At the end of 2018, most of the activity in the Pony community centered around a couple mailing lists on groups.io and the #ponylang IRC channel. Neither however, was all that active. In early 2019, we decided to open up a Slack and see if it was more popular than the IRC channel. Boy, was it ever. It didn't take us long to decide to shut down the IRC channel. Once the Slack was introduced, the IRC channel became a ghost town. The Slack channel on the other hand, was bustling. We'd never really seen that much community activity before.

Before long, we were sharing lots of knowledge and experiences with newer folks in the community, but that knowledge was also quickly disappearing. The issue, the free version of Slack limits the number of messages you can see in your history. I personally, spent a good amount of time teaching folks about the backpressure system in the Pony runtime only to have all that knowledge disappear behind a Paywall a few weeks later.

And so, Joe went looking for an alternative. What we wanted: complete history and an experience that would draw people in the same way Slack had. A few weeks back, we started trying out Zulip. It had everything we wanted and we recently decided to shut down the Slack and setup camp on Zulip. The Pony Zulip is up to almost 75 members and we invite you to come join us. You can sign up at https://ponylang.zulipchat.com.

Zulip activity dwarfs the trickle of activity we had on our mailing lists and so, we've decided to shut them down as well. The content will continue to exist on groups.io in a read-only form. With that move, we've centralized on Zulip as our community hub. We're loving it. Zulip is a lot like Slack so the adjustment should be fairly quick for folks familiar with Slack. The biggest difference, you have "streams" and "topics" rather than "channels". Learn more at https://zulipchat.com/help/about-streams-and-topics and then join us in the new Ponylang Zulip.