@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!

@brian_lovin any moderation features coming? Ban users, spam prevention etc?

@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 :)

@brian_lovin Thanks for the reply. Looking forward to these features. Loving the product, keep up the good work!

@mxstbr @brian_lovin Amazing product, congrats! Do you consider translating it into other languages?

@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.

@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!

@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 😁

@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 :)

@iamsooraj that's such a great idea, I don't know why that didn't exist before!

@iamsooraj So meta! I love it - now it just needs a nice profile + cover photo 😉

@alexanderisora there's also https://spectrum.chat/crypto, you should join that too!

@alexanderisora Oh and https://spectrum.chat/ethereum is another good one

Hey, thanks for the review! We're doing our best to stay on top of everything posted in https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/h... and https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/f..., just in case there's anything specific we can help with :) Otherwise - I definitely hear you about notifications, and that's something we're tweaking pretty regularly to try and find a good system that is clear and high signal for people.

@brian_lovin This means a lot when you are so responsive to the community 👍 I can talk to you later about these, but it's a startup I understand we can't expect a fully-featured product in the early months. I hope after Max's post and this launch on PH you'll acquire lots of helpful users and then you can focus more on the product! Then maybe I can join you :)

@theashtube Awesome! Looking forward to seeing you in there 😀 https://spectrum.chat/explore is a good place to start looking for communities to join, too

@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

Thanks for the feedback Mason!

@lorikarikari that's a great idea, we don't currently have an embed but we're going to look into it! 💯

Mobile experience is a bit rough, I know 😓 We're doing our best with a web app, but native mobile is probably our most-requested feature, so it's top of mind right now. Thanks for the review :)

@arunsathiya thanks Arun! Hope you're enjoying everything so far, let us know if any questions pop up :)

@tayler2412 Thanks Tayler!

@jeff_osborn We have so many ideas and plans! We already have some features to make a community owners job easier (moderation tools, community analytics, etc), but we also have lots of ideas we want to explore like content ingestion, thread/member approval, better moderation tools and more. Let me throw that question right back at you: If you currently admin a community, what would you like us to build next?

@mxstbr Thanks for getting back - all good to hear! I don't admin a community, but if I did, I'd be looking for support in marketing & getting the word out. I'd be interested in how I could use Spectrum to grow my community exponentially over time. I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but my if my primary concern were community growth I'd want Spectrum to help me amplify my message, break through the noise, and reach the right people.

@coco_vega we do too 😓 Thanks for bearing with us though Coco!

@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.

@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.

@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!

@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.

@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!

@uberbryn @madebyildi @mxstbr Oh, also - you can "logout" in the short term by just clearing localstorage + cookies. Sorry for the pain there 😫

@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.

@shivam_dewan in particular, we're more focused on the large scale public community market. Because of that, most content on Spectrum will be publicly viewable, meaning it can get picked up on search engines. This is valuable for businesses who use community platforms as a way to answer questions or share news about their product/company. With Spectrum, those conversations will be discoverable down the road, where on Facebook those conversations are always locked away and won't ever be indexed.

@brian_lovin Cool! looks so awesome :) & out of curiosity, can you elaborate how this compares with Reddit? cos Reddit has been my go-to platform for discussion, questions and community building?

@morajabi good call!