Starting a community on SpectrumChat: What is your opinion? 🤔

I run on a community on Spectrum and I wouldn't recommend it. You don't actually get access your your user's email addresses, Spectrum does a poor job of alerting users when there is new content (even as an admin I don't get notifications), and I get the sense that the product is no longer being actively developed since their acquisition by Github. I'm planning on moving as soon as I figure out a better alternative (potentially Slack).

I think that's a good idea. You shouldn't only limit it to spectrum though. Try out the other ones you said.

I think spectrum is a pretty poor platform personally, but I guess everyone has their preferences. I think you can create a community around the problem space that you are solving. People love to join a potential solution to their painful problem.

What you should post depends on what these your members want. You have to find it thru testing and collect feedbacks.

Is building a community your top priority right now? or you just wanna try it out and see if it can help ur launch?

I think the other two questions are much more important than "Is spectrum.chat the right option?"

Communities need to deliver something that nothing else can for their members. They tend to form around (i) passions/obsessions, (ii) profession (Python devs, product managers in finance), (iii) political/cultural issues.

People go to them to get answers they can't get elsewhere, nerd out with community they can't find elsewhere, network.

I'd see your community as an opportunity to build a brand around an aspect of your users' lives that is currently under-served. Everything marketing and branding that applies to product creation applies to community creation.

Do you know the story of Buffer's content marketing success in the early days? They started a blog of, basically, life-hacks. What do life-hacks have to do with scheduling social media posts?? Buffer found something that was a shared characteristic among their best users (a passion for life-hacking) and turned it into their secret brand sauce.

The reason I mention Buffer's story is to illustrate that your community doesn't have to necessarily be about something bang-on directly related to your product. It needs to be about something that's important to your best customers. What else do they talk about and frequently try to find answers to?

Maybe your best users talk about getting a job frequently. Are they freelancers? Do they all have side projects? Do they often need CSS help? Do they need feedback on their designs? Etc. Etc. Find something like this that they have in common and start providing resources for them, for free.

If you find a powerful reason to bring people together in a community, the platform you put them in will be less important.

Seems like GitHub is putting Spectrum on the back-burner and focusing more on GitHub Discussions.

I know it's in private beta, but that might be something to keep your eye on?

Other than that, I think I would consider Discord:

• more communities moving there
• free marketing with Server Discovery
• ability to stream to your members
• voice/video chat rooms
• better moderation tools

The con about Discord is no threading. But I would definitely weigh the two (Slack and Discord) to see what fits your needs best!

Not sure if you are willing to pay monthly, but I helped my girlfriend set up a community on Mighty Networks and I was really impressed with it overall. I'm a dev and I am part of a few Spectrum communities. It's ok to use, but I prefer the look and feel of Mighty Networks.