Slack, a relatively new messaging app for teams, has been booming in popularity and bringing more fun to team communication. We’ve been using it for over a year now and we love it. Slack makes it easy to create new channels and add integrations that send automated messages. In fact we have more than 350+ channels covering topics like languages, projects, interest groups, and more. With so many channels and so many messages, it can be difficult to keep up with even 10% of them without getting distracted throughout the day.

To avoid distraction, one could to turn off notifications or leave a bunch of channels, but this would lead to FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. So we created a Slack bot that will monitor all the Slack channels and let you know when important conversations happen so you can join the discussion. This allows you to ignore the once-in-a-while messages in channels but still participate in the larger discussions when the occur.

“How did you do this?”, you ask. Introducing FOMObot, a Slack bot that gives you peace of mind that you won’t be missing out. FOMObot hangs out in Slack channels and monitors for increased activity. When the rate of messages spikes above a pre-defined threshold, FOMObot notifies the #fomo channel. Users can sit in the #fomo channel and choose to ignore the message or click the link to open the channel with increased activity.

I constantly have FOMO! How can I get FOMObot in my life?

Another great question! FOMObot is available as open source software. It is written in Haskell and deployed to Heroku. You simply need to set a few configurations through environment variables and you’re ready to kick that fear.

For more details, check out the GitHub repository.