Label Studio's Community Support is Moving to Discourse!

Hello Label Studio Community!

Today, I'm thrilled to extend a warm invitation to all our community members to join us in an exciting new chapter. With the immense growth of our community and the desire to foster more sustainable support, we're transitioning from Slack to our very own Discourse platform for all community support requests and discussions!

Why Make the Switch? 🤔

Our current community Slack has been bustling with activity and interactions, featuring:

• 13,650 registered members
• An average of 300-600 active users weekly
• 60+ new users/sign-ups every week

However, despite these remarkable milestones, we've also been facing some roadblocks, such as:

• Our rich community knowledge gets lost every 90 days due to message limits
• Difficulty in indexing and retrieving previous knowledge for easy discovery
• High costs and throttled communication imposed by Slack's growth limitations

After carefully considering our community's needs and future scalability, we've decided that Slack as our primary community platform is not sustainable. We need a reliable space where we can preserve our collective wisdom, provide efficient support, and continue to build Label Studio together.

The Future is Discourse! 🚀

Discourse will be our solution and central hub for:

• Preservation: Permanently archiving and indexing conversations for better knowledge management
• Organization: Asynchronous communication to manage response times and team workloads efficiently
• Empowerment: A community trust model to identify and reward positive contributions
• Metrics & Analytics: Advanced tools to monitor and respond to community engagement

Our Commitment 💥

We are more than just an open-source company; we’re firmly dedicated to our users. This move to Discourse is another way of adhering to our unwavering commitment to deepening community involvement and unlocking Label Studio for your important use cases. I want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who has contributed to our Slack community, particularly those who have navigated the peaks and valleys with us. Your experiences will catapult us into this new, exciting phase of our journey with Discourse.

Your Next Steps 👣

• Signup: Use this invite link to be one of the first users on our Discourse! (You’ll be added to a special, invite-only group)
• Engage: Share your first post or join a discussion on Discourse to get the ball rolling.
• Support Each Other: As we prioritize responses on Discourse, encourage fellow users to join you on our new platform.
• Give Us Feedback: As an open source company, we care deeply your ideas and opinions. Please feel free to message me on Slack with any suggestions, thoughts or ideas on how to make our community better!

Let's make this change a resounding success - together. We can't wait for you to join us and to continue our collaboration. Dive into the new era of the Label Studio community with us—it's only going to get better from here!