Maybe I’m a bit late in this conversation, but here is a suggestion of a tool that was made exactly for that purpose of instant messaging over an open-source projet, with the ability of saving and accessing useful conversations:
I discovered it when ApolloGraphql chose to move away from Slack in the favor of Spectrum, after considering “tools like Discourse, Discord, Gitter, etc…” :
https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b
In a nutshell, it is
“a nice blend between realtime communication and threaded forum like discussion”
with some advantages:
- free and open-source
- has long-lived channel history (as opposed to Slack)
- accessible to search engines crawlers: you can find Spectrum discussions from a Google search
- it also means that you don’t need to have an account, as opposed to Discord or Slack
- easily searchable: if the discussion you’re interested in already took place, you’ll find it
Here is Apollo’s Spectrum chat if you want to see how it is: Apollo’s Spectrum