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Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

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Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#21

Post by LinuxBender »

davidw wrote: post #19
zer00eyz wrote: post #16

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent disc…

You can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1] to get history and make some folks happy that prefer using a http client.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#23

Post by jnwatson »

jjeaff wrote: post #11
mikece wrote: post #8

The article talks about Hipchat as a competitor but HipChat was shut down by Atlassian and HipChat users were strongly encouraged to adopt Slack: https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack

Just for clarity, Hipchat users were strongly encouraged to move to Slack because slack purchased Hipchat from Atlassian.

Only because Atlassian abandoned HipChat after trying to replace it.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#24

Post by ergothus »

davidw wrote: post #19
zer00eyz wrote: post #16

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent disc…

> Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.

I don't actually agree with this. Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications, which does NOT mean you can't have a history. Indeed, history and search is the real selling point of Slack for me. Everything else Slack has over IRC is trivial and not worth abandoning the standards.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#25

Post by hnaccy »

davidw wrote: post #19
zer00eyz wrote: post #16

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent disc…

>IRC works pretty well.

No, it sucks.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#26

Post by ivanbakel »

davidw wrote: post #19
zer00eyz wrote: post #16

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent disc…

>Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.

That assumes that every discussion which eventually is important enough to be made permanent starts out that way. One of the nice things about a history-keeping chat is that the barrier to starting conversation is low, and the barrier for preserving that conversation is also low (i.e. nil).

That has a double benefit - anything that becomes important is automatically preserved, so you could have tuned it out at the time and later be able to come back to it. There's no need to always focus on a chat if it's guaranteed to saved for later, unlike with IRC, which you can't always risk tuning out.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#28

Post by axegon_ »

sinnombre wrote: post #5

What about zulip? They seem to fare well in terms of features against slack and mattermost.

I've tried both and imo mattermost has the edge when it comes to hooks and integrations. It's also insanely flexible with the configuration options it gives. The one thing I don't like about zulip topics... Not really my thing...

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#29

Post by SlavikCA »

benatkin wrote: post #17
mikece wrote: post #8

The article talks about Hipchat as a competitor but HipChat was shut down by Atlassian and HipChat users were strongly encouraged to adopt Slack: https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack

Another thing that happened is GitHub acquired both Gitter and Spectrum. Gitter deprecated its mobile app. Spectrum's founder has been working on other stuff at GitHub. Microsoft has Teams so that might have something to do with it.

Gitter was acquired by Gitlab, not Github.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#30

Post by askafriend »

alias_neo wrote: post #15

We've been using Hipchat for years at $work. There's very little is say is "good" about it, it was just the best option at the time as it needed to be self-hosted. Mattermost is being trialled now, pasting code doesn't seem a lot better, but the overall experience is. As a place that likes Go/Docker it has potential for us.

The "$work" notation could be mistaken for the Slack stock ticker. The "$" is how you commonly denote stocks, and "WORK" is the ticker for Slack.
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