Stephen Downes

This is a ranking of modern community-building tools. Think of them as alternatives to things like Slack or Microsoft Teams. What makes them 'modern' (in my view) is that individual users can sign on to multiple communities (or 'teams', or 'channels') and interact in multiple ways: through chat in real-time (sometimes by audio or video), synchronous topic-based boards, or through file and media sharing. The problem, as always, is that each tool is a silo; you're not using Signal to converse with someone using Zulip, for example. I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of any of today's community-building tools, but that's more a reflection of how hard it is to get this sector right than it is a reflection on any of the tools. There's an opening, I think, for a tool that combines the functionality of Mastodon or Bluesky with the ability to organize provided by these tools, with an interface that keeps it simple. Anyhow, the tools evaluated here are Discord, Signal, Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Discourse, and Stoat. See also this discussion on the article. Here's a similar comparison from Proton. Via Alan Levine.