Mobile Pros has been a slack group since inception, way back in the late 2010s. One of the biggest bug-bears for that platform is Slack's hostile approach to non-paying communities, withholding message history and denying access to attachments; it's meant a lot of valuable information over the years has vanished into the ether and put the community on the back-foot compared to other platforms in the ecosystem, which retain a wealth of available wisdom from their collective members.
While it's arguable the ecosystem moves quickly and information soon becomes dated, I say yes and no. Specific questions about Intune or a version of iOS more than a couple of years old? Sure, it has an expiry due to the pace of development and change (perhaps Intune wasn't a great example for pace... heh), but a lot of information - the basics of management, approaches to security, best practices, etc. - change far less over time (just look at the docs here to see things from 2019 still relevant today), and means rewriting the same answers over and over with the Slack we have.
Well, as of August, Slack will start deleting old history entirely. I've always wanted to find a way to make access to past messages, solutions, and discussions viable on Slack, even to the point of asking around for sponsorship opportunities, but it's simply not feasible, and so after months of thought and discussion between our core members, the Mobile Pros community is moving from Slack to Discord.
Why Discord? Predominantly the popularity of the platform, but equally the reasonable parity of function between that and Slack to avoid it being too-jarring an experience to migrate. It goes without saying Discord has some great community features we can leverage as well, and I'm looking forward to putting these into use. On polling the existing community, Discord won out, with Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, Discourse, and others also considered, though with any community it's immeasurably important to ensure ease of access and simplicity of engagement; my concern with rolling a hosted instance of an (arguably easier to manage) FOSS community platform would be yet another account on yet another platform which I know can put people off.
The Mobile Pros community has been going strong over the years and has nearly 1,900 members. While I expect to lose a few of you during the migration, I'm hopeful that most of you will join us on Discord. I know moving platforms can be a farce, but Discord is a very popular platform (far more so than when we looked at it back in 2021!) and I'm hopeful the move won't be too off-putting.
The Slack Mobile Pros group will be officially shutting down come August, but engagement there is actively discouraged already as content will not be migrated over to Discord automatically (and I spent a week doing it all manually!). If you want to continue engaging with Mobile Pros or if you’ve been thinking about joining, now’s the perfect time to get involved.
You can start joining our new Discord community today. Just follow this link to get started.
I look forward to seeing you all there!
(Oh, and for good measure, I've also pushed a static copy of Mobile Pros' Slack history to archive.mobilepros.org through the exceptionally simple tool from hfran. I was doing the work to migrate, I figured I might as well!)
^ Not any more :)