Spectrum
p/spectrum
A community platform for the future
Yvo Schaap
Spectrum — Build better communities
Featured
105

Spectrum is a new platform for you to join, start and build online communities.

Replies
Kelly Kuhn-Wallace
Swoon.
Justin Mitchell
Curious how this compares to https://twistapp.com which is also thread based.
Brian Lovin
@itsthisjustin Twist is really focused on team collaboration - we're focused on making a platform that's great for communities, large and small. From an individual user's perspective, we're also combining all of your communities into one feed so that you don't have to maintain separate logins for multiple Twist/Slack accounts, multiple DMs/notifications, etc.
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
Boom. Thanks for hunting @yvo! Excited to have more people checking out this platform we’ve been working so hard on for the past 7 months. Feedback is definitely appreciated!
Josh Dunsterville
I've been running the Sketch community on Spectrum (previously on Slack), and can't speak highly enough of it. The team is genuinely interested in creating the best product for communities! Go check it out!
Max Stoiber
@jdunsterville It's been amazing to see your community flourish on Spectrum, we're excited to have you! This is it in case you wanna take a quick peek: https://spectrum.chat/sketch
Calvin Koepke

Spectrum is awesome. It's like what everyone wishes social networks would be, but can never find because they are too individually centered. I have high hopes for this platform.

Pros:

I love the "community over individual" nature of the platform.

Cons:

Faster, more predictable editor.

Brian Lovin
Thanks so much Calvin!
Coco Vega
I’ve been using this for a while and it is awesome. It has a very beautiful and fresh design and works perfectly. Just wish there was an app.
Brian Lovin
@coco_vega we do too 😓 Thanks for bearing with us though Coco!
Mason Wear

I've been using Spectrum for several months now, since Alpha. The team has really taken the time to listen to what these early users have had to say and improve the platform as a whole.

I think this truly solves a big issue for those people trying to manage a community. It also makes participating in community discussions a way more intuitive and user-friendly process. One account, one inbox.

Pros:

The organization of it all is top class. The team has really put thought into these interactions, & the pain points of managing a community.

Cons:

Mobile could be better. Notifications can be a little confusing at time. Both of these things I'm confident the team will address in time.

Brian Lovin
Thanks for the feedback Mason!
Stephen Olmstead
Big congrats @mxstbr @brian_lovin @uberbryn! I know this day has been a long time coming. Huge kudos on all the hardwork to bring this to where it is today. Excited to keep watching this grow and evolve!
Brian Lovin
Onur Senture
It's good but I needed to check ProductHunt to find it's URL because when you try to search on DuckDuckGo and Google you cannot find this service...
Ruben
Slick and clean material design and amazing UI. I think a crucial role here is played by the search feature, if it will be good it will put the product few level higher than all the competitors. Great Job!
Surjith S M
The main objective is discussion, but it opens in a sidebar popup. How UX friendly is it? @brian_lovin @mxstbr
Brian Lovin
@mxstbr @surjithctly What's opening up in a sidebar popup for you?
Surjith S M
@mxstbr @brian_lovin When clicking on titles on any forum, it opens a popup with all the comments / replies from the right side. That's where the discusion happens. Somehow it looks weired to me as it looks like a secondary action. Better to be on a separate page to give more importance and room instead of that popup. Hope you got my point! Example: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum?t... ~Surjith
Ildi Xhaholli
Is it just me or is there no option to log out on the website? I've tried everything, even revoking access from Twitter. Was this something that your team overlooked or done by design?
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
@madebyildi We had a cookie issue that was burning a lot of time, so we just deleted the button for the time being because there were very few users who'd be affected by that.
Ildi Xhaholli
@uberbryn interesting. I wanted to sign out of my Twitter account to login to my other account which is the one I was going to create a community with. Users such as myself stay away from products that do not allow users to delete account + logout. Seems like a dirty trick to keep you on the site. You appear to have a different reason for doing so, but I hope your team can fix this sooner than later. Cool product btw!
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
@madebyildi Yeah, that's something I do fairly frequently too. It sucks for sure, but it's definitely not meant to be a trick of any sort. Just an annoying bug on our end. fwiw, I highly recommend using a single account to create and join communities as it's much easier to manage that way. If you're set on switching I've been using multiple Chrome users or diff browsers, but I know that's certainly not ideal. You can clear your application storage/cookies for the time being if you want as well.
Max Stoiber
@uberbryn @madebyildi definitely not trying to play dirty, I just haven't been able to track down the bug that breaks logout 🙈 Going to fix that asap!
Brian Lovin
@uberbryn @madebyildi @mxstbr Oh, also - you can "logout" in the short term by just clearing localstorage + cookies. Sorry for the pain there 😫
Max Stoiber
@yvoschaap thanks for hunting us! Hey folks! 👋 To elaborate a bit on why I'm personally excited about Spectrum, it all comes back to my open source projects. They're used by lots of people worldwide, but no matter what app I tried there was no way to sustainably create a community around them. Existing platforms quickly break down when you have more than a couple of dozen folks talking. (especially when it's deep, technical discussions) Brian and Bryn, who had a Slack team for their SpecFM podcast network with 9,000+ members, ran into the same issue. No matter which platform they looked at, none of them really work for this use case. That's why we tailor-made Spectrum for ourselves. By forcing conversations to be threaded, there can be one, five, ten or a hundred of them going on at the same time but they'll never interfere with each other! Contrary to a forum though, they're still real-time, making them feel more present and active. It's also a single login to get to all of your favorite communities—no more juggling tons of passwords and notfication settings and all that annoying jazz. 💯 To get a feel for what Spectrum is about I'd recommend you head right to the explore page (https://spectrum.chat/explore) to find and join a community that interests you or to create a new one! (for example, what about the ProductHunt community? https://spectrum.chat/product-hunt 😉) While this might sound like we've got it all figured out, there's still lots to do. (which is why Spectrum is still in public beta) We're constantly experimenting and trying out new things, so we'd love to get your feedback: What do you think we should tackle next?
Mo
@yvoschaap @mxstbr I like how you experiment with new features, techniques and even new user interfaces! Startup founders that themselves are the in the focus of the demographic can really understand the product and users needs, so that's why I recommend Spectrum to every community I know, although as you said there are some polishing and features. Features can be added as we go but what matters are founders that understand the problem and the love of users. I'll try as much as I can to help with new features or reporting bugs.
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
@adithya everything is subject to change right now, but: - custom urls: likely - self-hosting: not likely - mobile apps: definitely. It’s a good question. We did a lot of research with teams who use Discourse. The main issue - as with other forum software - is that there are no “warm bodies”. It never feels like you’re together. People pop in, ask a question (or answer a couple) and leave and wait for an email. Spectrum is meant to be more social and casual so that people can just be around each other (which was a big benefit of public slack teams, but they had a lot of other issues) Anyway, hope that answers your question!
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
@adithya That's good feedback! We definitely considered a la carte pricing, but we're not in a hurry to make changes to optimize pricing just yet as we're still very early and working on meeting higher-order product needs. This was basically just the fastest option for us to ship 😁
Brian Lovin
@adithya @uberbryn Good thoughts on pricing - as Bryn mentioned we're probably not at a point where we can easily build out an a la carte system for specific features like one additional moderator. If you're interested in trialing some of the Standard features (private channels, multiple admins, analytics) just let me know and we can get that set up :)
Reony T
Oh wow!! I must've assumed this was hunted before. Guess I missed my chance 😂👏 I would add more photos as well, maybe a simple GIF of clicking into threads and communities.
Vadi
Thanks for the answer @uberbryn. I’m going to use it. How spectrum is helpful for dev shops that are already using Slack and Github, just not the open source communities. I’m sure we all have struggles differentiating conversations across different stream of teams juggling in Slack. However i also see conversations are just not isolated within techs. I’m looking to see how it is useful in the enterprise world and its use for it. Just a curious..
Vadi
Looks stunning! How it differs from Discourse?
Bryn Jackson
Top Product
Maker
@vadivelk It's live chat - more akin to something like Slack where it's realtime, but everything is divided by threads, so it's easy to keep things more focused. But unlike both of those options, you can have all your communities, notifications, and DMs with only one account instead of many.
Anthony Lee
How do you log out of this thing?
Max Stoiber
@anthonygawonlee logout is currently broken, we're working on bringing it back! Sorr for the troubles 🙏
Brian Lovin
@anthonygawonlee @mxstbr Yeah sorry about this, it's been an annoying bug for us to track down. In the short term you can clear localStorage + cookies and that'll do the thing. Public beta problems, huh? 🙃
Arun
Woah! Spectrum IS THE GAME! I am going to be drooling over the "Find communities" button for the next few days.
Brian Lovin
@arunsathiya thanks Arun! Hope you're enjoying everything so far, let us know if any questions pop up :)
Sooraj Chandran
Wonderful product. Fell in love with it instantly!
Max Stoiber
@iamsooraj that's such a great idea, I don't know why that didn't exist before!
Brian Lovin
@iamsooraj So meta! I love it - now it just needs a nice profile + cover photo 😉
Yvo Schaap
Spectrum fills in a void between Github and Slack. One-liner: > Spectrum is a new platform for you to join, start and build online communities. Pain: > I’ve (@mxstbr) been running large communities for my open source projects on these platforms for years, and have personally felt the pain of managing discussions with hundreds and thousands of people who contribute from all around the world. Solution: > Every conversation on Spectrum starts as a thread, its own place to provide rich context for the conversation ahead. Once a thread is published others can join the conversation. Explore their launch communities: https://spectrum.chat/explore including React, Sketch, and Product Design.
Brian Lovin
@mxstbr @yvoschaap Hey Yvo, thanks for adding us here 😀 We originally started Spectrum because we were continually frustrated by the lack of community support from running a large (9k+ members) Slack team for designers and developers. As soon as we started working on Spectrum as a replacement for our own Slack team, we started hearing from a bunch of other companies and organizations who were all feeling the same pains as us, and were looking for something better. Some of the things I'm most excited about that Spectrum offers are: - open platform first: as a member of many communities, I'm able to view all of the conversations across all of my communities in one unified feed, to avoid the annoying time it takes to navigate between Slack teams or individual forums around the web. As a result, I also have a unified set of direct messages and notifications, which means I don't have to play whackamole with navigating between different community sites or Slack teams to keep up. - communities are public by default: this means that content is more accessible, doesn't necessarily have to be hidden behind an authorization wall, and lets threads get indexed on search engines to make content more easily discovered on the internet. We also allow communities to have unlimited conversations + messages, which means that even communities who can't afford to pay will not have to worry about a continuous churn of information and discussions getting lost. - threads first: all conversations on Spectrum are thread based, which means you can follow discrete topics within a community, easily save or link directly to a conversation, and resurface a conversation at any point in time when there's something new to say. Spectrum is still in beta, which means we're really focused on gathering as much feedback as we can - so if anyone here has any questions at all just let me know and I'll be happy to answer!
Tony
@brian_lovin any moderation features coming? Ban users, spam prevention etc?
Brian Lovin
@tamedo hey Tony, right now we support thread freezing, deletion, and message deletion. For paying communities you can have multiple moderators with these permissions. As far as moderation features - yes, we're working towards blocking users, thread approval, member approval, spam detection...the whole thing! It's just going to be an iterative process as we tackle these things one by one :)
Tony
@brian_lovin Thanks for the reply. Looking forward to these features. Loving the product, keep up the good work!
Vlad Pekh
@mxstbr @brian_lovin Amazing product, congrats! Do you consider translating it into other languages?