Hi everybody, I wanted to bring spectrum.chat (https://spectrum.chat) to your attention. It is a community communication platform which seeks to combine the advantages of mailing lists (searchable, easily accessible) with the interactivity of chats.
A spectrum community contains multiple threads, similarly to a mailing list. Each thread is a chat room where any logged in members can participate. The threads are easily searchable and remain available indefinitely. As far as I can tell, you can't group them by timeframe (i.e. month etc) right now, though. The project is fairly new (started March 2017) and kind of rough around the edges. For example, it's not possible to sign up using an email right now (only google, github etc OAuth is supported). This alone can be a deal breaker. Another lacking feature is the missing open API / chatbot support. The project is open source, though, and is moving very fast. The bot option is being added in the near future, which would allow integrating existing mailing lists into spectrum. The devs are also very responsive to questions and requests from the community. So I think we might want to keep an eye on the development of this tool as a possible interactive channel for the arrow community which would provide the interactivity of slack while avoiding its downsides. Cheers, Dimitri.
