
Spectrum is joining GitHub - adamwathan
https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce
======
Arkanosis
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, but I wish they were able to federate somehow,
so that as a user, I don't have to have an account and a browser tab on each
instance of each platform, with slightly different user interfaces and
features (in addition to my IRC client).

I remember there was a suggestion for Gitter to use the Matrix protocol at
some point, but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction. That would be so
awesome to have all of them using it, so that one could keep all their
discussions in the same place (eg. same mobile application, same user-chosen
chat client…).

~~~
bad_user
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](https://irccloud.com) for always-on
presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

~~~
raspie
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.

~~~
bad_user
Chat works better than forums.

Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for
_months_ before I replied. That's because my time as a contributor is very
limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets.

And you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. But not
really. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects
you're talking about are insanely popular.

This is because of two reasons:

1\. people with problems are bad at describing those problems — this is why
StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try
to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I
often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else;
whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the
intent

2\. people are afraid of being wrong; but chat is more casual, so in my
experience more people end up participating

Chat has other benefits. You can have off topic conversations, you can make
jokes, you can make friends. I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. They
promised it at some point but nothing came of it.

Also, I do like Discourse ([https://discourse.org](https://discourse.org)). It
does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. Scala has Discourse
forums, like for example [https://users.scala-lang.org](https://users.scala-
lang.org) ... but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular.

And one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful
online presence. You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at
least you've got some chat channels to go to.

~~~
andybak
> Chat works better than forums.

I've never had much satisfactory help from chat. I think I've never quite
understood the social element of it. Do I wait for a pause? Do I make friends
first? Just ask my question and wait?

Ask a question and hang around for half hour to see if anyone replies?

And in the meanwhile 6 different conversations, statements, off-topic chats
and other noise is scrolling past me completely ruining any focus I had.

I find them utterly hateful things when I'm in problem-solving mode. Maybe
they are more fun when you're in a "sort of working" mode but that's not when
I need help.

~~~
bad_user
Gitter sends you an email when you’re being mentioned.

Our experiences are wildly different.

On Gitter, on the channels I hang out, I think I got answers to my problems in
99% of cases.

------
carwyn
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 been away from the conversation for a
while. Other criteria I was looking for were sensible threading, mobile
friendly, persistence of history and private channels. Integration with voice
or video chat was a bonus.

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/](https://spectrum.chat/)

Zulip: [https://zulipchat.com/](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/](https://matrix.org/)) and Riot
([https://riot.im/](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](https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349)).

~~~
IshKebab
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.

~~~
vishnu_ks
I think plenty of people knows Slack has threads. Threads in Slack are
secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care
about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation
is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch
up and participate in conversations. Once you get used to the threading model
of Zulip its hard to tolerate threading model like Slack which is really
inefficient and time wasting.

~~~
carwyn
> Once you get used to the threading model of Zulip its hard to tolerate
> threading model like Slack which is really inefficient and time wasting.

This!

I got a bunch of our community to try out many of the different chat systems
out there. Zulip was an interesting one as there were two points that really
changed their perception of it as a platform:

1\. When they were told there was a "Night Mode" \- aesthetics are important!
(something Slack arguably got right, IMHO beyond that it's just fancy IRC).

2\. After around 5-10 minutes of playing around the penny drops as to why the
stream and topic "zooming" is implemented in the way is it. Usually a "Holy
Cow" moment.

Once you "get" it, going back to anything else feels like going back in time.

------
ggregoire
I quite often take a look at the code of Spectrum:
[https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum](https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum).

It's my go-to (with [https://github.com/Automattic/wp-
calypso](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso)) to get an idea of how they
solved a particular issue in their React app.

I'm really thankful to them for open sourcing their product. I wish more
companies would go this way.

Anyway, congratz to Max (also author of Styled Components) and the rest of the
team!

~~~
brianlovin
Thanks for the kind words! For reference, we open sourced everything back in
April: [https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-
spectrum...](https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum-
goes-open-source~556b4915-7269-46a7-96e6-f38446d14146)

------
asien
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
Spectrum.

It makes sense as GitLab have Gitter but GitHub has nothing to manage
communities.

~~~
brobdingnagians
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.

------
orliesaurus
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/](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](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.

~~~
RandallBrown
I don't know of any forums built into GitHub? They have issues and the wiki,
but that's as much as I've ever used/heard of.

~~~
orliesaurus
Here is a edited screenshot for reference:
[https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg](https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg)

------
meritt
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?

~~~
brianlovin
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, public community/user profiles, and more.
We've seen these things be really useful for content and community discovery.

~~~
DIVx0
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?

~~~
brianlovin
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.

~~~
DIVx0
Ok, then this text in the "general" channel settings is very confusing:

 _Anyone on Spectrum can join this channel, post threads and messages, and
will be able to see other members. If you want to create private channels, get
in touch._

Also, it would be helpful if i could tell at a glance which communities I was
in were private vs public. I can't even tell from the communities setting page
if I selected private or not on creation (I did, but i'd still like to see
that noted)

Thanks, looking forward to seeing how this gets integrated

*I'd love to see documents/media added to threads added to the repos (optionally perhaps)

------
bovermyer
For those who, like me, have never heard of this before:

Spectrum is a real-time chat service where each conversation has a permalink.

~~~
wlesieutre
Not to be confused with the other Spectrum which is a real-time chat service
and forum

[https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/)

[https://starcitizen.tools/Spectrum_(module)](https://starcitizen.tools/Spectrum_\(module\))

~~~
bobthepanda
Or the other Spectrum, formed from the merger of Time Warner Cable and
Charter.

~~~
egypturnash
Or the other Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers, which has been published since 1964...

~~~
ndarilek
Or the instant messaging transport, which is what I thought this was related
to when I first saw it. :)

[https://spectrum.im/](https://spectrum.im/)

~~~
mattlondon
Or the 8-bit Z80-based 1980s computer that was huge outside of the US (when
the US was mainly Commodore 64 focused) (1) and of Google Doodle fame (2)

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum)

2 - [https://www.google.com/doodles/st-georges-day-the-30th-
anniv...](https://www.google.com/doodles/st-georges-day-the-30th-anniversary-
of-the-zx-spectrum)

------
sjroot
I am very happy to see this. It is a well-polished product that I would use
any day over alternatives like Discord, which lots of OSS projects seem to be
shifting to. Congratulations to the team.

------
segphault
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.

~~~
bovermyer
Growing pains are to be expected. They're probably working feverishly to scale
as we write this.

------
chrismorgan
The first time I loaded this, I got an error, “We couldn’t find a channel with
this name.” In the console, ServiceWorker errors on Google Analytics
(blocked), and a bunch of unhelpful “Unhandled (in react-apollo)” errors with
long stack traces that I shan’t reproduce here. A reload fixed it. Curious and
a little concerning. But even then, the document has no title or favicon,
which is… _what!?_ (OK, when I looked back five minutes later, after much
scrolling through several pages of comments at the end, it did eventually get
a document title, but only eventually.)

The big image at the top of
[https://spectrum.chat/features](https://spectrum.chat/features) is also
broken.

------
merlincorey
I've never used this product, but I might now, since the article indicates
that all their services are now free.

------
L-11
To write a dissenting comment:

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.

~~~
zestyping
Spectrum has no concept of channels or topics?

~~~
brianlovin
We do have the concept of channels within communities. Channels can also be
optionally private.

------
ckok
This seems more like discourse, a forum than slack, chat?

One thing that often happens in chat is general talk like weather. Would that
go in a topic here too?

~~~
gunn
There seem to be two things. Each community can define channels so I guess you
could have an 'offtopic' one. The other is that there are dedicated
'watercooler' threads e.g.
[https://spectrum.chat/react?thread=257957e0-ef20-4757-b25e-8...](https://spectrum.chat/react?thread=257957e0-ef20-4757-b25e-82156b89131a)

------
honkycat
I know nothing about this app but am excited to see GitHub has done a single
thing to move their boring featureless application forward.

------
pasxizeis
If only I had a dollar for every time the word "community" appears in the
article...

------
ksec
So what is the next Step for Microsoft? Circle CI? or some other CI tools?

~~~
Yeaw
Microsoft already has Azure Pipelines

------
bencollier49
That _has_ to be a trademark violation in the UK. Would be very surprised if
the trademarks for Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum weren't in the same category
as this. And thanks to the "Next", they're still in use.

~~~
laurentoget
spectrum is also the brand name used by charter telecommunications for their
ISP and news business, so they obviously do not have much concern about
trademark infringement.

------
sam0x17
I tried using spectrum for something the other day and I found it impossible
to find what I had already posted (to see if someone answered my question). UI
is garbage.

~~~
jakelazaroff
Gitter is already owned by GitLab.

------
sergiotapia
*joining Microsoft

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

~~~
alangpierce
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.

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

~~~
porphyrogene
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.

~~~
maxxxxx
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.

~~~
byproxy
I must've lucked out, then, as I only pay $15 a month for an Internet-only
plan through Spectrum. Granted, the speeds aren't anything to write home about
(30 Mb/s download), but it's more than serviceable.

~~~
maxxxxx
Where's that? I have an old $15 plan for 3 mbit grandfathered in but I would
like a little more speed. The only plan they are offering to me is $49 for 12
months which then goes up 70.

~~~
byproxy
In Los Angeles. Oddly enough, I went to see if I could find that plan again
and it's nowhere to be found. The cheapest it's showing for me is a $50 a
month plan for 100 Mb/s speeds.

~~~
maxxxxx
I am in LA too. You are lucky. Keep that plan for as long as you can!

------
PaulHoule
Oh great, Microsoft bought the cable company!

~~~
JCharante
I read the title and thought to myself "alright, now I <i>really</i> need to
switch to Gitlab."

------
coolspot
I am curious how it is not a trademark infringement?

Can someone please explain?

Skype was sued in UK for using letters "S,K,Y" by brand "Sky" and lost [1]

[1] -
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32593735](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32593735)

~~~
jamesgeck0
In the US, similar trademarks are fine as long as they're in different
industries. See [https://www.estesrockets.com/](https://www.estesrockets.com/)
and [https://www.estes-express.com/](https://www.estes-express.com/) for
example.

~~~
userbinator
Unfortunately there's [https://spectrum.im/](https://spectrum.im/) which is a
bit close for comfort; compare:

    
    
        https://spectrum.chat/
        https://spectrum.im/

