(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.
Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.