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Spectrum is joining GitHub

spectrum.chat

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Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#12

Post by Arkanosis »

I didn't know Spectrum until today. It looks similar to Gitter.

As I understand it, it means we now have at least three “slack-like”, well-backed, open-source, community-centered chats: - Gitter, now owned by GitLab; - Spectrum, now owned by GitHub; - Mattermost, independent, but fully integrated within GitLab.

That's great to have credible alternatives to the proprietary behemots that are Slack, Discord and others, but I wish they were able to federate somehow, so that as a user, I don't have to have an account and a browser tab on each instance of each platform, with slightly different user interfaces and features (in addition to my IRC client).

I remember there was a suggestion for Gitter to use the Matrix protocol at some point, but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction. That would be so awesome to have all of them using it, so that one could keep all their discussions in the same place (eg. same mobile application, same user-chosen chat client…).

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#13

Post by brianlovin »

ggregoire wrote: post #10

I quite often take a look at the code of Spectrum: https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum . It's my go-to (with https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso ) to get an idea of how they solved a particular issue in their React app. I'm really thankful to them for open sourcing their product. I wish more companies would go this way. Anyway, congratz to Max (also author of Styled Components) and the rest of the team!

Thanks for the kind words! For reference, we open sourced everything back in April: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum...

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#14

Post by brianlovin »

meritt wrote: post #3

This is the first time I've heard of Spectrum, anyone mind summarizing the key features/differentiation? It looks similar to Slack or Discord, with a focus on discoverable open communities as opposed to private organizations, and threaded conversations being a key feature?

Hey, co-founder here. We've really been focused on threaded, public-by-default, search-indexed conversations. We've found this to be super helpful for large, async communities so far, and the search-indexing is really great for organic discovery and preventing too many duplicate questions that someone might ask in a synchronous chat app. But we also support private communities, private channels, direct messages, public community/user profiles, and more. We've seen these things be really useful for content and community discovery.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#15

Post by wlesieutre »

bovermyer wrote: post #9

For those who, like me, have never heard of this before: Spectrum is a real-time chat service where each conversation has a permalink.

Not to be confused with the other Spectrum which is a real-time chat service and forum

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/

https://starcitizen.tools/Spectrum_(module)

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#16

Post by jeremyjh »

Arkanosis wrote: post #12

I didn't know Spectrum until today. It looks similar to Gitter. As I understand it, it means we now have at least three “slack-like”, well-backed, open-source, community-centered chats: - Gitter, now owned by GitLab; - Spectrum, now owned by GitHub; - Mattermost, independent, but fully integrated within GitLab. That's great to have credible alternatives to the proprietary behemots that are Slack, Discord and others,…

For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#17

Post by bovermyer »

wlesieutre wrote: post #15
bovermyer wrote: post #9

For those who, like me, have never heard of this before: Spectrum is a real-time chat service where each conversation has a permalink.

Not to be confused with the other Spectrum which is a real-time chat service and forum https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/ https://starcitizen.tools/Spectrum_(module)

I imagine they'll rebrand it as GitHub Chat or something, then.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#18

Post by bobthepanda »

wlesieutre wrote: post #15
bovermyer wrote: post #9

For those who, like me, have never heard of this before: Spectrum is a real-time chat service where each conversation has a permalink.

Not to be confused with the other Spectrum which is a real-time chat service and forum https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/ https://starcitizen.tools/Spectrum_(module)

Or the other Spectrum, formed from the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#19

Post by redindian75 »

brianlovin wrote: post #14
meritt wrote: post #3

This is the first time I've heard of Spectrum, anyone mind summarizing the key features/differentiation? It looks similar to Slack or Discord, with a focus on discoverable open communities as opposed to private organizations, and threaded conversations being a key feature?

Hey, co-founder here. We've really been focused on threaded, public-by-default, search-indexed conversations. We've found this to be super helpful for large, async communities so far, and the search-indexing is really great for organic discovery and preventing too many duplicate questions that someone might ask in a synchronous chat app. But we also support private communities, private channels, direct messages, publ…

Forums?
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