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Spectrum is joining GitHub

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101–110 of 155 posts

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#101

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,…

I like Gitter, the Scala community is on Gitter. However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane. Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool.

Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually.

This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues.

And so the users are left with a messy stream of collective consciousness that is impossible no search or navigate effectively.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#102
post #33

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…

Slack has threads. I don't know why nobody knows this. And unlike Zulip they aren't mandatory, which is a bit nicer for small channels.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#103

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,…

I like Gitter, the Scala community is on Gitter. However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane. Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

Heya, Gitter developer here

You can track https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/irc-bridge/issues/52 for seeing more users in the member list/roster. There is a proposal there to trickle in new users to the list every time a new message comes through the bridge with relevant code linked (merge request welcome).

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#104
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Gitter, the Scala community is on Gitter. However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane. Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool. Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually. This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues. And so the users ar…

Heya, Gitter developer here,

Search definitely needs improvement and is on the roadmap. You can track these issues,

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Gitter, the Scala community is on Gitter. However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane. Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

Gitter has this annoying bug where it'll email you for every message in any channel you're in and you can't turn it off. How such an egregious bug still hasn't been fixed, I don't know, but it doesn't inspire much trust.

Heya, Gitter developer here,

If you want to stop email notifications, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...

You could also adjust your notification settings to "Mute", https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...

But the real problem is that unread item count is coupled to the emails being sent out, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1205. So if you have notifications set to "All" or "Announcements" which track unreads, you will get emails for any unread messages in the room which isn't desirable.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#106

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,…

The problem is: lock-in is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#108

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,…

And I'll never get to use any of them usefully because every company says "can't we use whatever Atlassian tells us to use?"

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#109

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,…

The problem is: lock-in is a feature, not a bug.

It’s a feature for the company creating the lock-in, and a bug for the users.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#110
post #77

*joining Microsoft

Why is everything I read from Microsoft something I have to translate into what actually is reality. It's exhausting.

Unless you're viewing it from a purely financial lens (e.g. you're closely following the MSFT stock), it seems like "joining GitHub" is probably closer to reality than "joining Microsoft" for most purposes. I don't have any more information than the post has, but it sounds like:

* The Spectrum product will be merging with the GitHub product in some sense, maybe integrating completely, maybe re-branded with GitHub branding, maybe separate branding but tighter integrations. It certainly doesn't seem like it'll be a separate Microsoft-branded product.

* The Spectrum team (three people) will join the GitHub team, which of course has its own office, culture, vision, etc. Maybe they'll keep working on Spectrum, maybe they'll work on other parts of GitHub, maybe current GitHub folks will join them, but point is, the people they'll work with are the people who work on GitHub, not Microsoft as a whole. It certainly seems unlikely that they're moving to Redmond to work at Microsoft HQ.

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