I’m not sure I understand what you’re implying? That you think I should make my own version of Slack or Discourse? Slack is a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. I don’t really think I have the right resources to compete with that.
Or maybe you’re implying that there should be chat built right in to Stacks? If that’s the question, then I so… Nope. It’s just a bad idea, if you ask me.
The reason is that some things you see on the web aren’t just websites, they’re an entire application running in the web browser. Things like Google Docs, Slack, YouTube, etc.
Let me explain with YouTube, because I think the split between CONTENT and APP is a bit more obvious on YouTube than it is for chat.
If you want YouTube on your website you don’t invent a new YouTube app just for Stacks – that would be silly. YouTube is it’s own thing.
But you can show YouTube CONTENT on your website by embedding it. You ebed a video and people visiting your site can consume that video without ever leaving your site. They might even be able to like and subscribe – but that’s about it for interactivity.
If you want the interactive part of YouTube: uploading, commenting, live-chat, organizing your subscriptions, etc… for that you have to go to YouTube.com. YouTube.com isn’t just a website, it’s an entire app being used by millions of users running on vast server farms.
Chat is similar – just without quite the scale of YouTube. It’s an interactive app that has to run on a server so that many users can simultaneously interact with the app. But just like YouTube you can “embed” bits of chat CONTENT – depending on the service.
Isaiah