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Comment by drhayes9 | Hacker News Reader

The best online communities I've been a part of have been the focused ones built around concrete discussions. I have problem X, let's talk about some solutions A, B, and C, that kind of thing.

There doesn't seem to be a way of involving small groups of people in small discussions that don't require a lot of attention. Someone else mentioned D&D groups -- that's exactly my use case. I don't want to send out tons of email to my players about stuff they might not be interested in. I do want a place that I can dump interesting things that they can later choose to participate in, low attention kind of stuff. Making a G+ community for five people feels like overkill.

This could be perfect for that.

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For me and most of my friends, Slack has filled that gap - but more for groups of friends, with overlapping subsets of interests. (e.g., I'm in a NYC redditors slack team with 52 people, and we have over a dozen channels.)

For smaller interests, a lot of people tend to use Google Hangouts - I'm in one with mostly people I know focused on the game Star Realms.

Slack's harsh message retention limits and steep slope from free to paid surely are going to limit it's reach for many communities that a) can't persuade participants to pay £5/month and b) grow to the point that 10000 messages means almost no retention at all.

It's happened to more than two Slack groups I've been part of and they are both looking for a new platform.

Agree. I think Spaces is aimed at Slack.

If they keep unlimited message history that is going to be a really compelling feature.

Hmmmm. As much as I wish Slack would become more attractive to non-commercial communities - Spaces doesn't even come close. No integrations, no @mentions, none of the UI niceties, no 'presence'.

I would imagine that for a lot of small groups, lack of retention is just fine. If I'm chatting with friends about playing Star Realms, I don't need to see what was said two months ago.

My one successful use of G+ has been for a roleplaying group. The early days with always-on notifications and a lot of other small annoyances were a bit uncomfortable, but as we were using Hangouts for actual sessions, it kinda-sorta worked. And yeah, we had that as a G+ community.

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