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The site has slowed to a crawl as the HN audience hugs it to death. Unfortunate that they didn't anticipate the increased interest and allocate more capacity accordingly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on definitions, you could also include rocket.chat, and Zulip (open core). There's a bunch. As to federation, the ActivityPub protocol underlying Mastodon, and a bunch of other projects, was originally designed to support it -- but the devil's in the details, particularly regarding finding a common data model (do you have topics within channels, like Zulip does? what do you support within a channel beyond p…
> Zulip (open core) Isn't Zulip fully open source? That's what they say on their site: https://zulipchat.com/
Amongst others I tried: Mattermost, Rocket.chat, IRC(Cloud), Gitter, Discord, Slack, MS Teams, Twist, Hangouts Chat.
Two stood out, both open source (Spectrum wasn't when I started looking):
Spectrum: https://spectrum.chat/
Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/
These two along with Twist (proprietary) manage to deal with the threading and hybrid sync/async. Both the above also have exceptionally helpful people behind them.
The other special mention goes to Matrix (https://matrix.org/) and Riot (https://riot.im/) as their persistence syncing and federation work is impressive. Their threading and hence async story isn't as well developed yet though (https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349).
I spent a fair bit of time trying out many of the different chat systems out there for our tech community. In particular I looking for solutions that could do a half decent job of combining synchronous as well as asynchronous communication. The main benefit of implementations that manage to pull this off is being able to handle real-time chat but also make it easier to catch up with the conversation history if you've…
I spent a fair bit of time trying out many of the different chat systems out there for our tech community. In particular I looking for solutions that could do a half decent job of combining synchronous as well as asynchronous communication. The main benefit of implementations that manage to pull this off is being able to handle real-time chat but also make it easier to catch up with the conversation history if you've…
I really like Spectrum, I tried to get other people to join it but my "friends" are always stuck on Discord and Reddit. So finally, I only lurk it occasionally. However I don't understand why GitHub would acquire Spectrum: what do they have to win from this? Doesn't GitHub already have their own "forums" for communities per Git org? I tried to use these git forums/board ( https://github.com/orgs/lnug/teams/ ), sadly…
« Microsoft is Acquiring Spectrum through GitHub ».
Regardless of what the title says this is what my brain keeps reading.
At first it seems like a nonsense, but after all it makes perfect sense.
Microsoft must repay the inversement in GitHub, it was an expensive acquisition. Best way to do this ? Probably to bundle GitHub Enterprise with Spectrum.
It makes sense as GitLab have Gitter but GitHub has nothing to manage communities.
I spent a fair bit of time trying out many of the different chat systems out there for our tech community. In particular I looking for solutions that could do a half decent job of combining synchronous as well as asynchronous communication. The main benefit of implementations that manage to pull this off is being able to handle real-time chat but also make it easier to catch up with the conversation history if you've…
Yes async threading is crucial, and I hope Matrix gets those. I do want to root for Matrix the most, but I think it also likely that adding federation after the fact is less likely than adding threading/async, so it's a rational not just sentimental thing to root for it.
Personally I find Zulip to have the nicest implementation of "topic zooming" as it still allows for a global linear view of all activity. Spectrum feels a bit more "channelized" and a bit white-space heavy but prettier.
Zulip's mobile client has come a long way in recent months too.
The hardest part though was trying to convince the community to migrate away from other social platforms. Meetup was (still is) driving me mad with their forums/discussions features which are woeful.
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Or the other Spectrum, formed from the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter.
Charter spectrum predates time Warner's take over. It wasn't a merger, twc is taking over charter. Just like the time they did that with AOL.
Zeit (the company behind `now`) recently killed their 10,000+ member Slack server in favor of Spectrum. Their reasons were (a) Slack isn't designed to support communities, (b) they were having to answer the same questions repeatedly, (c) those answers weren't being indexed by Google, and (d) there is very little abuse prevention in Slack.
Another way of phrasing (d) is that they seemed to want to have greater control in shutting down conversations (for better or worse).
Lopping the head off a 10,000 member community seems like a bad idea, and that was only reinforced by the outcome. People regularly complain about Spectrum on Zeit's spectrum. Threads go unanswered, sometimes for weeks. And every conversation is forced into a threaded model. There's no way to have a single, shared chatroom that everyone is posting to. (Or if there is, it's not the default, and defaults matter.)
The nice thing about Zeit's old Slack channel was that if you were facing a crisis with `now`, you could post in #now and their support staff would take care of the problem almost immediately. But more than that, you could see that other people's problems were being taken care of immediately. That strengthened my brand perception of Zeit and made me want to recommend `now`.
I still recommend `now`, but losing out on real-time support felt like a major blow. When my payment details lapsed, all of my `now` deployments were shut off immediately. I updated my payment details, but the deployments were still offline. I felt somewhat foolish posting a Spectrum thread like "Hey, I know I was supposed to be paying you, but I didn't. Now I did. Will my deployments come back online, or do I have to re-deploy everything?"
I didn't want a conversation like that to be indexed in Google for all time, public for all to see. And while there may be a DM feature in Spectrum, the benefit of Slack is that you can get a sense of who's who right away. It's obvious who the support person is, because they are the ones fielding everyone's questions each day. And you can just shoot them a quick message for one-off questions.
No doubt that gets annoying. But from an outsider's perspective, it's hard to understand why the trade-offs are worth it.
Meanwhile, Discord seems to be gaining traction in the developer space. There are a lot of interesting programming communities springing up, like The Coding Den. Many open source projects are starting to offer a Discord presence by default. And there are a lot of benefits with this model: All the upsides of Slack (and then some), minus some Slack integrations that you might miss (which you can use Slack for anyway), and without forcing every conversation into a threaded async model.
All of that said, please note that this comment is written as an outsider's perspective with relatively little Spectrum experience. Maybe I'm just using Spectrum wrong. But the benefit of the Slack/Discord model is that you end up feeling like a community, rather than a disparate set of posts that are basically tweets.