Spectrum.chat

» see spectrum.chat as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Spectrum belonged to a specific professional tribe, the JavaScript front-end people who spent 2018 building component libraries and design systems for each other. I write computer vision code that ends up on drones, and the rooms I need have never been anywhere near that part of the industry. So I knew Spectrum the way most of the internet knew it: as a result in a search engine, a thread somebody else had already had, two years earlier, about the exact error message I had just pasted into a search box. That was the entire pitch of the product, arriving at me sideways and working.

Bryn Jackson and Brian Lovin ran a podcast network called SpecFM, and the Slack community they kept for listeners was failing in the usual way. Slack buried the history behind a message limit and could not be read at all by anyone without an invite. In February 2017 they started building a replacement with Max Stoiber, and what they came up with was chat crossed with a forum: conversations threaded like a message board but live like a chat room, sitting on the open web where anyone could read them without an account.

It worked well enough that other people's communities moved in. Figma ran its user community there. So did Next.js and Storybook, along with a great many smaller open source projects that needed somewhere for users to ask questions. The codebase went open source in April 2018 and collected more than ten thousand stars on GitHub, which is a lot for a product you were also supposed to be paying for eventually.

GitHub acquired the company on 30 November 2018. It did not buy a product so much as an argument about where developer conversation should live, and it spent the next two years proving that by shipping the argument under its own name. GitHub Discussions arrived in late 2020, written from scratch on GitHub's own stack rather than built out of Spectrum's code. Once Discussions existed there was no reason for the original to keep running, and on 10 August 2021 spectrum.chat went read only.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Spectrum's timing was good. By 2017 every open source project of any size had a Slack workspace, and every one of those workspaces was quietly deleting its own history at ten thousand messages. Maintainers were answering the same question weekly because last week's answer had evaporated. Spectrum's pitch was that a question answered once should stay answered, in public, where a search engine could find it.

The team had been building for about seven months before the public beta, first as an alpha for friends and then as the home of their own podcast community. Being the only tenant of your own product for that long shows in the result. Spectrum was unusually pleasant for a chat app, fast and stripped of the decoration that made its competitors feel heavy.

~ bought to be absorbed ~

The acquisition was never a mystery. GitHub said at the time that Spectrum would keep running, and it did keep running, with the founders inside GitHub working on community features. Anybody reading it as an exit was correct, and the team themselves later said in public that they wished they had stayed independent longer.

What makes this one worth a page is that the thing GitHub built instead is a real successor rather than a replacement in name. Discussions sits next to the issue tracker on repositories everywhere and does the job Spectrum was arguing for. The founders won the point and lost the product, which is a specific and fairly uncommon way for a startup to end.

~ the day it went read only ~

The notice went up at the start of August 2021 and the site froze on the 10th. Old content was promised a read only existence for the foreseeable future, which held for a while and then did not. Today spectrum.chat answers a redirect straight to github.com/features/discussions, so every one of those indexed threads, the ones that were the entire reason the product existed, now lands on a marketing page.

Two complaints came up repeatedly when the news broke. There was no way for a community owner to contact their own members about the move, and no tool to carry existing threads into GitHub Discussions. Retool ended up writing its own migration scripts to get its community into Discourse instead. The repository took its final commit on 20 July 2022 and is archived.

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