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Spectrum is joining GitHub

spectrum.chat

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#21

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)

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#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"?

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#23

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.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#24
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 it never ever really get going... I also blame GitHub's notification system which is absolutely badly implemented and confuses new-comers.

Back in the day we hyped-up and used Gitter for our community ( https://gitter.im/lnug is where I am at ). Now I wonder, is this why GitHub would want to buy Spectrum? To show GitLab they also can do community threaded discussions a-la-IRC ?

I am confuse, friend.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#25

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,…

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 plain text messages? etc)

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#27

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.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#29

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.

Somehow they managed to escape into even more dissatisfaction. At least Time Warner had different plans and didn't spam me several times a week with letters. Now they only have one $70 plan and are sending me a ton of mail with "deals" that aren't deals.

Re: Spectrum is joining GitHub

#30
post #25

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,…

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/

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