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Spectrum is joining GitHub

spectrum.chat

41–50 of 155 posts

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#41

Apparently this has nothing to do with the cable company ...?

I had the same thought. For the sake of clarity, Spectrum is not a cable company unto itself. It is a brand owned by Time Warner Cable, a thin facade to escape their reputation for costumer dissatisfaction.

> a thin facade to escape their reputation for costumer dissatisfaction

Not quite. TWC switched to the Spectrum brand when they were acquired by Charter, because Charter was in the process of rolling out the Spectrum brand for their own services at the time.

(to be fair, you could probably argue that Charter launching the Spectrum brand was "a thin facade to escape their reputation for costumer dissatisfaction", but it's not why TWC switched to the Spectrum brand)

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#42

Apparently this has nothing to do with the cable company ...?

I had the same thought. For the sake of clarity, Spectrum is not a cable company unto itself. It is a brand owned by Time Warner Cable, a thin facade to escape their reputation for costumer dissatisfaction.

Actually, Spectrum was a new brand introduced after TWC was purchased by Charter Communications 2 years ago, so it was more an effort to unify the two brands than trying to run away from a bad reputation.

That also helps explain why they stopped offering discounts to new (and determined) customers. With fewer competitors, there's a greater ability to jack up prices and earn monopolistic rents.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#43
post #37

I had to read the title multiples times to truly believe what I was reading. « 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 Sp…

I wonder if there is any tool to help correlate sequences of events in the news like this. So much of understanding this is understanding the Microsoft acquisition of Spectrum. It feels like you have to have a constant memorized list of what happened to everyone in at least the last 5 years to understand why something happened, and then try to correlate it to other peoples' strategies. Would be nice to have a little timeline of events related to each "entity" so that you could see all the connections.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#44

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,…

There is so riot.im which is built on top of Matrix.org (which was built for federation and E2E encryption). There are already IRC and Discord bridges to matrix. Riot is being deployed as the govt chat infrastructure for 5 million users in France. The SaaS version is modular.im (much cheaper than slack)

That's the next thing on my list to setup. I want to get a synapse server up with FB Messenger/Hangouts/IRC/Discord and Slack bridges to bring all my messaging back under a gateway I control (even if I have no control over the actual chat services) and a unified accessible history.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#45
post #37

I had to read the title multiples times to truly believe what I was reading. « 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 Sp…

I would make more sense than trying to package Teams into Github somehow .. I mean they don't want to lose more people.

I did find it interesting it's marketed as Github doing this rather than MS. I think MS is trying to distance their influence over Github.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#46
post #22

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,…

Can something owned by Microsoft be really considered less of a "proprietary behemoth"?

And Microsoft already has Teams

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#47
post #37

I had to read the title multiples times to truly believe what I was reading. « 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 Sp…

Thanks for clarifying, I initially skimmed the page and assumed it was merely open sourcing their implementation.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#48
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…

I have a project within my corp where we need to collaborate with other companies on a shared project. We want to do this privately and right now run our own rocketchat stuff to do this. However we are open to hosted solutions.

I was unaware of this product until now, I figured I'd give it a spin to see what was available now and hope for some cool github integration in the future.

However the public-by-default stuff is a bummer. I know there are ways to make things private and perhaps its just me not spending enough time with the product but even if I make a private community it always has a _public_ general thread that I can't delete.

The public general thread is the default for any new thread or conversation so I can see that it will be easy to unintentionally create a thread that was intended to be private as public.

I understand why you want public-by-default, to increase engagement and community building but there are many businesses using Github and could use this tool if they were sure that they could keep stuff buttoned down.

So perhaps you guys could add a "business" or "private first" context that could be used for folks like me to ensure that while operating in that context I am operating as private-by-default.

Also, can you give any hints to what integrations might come?

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#50
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a project within my corp where we need to collaborate with other companies on a shared project. We want to do this privately and right now run our own rocketchat stuff to do this. However we are open to hosted solutions. I was unaware of this product until now, I figured I'd give it a spin to see what was available now and hope for some cool github integration in the future. However the public-by-default stuff…

Hey there - if you selected 'private' during the community creation flow, everything in that community will be private. However, there will still exist the concept of "public" and "private" channels, however those scopes are still constrained by the community settings. For example, a private community with a public general channel means everyone who has access to the community can see those conversations. But if you have a private channel in a private community, only a subset of authorized community members will be able to see those threads.
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