ground. Since then it's mostly been a communication channel between us two. We do get a user question once in a while, and I do answer when I get a notification email. Basically, for users it's like opening an issue, just less formal.
Gitter has been a huge part of freeCodeCamp's community since the beginning. Thousands of people have asked questions there, and most of them have gotten helpful answers quickly. This is thanks to the experienced developers who contribute their time and expertise in there.
Like IRC, it's a great platform to ask and answer questions on. Find the right rooms and talk to the right people.
gitter.im is awesome! But it's more like a slack for github. I wanted a few comments on the project page to get an idea if I want to explore this project or not.
I've really enjoyed Gitter as a better means of communications when I have questions that are small enough to not need their own issue, yet also not worth it to ask on SO or some other platform.
It has been nice to be able to have a nice way to talk with other open-source collaborators or get quick clarification on a small repo-specific question.
Been using Gitter with my Dev Group for a few weeks and we all love it and switched completely to it as our main Chat. It's worth a try and the integration of services like Trello and - for sure - Github is just great! Also Auto-Embedded Links (YouTube, SoundCloud, images (jpg, png, gif)). Really love it and I'm looking forward to the apps. :)
What the heck is Gitter? A public chat service? Sounds like adding yet a new way for people to bug you about things that don't work, but without the controlled discussion of opening a proper Issue. As a developer or maintainer, what value does this bring to a project?
some gitter communities are pretty dead though.
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