There are two primary things of interest from a communication perspective -

1. One to one/many collaboration with team

2. One to many collaboration with the world

The tools outlined here are great from both perspectives, but choose your poison carefully.

1. Team

I am sure you have a bunch of tools from your organization - but let’s be honest. Most of the “org approved” tools are redundant by the time they get approved by the security team.

A note about emails: just hang anyone who writes emails about code, bugs, and issues. Ask questions later.

Here are our saviors in the harsh world -

1. Microsoft Teams
   The first real competition to Slack :). It promises a lot, has delivered on a lot - the future is sure exciting.
   
   
   I, unfortunately, have not tried a lot of Teams. It has been the niche territory for the teams I work with.

2. Slack
   Needs no mention. Moving on then.
   
   
   Greatest strength: integration and the resulting automation that can be done anywhere.

If you are in smaller groups that do not qualify for the free preview of Teams, and you find Slack is expensive - read on.

2. World

By “world” I do not essentially refer to every Tom out there. I am looking for public or private communities that gets our message out, and allow us to work in peace in our own shell.

I would still carry some hope of using Slack in our daily lives, but there are more interesting platforms as well.

1. Spectrum.chat
   I am excited about Spectrum. I was led there through the NextJS community, but stayed there for all of the other communities as well.
   
   
   Note that Spectrum does not have voice capabilities today.
   
   
2. Discord
   Discord can be for gaming - certainly. But the feature set is invaluable to developers. Single/group chat, group calls, screen sharing, and a cool, dark theme.
   
   
3. Reddit
   Create private or public communities on Reddit, and collaborate away. I have written a thesis about collaborating on Reddit before.

If you don’t all that care about collaborating faster but love to build influence posing as a developer: you always have Facebook Groups or LinkedIn groups.