16 ms·

Spectrum is joining GitHub

408 points by adamwathan 8y ago

merlincorey 8y ago
I've never used this product, but I might now, since the article indicates that all their services are now free.
meritt 8y ago
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?
- the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  It’s a mix of gitter and discourse.
- brianlovin 8y ago
  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.
  - redindian75 8y ago
    Forums?
    - carwyn 8y ago
      It's more real-time capable than classical forum software meaning you can use it as a channelized chat system.
  - DIVx0 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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)
  - blfr 8y ago
    Like Google's Wave (RIP)?
  - tracker1 8y ago
    OT: My hope here, is that the integration with Github will also, as a side effect allow orgs using MS Teams to bridge the public channels... Letting an org use the more powerful MS Teams client internally, but still integrating with Spectrum without the need for yet another client for public interactions.
jhokanson 8y ago
Apparently this has nothing to do with the cable company ...?
- sethammons 8y ago
  I expected to see something about the cable company. Never heard of spectrum.chat. Is "Spectrum" their actual name? Or is it "spectrum.chat"?
- rzzzt 8y ago
  Also no relation to Sinclair Reasearch's famous home computer.
- porphyrogene 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - xur17 8y ago
      They like to disguise these mailings as bills and personal letters for me as well.
    - byproxy 8y ago
      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.
sjroot 8y ago
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.
PaulHoule 8y ago
Oh great, Microsoft bought the cable company!
- ykevinator 8y ago
  wonder why they announced it this way
- JCharante 8y ago
  I read the title and thought to myself "alright, now I <i>really</i> need to switch to Gitlab."
bovermyer 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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)
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    I imagine they'll rebrand it as GitHub Chat or something, then.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Or the other Spectrum, formed from the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      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.
      - indigodaddy 8y ago
        TWC most certainly did not take over Charter. The other way around, which is also why the legacy Spectrum brand continued on. Disclaimer: Former employee of Bright House/Charter.
        paulie_a 8y ago
        The same with AOL with everyone thinking the same thing. Sorry but charter is toast, it will be either a brand name and see me infrastructure, but entirely controlled by twc.
ggregoire 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! For reference, we open sourced everything back in April: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum-goes-open-source~556b4915-7269-46a7-96e6-f38446d14146 https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum...
- max23_ 8y ago
  It is my first time knowing Spectrum and will definitely look into the code base for idea/solution when working in React. Kudos and appreciate the team for open sourcing it too!
Arkanosis 8y ago
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…).
- jeremyjh 8y ago
  For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.
  - em-bee 8y ago
    they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point
    - patcon 8y ago
      Just because I'm a big fan and new contributor :) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  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)
orliesaurus 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Here is a edited screenshot for reference: https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg
  - cyphar 8y ago
    Organisations have a "conversation" feature. Personally I've never found it particularly useful.
segphault 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Growing pains are to be expected. They're probably working feverishly to scale as we write this.
carwyn 8y ago
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).
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  Yes async<->threading is crucial, and I hope Matrix gets those. I do want to root for Matrix the most, but I think it also likely that adding federation after the fact is less likely than adding threading/async, so it's a rational not just sentimental thing to root for it.
  - carwyn 8y ago
    I couldn't for the life of me understand how many people I spoke to didn't see the problem that lack of threading and async catch-up posed to linear chat systems as Slack gained in popularity. to me it felt like a forgetful, prettified IRC with awkward sign-up. Personally I find Zulip to have the nicest implementation of "topic zooming" as it still allows for a global linear view of all activity. Spectrum feels a bit more "channelized" and a bit white-space heavy but prettier. Zulip's mobile client has come a long way in recent months too. The hardest part though was trying to convince the community to migrate away from other social platforms. Meetup was (still is) driving me mad with their forums/discussions features which are woeful.
asien 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  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.
- wyldfire 8y ago
  Thanks for clarifying, I initially skimmed the page and assumed it was merely open sourcing their implementation.
- tracker1 8y ago
  From the release it looks like all the features of Spectrum are now free. It seems to me, the goal was to integrate slack-like features in the box for GitHub proper, and for enterprise. I would theorize that GitHub enterprise itself may be deprecated with a migration path to "Azure DevOps" and "TFS" for hosted/internal source control respectively, with potentially better integration with public Github over time. It may be interesting to see Spectrum integrated with MS Teams for those orgs that have internal teams, but need to interact externally, which is a story seriously lacking in Teams currently.
L-11 8y ago
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.
ckok 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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-82156b89131a https://spectrum.chat/react?thread=257957e0-ef20-4757-b25e-8...
coolspot 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Unfortunately there's https://spectrum.im/ https://spectrum.im/ which is a bit close for comfort; compare: https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.im/
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  That's so ridiculous! This is the hypothetical confusion scenario: "Oh I want to waste a tonne of money watching sports and uglify my house with a dish. Ah Skype! They do that, I'll call them up and get an install done this week." Calls them up and Skype taking advantage of the trademark confusion pocket some money from their Skype dish installation.
- dingaling 8y ago
  They weren't sued, it wasn't in the UK and the rejection was about the combination of the name Skype with a generic-looking cloudish logo. Subsequent they made a logo from the S alongside the word Skype and registered it successfully.
sergiotapia 8y ago
*joining Microsoft
- trycrmr 8y ago
  Why is everything I read from Microsoft something I have to translate into what actually is reality. It's exhausting.
  - alangpierce 8y ago
    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.
sam0x17 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Gitter is already owned by GitLab.
- tuananh 8y ago
  im not a big fan of their UI either
chrismorgan 8y ago
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.
honkycat 8y ago
I know nothing about this app but am excited to see GitHub has done a single thing to move their boring featureless application forward.
bencollier49 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
pasxizeis 8y ago
If only I had a dollar for every time the word "community" appears in the article...
ksec 8y ago
So what is the next Step for Microsoft? Circle CI? or some other CI tools?
- Yeaw 8y ago
  Microsoft already has Azure Pipelines
qazqwert 8y ago
How could've we let that happen?!

408 points by adamwathan 8y ago

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

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?

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
It’s a mix of gitter and discourse.
brianlovin 8y ago
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.
- redindian75 8y ago
  Forums?
  - carwyn 8y ago
    It's more real-time capable than classical forum software meaning you can use it as a channelized chat system.
- DIVx0 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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)
- blfr 8y ago
  Like Google's Wave (RIP)?
- tracker1 8y ago
  OT: My hope here, is that the integration with Github will also, as a side effect allow orgs using MS Teams to bridge the public channels... Letting an org use the more powerful MS Teams client internally, but still integrating with Spectrum without the need for yet another client for public interactions.

jhokanson 8y ago

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

sethammons 8y ago
I expected to see something about the cable company. Never heard of spectrum.chat. Is "Spectrum" their actual name? Or is it "spectrum.chat"?
rzzzt 8y ago
Also no relation to Sinclair Reasearch's famous home computer.
porphyrogene 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - xur17 8y ago
    They like to disguise these mailings as bills and personal letters for me as well.
  - byproxy 8y ago
    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.

sjroot 8y ago

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.

PaulHoule 8y ago

Oh great, Microsoft bought the cable company!

ykevinator 8y ago
wonder why they announced it this way
JCharante 8y ago
I read the title and thought to myself "alright, now I <i>really</i> need to switch to Gitlab."

bovermyer 8y ago

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 8y ago
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)
- bovermyer 8y ago
  I imagine they'll rebrand it as GitHub Chat or something, then.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Or the other Spectrum, formed from the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    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.
    - indigodaddy 8y ago
      TWC most certainly did not take over Charter. The other way around, which is also why the legacy Spectrum brand continued on. Disclaimer: Former employee of Bright House/Charter.
      - paulie_a 8y ago
        The same with AOL with everyone thinking the same thing. Sorry but charter is toast, it will be either a brand name and see me infrastructure, but entirely controlled by twc.

ggregoire 8y ago

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 8y ago
Thanks for the kind words! For reference, we open sourced everything back in April: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum-goes-open-source~556b4915-7269-46a7-96e6-f38446d14146 https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/announcement-spectrum...
max23_ 8y ago
It is my first time knowing Spectrum and will definitely look into the code base for idea/solution when working in React. Kudos and appreciate the team for open sourcing it too!

Arkanosis 8y ago

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…).

jeremyjh 8y ago
For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.
- em-bee 8y ago
  they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point
  - patcon 8y ago
    Just because I'm a big fan and new contributor :) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
sandGorgon 8y ago
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)

orliesaurus 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Here is a edited screenshot for reference: https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg https://i.snag.gy/MYzudj.jpg
- cyphar 8y ago
  Organisations have a "conversation" feature. Personally I've never found it particularly useful.

segphault 8y ago

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 8y ago
Growing pains are to be expected. They're probably working feverishly to scale as we write this.

carwyn 8y ago

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).

Ericson2314 8y ago
Yes async<->threading is crucial, and I hope Matrix gets those. I do want to root for Matrix the most, but I think it also likely that adding federation after the fact is less likely than adding threading/async, so it's a rational not just sentimental thing to root for it.
- carwyn 8y ago
  I couldn't for the life of me understand how many people I spoke to didn't see the problem that lack of threading and async catch-up posed to linear chat systems as Slack gained in popularity. to me it felt like a forgetful, prettified IRC with awkward sign-up. Personally I find Zulip to have the nicest implementation of "topic zooming" as it still allows for a global linear view of all activity. Spectrum feels a bit more "channelized" and a bit white-space heavy but prettier. Zulip's mobile client has come a long way in recent months too. The hardest part though was trying to convince the community to migrate away from other social platforms. Meetup was (still is) driving me mad with their forums/discussions features which are woeful.

asien 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
djsumdog 8y ago
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.
wyldfire 8y ago
Thanks for clarifying, I initially skimmed the page and assumed it was merely open sourcing their implementation.
tracker1 8y ago
From the release it looks like all the features of Spectrum are now free. It seems to me, the goal was to integrate slack-like features in the box for GitHub proper, and for enterprise. I would theorize that GitHub enterprise itself may be deprecated with a migration path to "Azure DevOps" and "TFS" for hosted/internal source control respectively, with potentially better integration with public Github over time. It may be interesting to see Spectrum integrated with MS Teams for those orgs that have internal teams, but need to interact externally, which is a story seriously lacking in Teams currently.

L-11 8y ago

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.

ckok 8y ago

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 8y ago
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-82156b89131a https://spectrum.chat/react?thread=257957e0-ef20-4757-b25e-8...

coolspot 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Unfortunately there's https://spectrum.im/ https://spectrum.im/ which is a bit close for comfort; compare: https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.im/
quickthrower2 8y ago
That's so ridiculous! This is the hypothetical confusion scenario: "Oh I want to waste a tonne of money watching sports and uglify my house with a dish. Ah Skype! They do that, I'll call them up and get an install done this week." Calls them up and Skype taking advantage of the trademark confusion pocket some money from their Skype dish installation.
dingaling 8y ago
They weren't sued, it wasn't in the UK and the rejection was about the combination of the name Skype with a generic-looking cloudish logo. Subsequent they made a logo from the S alongside the word Skype and registered it successfully.

sergiotapia 8y ago

*joining Microsoft

trycrmr 8y ago
Why is everything I read from Microsoft something I have to translate into what actually is reality. It's exhausting.
- alangpierce 8y ago
  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.

sam0x17 8y ago

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 8y ago
Gitter is already owned by GitLab.
tuananh 8y ago
im not a big fan of their UI either

chrismorgan 8y ago

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.

honkycat 8y ago

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

bencollier49 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

pasxizeis 8y ago

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

ksec 8y ago

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

Yeaw 8y ago
Microsoft already has Azure Pipelines

qazqwert 8y ago

How could've we let that happen?!