I didn't know Spectrum until today. It looks similar to Gitter.

As I understand it, it means we now have at least three “slack-like”, well-backed, open-source, community-centered chats: - Gitter, now owned by GitLab; - Spectrum, now owned by GitHub; - Mattermost, independent, but fully integrated within GitLab.

That's great to have credible alternatives to the proprietary behemots that are Slack, Discord and others, but I wish they were able to federate somehow, so that as a user, I don't have to have an account and a browser tab on each instance of each platform, with slightly different user interfaces and features (in addition to my IRC client).

I remember there was a suggestion for Gitter to use the Matrix protocol at some point, but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction. That would be so awesome to have all of them using it, so that one could keep all their discussions in the same place (eg. same mobile application, same user-chosen chat client…).

For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.

they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point