Spectrum: Custom Domains

[mxstbr]

Users should be able to specify custom domains for their community, e.g. community.figma.com. This would make spectrum.chat/figma redirect to that URL and show the community landing page, with users being able to click around into channels (community.figma.com/general) and threads (community.figma.com/thread/asdf-123).

If they end up joining the community they'll be redirected to Spectrum.chat in the home view (?) where they'll see all the threads, just like they do today.

TBD:

• [ ] Do we need to run nameservers?
• [ ] How does one run nameservers?

[brianlovin]

Lots of questions to be answered here, for sure. Some more that come to mind:

• [ ] How do we handle authentication across domains? I.e. I want to view a private channel at community.figma.com/private-channel - am I able to do so? If I'm locked out, and I authenticate, do I end up back at that url or at spectrum.chat/figma/private-channel?
• [ ] How do we handle branding and copy to manage user expectations of what the service is. E.g. a brand new user to community.figma.com may have never heard of Spectrum before. If they join that community, they are also joining Spectrum - they may be surprised by this. We'll have to figure out how to balance our brand with the community's brand, especially given that it's on their domain
• [ ] If community.figma.com points to the community page, is there a way for the user to get to their inbox view? If yes, won't it be weird to have the full Spectrum experience on another domain? If no, then we'll need to rework out whole navigation system to prevent these situations
• [ ] How do we handle thread content and SEO? We don't want duplicate content being indexed at spectrum.chat/thread/12345 and at community.figma.chat/thread/12345

[jessuppi]

I'm surprised this hasn't had more discussion. The only chat thread I found was:

https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/meta/custom-domain~04c3c34e-1596-4aca-abe2-2f1ecdad2c4f

Anyway, beyond all the DNS, cookie, session, authentication, login, etc challenges... I think the bigger question is really just branding and community and values... I think probably Medium would be the closest comparison in regard to both technical and branding concerns here, but even they ironically ended up deciding to cancel the custom domains feature altogether (perhaps a sign)...

What does Spectrum Chat really want to be? As per this thread:

We see ourselves competing with a little bit with each of Slack, Gitter and Discord, but really there isn't anything that fills this specific void yet. (otherwise we would've just used that instead of starting Spectrum)

Looking at my sidebar, I'd say community slacks, Discord and DevRant, but Spectrum is more like a forum than a chat, so the obvious one would be Discourse ... FWIW what Discourse is missing is the reddit-like centralisation. What Discord and Slack are missing is the forum aspect. What DevRant and Reddit are missing is the focus on discussions rather than comments.

yeah that's a good analysis. Discourse is not a platform and not real-time chat, Discord and Slack are not publicly indexed and a single stream of chat (with channels), not threads, and DevRant and reddit are not as disjoint ... In the sense that reddit is global with /r/topic subreddits, but Spectrum (ideally, though I don't think we're 100% there yet) should feel like you're a member of individual communities

...it sounds like core values are:

• public indexing
• real-time chat support
• forum-like topics created by OP users
• forum/chat room-like categories a.k.a. Channels
• specific communities that anyone can request to join or discover

Frankly, its kind of surprising that Slack, Discord, Gitter, etc haven't thought of having topics because especially in the developer world, its hard to follow chats that go on and on... thus, there are so many technical communities and teams that maintain both "forums" and a "chat room".

I think the value of Spectrum lies in teams or companies (esp. smaller ones that don't want to spend so many resources) being able to launch a Spectrum community in just a few minutes and completely avoid having to manage both forums and/or chat rooms... but like Reddit, they also have the opportunity at getting some free exposure due to the centralized aspect too.

For these reasons, I would suggest that Spectrum not allow custom domains or subdomains, because it simply doesn't make sense based on these goals and features. If a team really wants to host their own Spectrum app, it's open source after all...