
Goodbye, Slack. Hello, Spectrum - jakear
https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b
======
black_puppydog
"we're switching from a walled garden to another"

how do these kinds of posts end up on page one so often?!

~~~
sandGorgon
[https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum](https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum)

> _That being said, this codebase isn 't your typical open source project
> because it's not a library or package with a limited scope—it's our entire
> product._

Not sure what you mean by that.

~~~
coldtea
They mean that it's not just some library or package they created for their
own use (which many companies outsource, e.g. Facebook outsourcing React).

It's their full product -- you can get all their code from GitHub and run your
own version of their service locally (so it would be like Facebook the company
outsourcing the whole codebase behind Facebook the website).

~~~
kakwa_
It also means that it's probably not practical to deploy it yourself as it
relies on a big infrastructure deployed in a particular way.

------
newscracker
Serious question: how do people even stay sane in chat groups with 12000
members? Even if you assume only 50 people message in a day, that's probably
several thousand messages already. Even if you use hashtags and separation
through channels, to me it seems like these platforms aren't intended for such
large groups. Similarly, Telegram allows groups with hundreds of thousands of
members. I can't imagine what people even do in those or how they can even
keep up when several people are talking.

Note: I get that most people wouldn't even check it every day or catch up with
unread messages most of the time. I'm referring to so many people chatting in
near real time in such large groups and keeping up with the messages while
they flood the place ("flood" is an apt term borrowed from IRC, though I'm
using it slightly differently here).

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting, I didn't see any mention of cost with a casual search through the
pages. Presumably they are planning on paying their developers with something
at some point?

~~~
dickeytk
they disabled their paid tier when they were acquired by github:
[https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-
joining-g...](https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-
github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce)

~~~
0x0
So Spectrum is now owned by Microsoft? How long until they are assimilated
into Skype for Business or MS Teams (which is a poor carbon copy of Slack in
my experience)?

~~~
godzillabrennus
If it’s anything like Sunrise they’ll just destroy the product and never
assimilate it’s festures.

~~~
yebyen
FWIW, Microsoft has bought other companies that had (perhaps more) prominent
open source products, and later marked them as EOL, with future-dated grace
periods for companies to move off and migrate away, and they haven't all died
(community takes over.)

I say that as an admin of Team Hephy, the fork/continuation of the Deis
Workflow Kubernetes PaaS, which is open source and from the team that invented
Helm. They didn't actively destroy the product when MS bought out Deis, they
did collectively decide and deem it "not strategically important" and
subsequently allowed the community to decide what to do with it, helpfully
adding MIT licenses to everything on the way out, so there would be no
difficulty for us. There's a strong argument for that position ("not
strategically valuable") even without imagining that "Corporate got involved,"
as some of us believed. Workflow is not positioned where the demand is, and I
can tell you that is objectively true. (I can't tell you why, though. New
users absolutely love Workflow!)

Many of the Deis people now work at Microsoft, making more Open Source and
working on Azure Cloud.

We're still kicking it here at Team Hephy. I hadn't heard about Sunrise. But
if Microsoft is aligning their company against Slack, it is not such a big
stretch to imagine that building an OSS competitor to Slack actually fits
right in with the strategic goals, even if they are also selling their own
brand of chat, in Teams.

(Has there been any news about GitHub's developer commitment to Atom? Many
predicted that with the acquisition, Microsoft wouldn't commit resources to
both Atom and VSCode, but as far as I know both projects continue to be
developed.)

~~~
yebyen
We're killing it!

------
joshfraser
We made the switch from Slack to Discord at Origin and have been very happy we
did. Not only does it have better message history and fine-grained
permissions, it's far better designed for large groups of strangers on the
internet vs. Slack which assumes that everyone knows and trusts each other.

~~~
intertextuality
A big downside for discord is plenty of people already use it in their
personal life. The last thing I'd want is mixing personal and business
environments in the same app.

Additionally, discord's fine-grained structure is great but takes time to set
up. Slack is pretty painless, isn't it? Technically if you're working at the
same company you wouldn't need such finegrained control, unlike with random
strangers on the internet.

~~~
reustle
How is that a downside? I use slack for personal and business and there is a
pretty clear separation based on community.

~~~
intertextuality
With slack it's on a per-workspace basis (I don't use the os apps). With
discord I see every single server that I'm in.

When I see a slack alert, on mobile, I know I have something that needs my
attention, because I have most alerts off. With discord alerts, I know that
someone has pinged me with a question or wants to go grab a beer or something,
but it's not urgent.

I enjoy separating my life/work like this, but maybe to others it won't pose
an issue.

------
sincerely
It really feels like by exclusively targeting the enterprise market, Slack is
leaving money on the table. Like it says in the article, the paid plan is
_prohibitively_ expensive for casual users and it's very easy to run up
against the limitations of the free version.

~~~
jjordan
There's a tech community slack in my area with dozens of vertical channels of
discussion. I'm sure that at there's been many interesting conversations, but
because the free version limits a server to 10,000 messages across all
channels, the majority of chats are 'empty' until someone decides to pony up
the $8,500(!) per month to fully unlock the community.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Hey, Zulip offers our Standard plan[1] for free for communities like yours.
There is no restriction on message history. Plus the unique threading model of
Zulip makes it easier to run communities[2]. If you folks are interested feel
free to create an organisation in zulipchat.com and mail us at
support@zulipchat.com for activating Zulip standard. We support exporting the
data from Slack as well :)

[1] [https://zulipchat.com/plans/](https://zulipchat.com/plans/)

[2] [https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-
communities/](https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/)

~~~
molsongolden
Zulip rocks. Streams + topics are great when I can’t check chat constantly and
need to later skim a large amount of activity.

~~~
nebulaserfer
Zulip not rocks at all. Maybe topics are handy buy overall user interface so
clumsy, small fonts and so on. Tools like Slack spoiled us in terms of UI.
Mattermost maybe closest one to slack slickness.

------
dbbk
Slack has never made sense for open source communities, and I don't know why
they have persisted in trying to use it for so long. Even Slack themselves
have basically come out to discourage it.

------
gregknicholson
> After extensive research and weighing the pros/cons of different
> collaboration options (covering tools like Discourse, Discord, Gitter,
> etc.), we’ve happily landed on Spectrum.

What was wrong with each of those other options? To me, Discourse seems like a
much better option, because it's designed to interoperate (rather than to
trap).

------
znpy
We will begin migrating from Slack to Teams from Microsoft, and the will phase
out the former.

Quite frankly, Teams is at least "good enough" and quite frankly I didn't even
bother looking at the advanced functionalities (if available at all). But
Teams fits a lot lot better with our existing Office 365-based infrastructure
(domain authentication and everything) and it's already included in the office
365 subscription that we already pay.

------
muzani
Another lesser known alternative to Slack is Jandi, which is cheaper, better
free tier, has more eastern language support and is built more like a
chatroom. Though the walled garden is still there and free tier only goes up
to 500 members. I'd actually like to see more communities adopt it and see how
it goes.

------
aliswe
I never got the usp of slack its a searchable private irc server is that it?

~~~
IshKebab
It's a _modern_ version of IRC with useful modern features, notably:

* Threads * Images * File upload * Markdown-like formatting (although very annoyingly it is arbitrarily different to markdown and doesn't support links). * Emoji reactions (you probably think that is frivolous but it is genuinely useful) * Channel history (i.e. you don't have to be online at the time to receive messages)

~~~
autotune
> Threads

Some folks would vehemently disagree with this being considered useful.

~~~
IshKebab
Maybe stuck-in-the-mud naysayers. Threads make it possible to track multiple
conversations in the same channel in a sane way.

Anyone who has used IRC when there are two simultaneous but separate
conversations happening in the same channel will know how shit it is.

------
pexaizix
Grown men using emojis... Now that's something I will never understand.

~~~
koonsolo
You will once you grow up ;)

(See what I did there, putting a wink emoji after that sentence?)

~~~
pexaizix
That's not an emoji.

------
Kiro
Spectrum is owned by Github which means it's owned by Microsoft.

~~~
fastball
And...?

~~~
Kiro
Just saying. I thought it was an FOSS project by the description in the post.

~~~
basil-rash
It is, it's licensed under the BSD 3 clause license.

------
Dwivid
I don't think Spectrum is a replacement of Slack. There lots of people who are
using Slack and satisfied with its features.

~~~
sprremix
"I don't think a bicycle is a replacement of a horse. There lots of people who
are using a horse and satisfied with its features."

