Community Migration: Slack vs Discord

[CortNick]

Hello Kyverno Community and Maintainers 👋

Along with @JimBugwadia, @realshuting, and the rest of the Maintainer team, we’ve been discussing the future of the Kyverno Community communication platforms.

Right now, conversations and support happen across multiple spaces including Kubernetes Slack, CNCF Slack, and our smaller Kyverno Slack and Discord test server.

As the community continues to grow, this fragmentation makes it harder for contributors, end users, and other community members to connect, ask questions, and share knowledge efficiently. Additionally, it creates overhead for our Maintainers who must navigate back and forth between varying workspaces.

Because of this, we’d like to consolidate all community and support discussions into one dedicated space to better serve everyone.

The goal is to create a home that allows:

• Easier onboarding for new contributors
• Persistent message history and searchable conversations
• Clear topic-based channels for questions, support, governance, and integrations
• Room for open discussions around Kyverno and new and related policy-as-code projects

The options being considered

1️⃣ Kyverno Slack Workspace

Continue to use Slack, most probably in our own dedicated workspace rather than in the current Kubernetes and CNCF Slack channels. Staying on Slack but moving to our own workspace keeps things familiar and aligned with the platform our community has already been using.

• ✅ Pros: Familiar for most maintainers, excellent integrations, structured and professional

• ❌ Cons: Limited history in the free plan, high cost to scale, not ideal for large open communities, limited in terms of creating community collaboration via livestreams, calls, and other events via the platform

2️⃣ Kyverno Discord Server

Migrate all Kyverno communication and support to Discord, a platform that many open source and AI communities are already adopting.

• ✅ Pros: Free and unlimited chat history, strong community tools (roles, onboarding, forums, voice channels, event options, and moderation), better suited for open engagement

• ❌ Cons: Learning curve, less enterprise-style structure, fewer productivity integrations

⭐⭐⭐ Key considerations & Must haves:

• Easy onboarding and low learning curve
• Good message organization and discoverability
• Active moderation and safety tools
• Ability to export and archive community data
• Low overhead for maintainers
• Clear connection between Kyverno OSS and related ecosystems

Nice-to-haves:

• Contributor roles and recognition (via bots or integrations)
• Custom branding / onboarding screens
• Integration with GitHub issues and CI/CD notifications
• Dedicated space for theme related discussions and events

Opinion / Summary

Both Slack and Discord are viable options for what's needed our current level of maturity and accessibility.

Slack fits the CNCF ecosystem and provides structure but becomes expensive and restrictive for open collaboration.

Discord fosters open-source style community energy, with free history and engagement tools, but lacks enterprise compliance and discoverability.

Note: When faced with the possibility of having to use a paid version of Slack a few months back, CNCF also considered moving to Discord as the platform lends itself to growing communities and collaborations. There are other projects on the CNCF landscape who decided to move to Discord and CNCF has no issue with projects making the move to Discord if the platform better suits their community needs.

Next steps

💬 We’d love your feedback!

Please share your thoughts in this thread:

• Which platform would you prefer for the Kyverno community?
• What are your must-have features or biggest concerns?
• Would you support a phased migration?
• What else do we need to consider?

🗳️ After a week of discussion, we’ll open a vote to make a final decision.

[kalyankrishnat]

1.Discord
2. Enable bots to block spammers.
3. Create verification (phone and email address mandatory.. this can be automated)

Isn't the Kubernetes slack moving to Discord too?? - https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/communication/slack-migration-faq.md#why-discord

[erikgb]

1. Kubernetes Slack 💯. It is by far the most active community. The channel on CNCF is quite dormant and should be archived IMO, mainly to avoid confusion. Discord is for gamers, and not tech people like us. 😆
2. Good threading support. Encourage users to enrich their profile before engaging. I like to know who I am communicating with, and not only a simple user handle.
3. No, I will not migrate to Discord. Slack is my "single pane of glass" for work/tech communication.
4. The community communication should remain where the community is active. Live events, etc., can be linked to from Slack, so it's not an argument for moving IMO.

[mubarak-j]

My vote would be to keep one of the Slack channels and archive the other. I'm more active in the CNCF Slack workspace, but I know that we have 4x more members in the Kubernetes workspace, so it makes sense for that to be the one we keep. Most folks who use Kyverno also use Kubernetes and other CNCF projects, so it is more convenient for Kyverno to meet its users where they are.

Despite Discord's compelling features, I'm afraid switching to Discord will fragment the community even more, and it will probably be less active than the CNCF channel. And I will not be surprised if the community opens up another channel after moving to Discord...simply out of convenience. 🤷🏼

IMHO, the biggest advantage of Slack is the rich history of all examples and troubleshooting that the community and the maintainers have done over the years, which I use more often than GitHub issues to help solve my issues. Open Tofu recently moved from their own Slack workspace to CNCF to be closer to their users, I guess.

[JimBugwadia]

Kubernetes Slack 💯. It is by far the most active community. The channel on CNCF is quite dormant and should be archived IMO, mainly to avoid confusion. Discord is for gamers, and not tech people like us. 😆

@erikgb - I wonder if this is based on our promotion of the Kubernetes Slack Workspace as our primary channel.

As Kyverno grows beyond Kubernetes, we need more flexibility than the K8s slack workspace provides. The CNCF slack is more permissive with apps, etc.

Discord seems like a popular choice for newer projects and was also proposed by CNCF due to Slack restrictions which seem to have been resolved, at least temporarily:

https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/communication/slack-migration-faq.md#why-discord