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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

#41

Post by chrisweekly »

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…

email is just untenable for collaboration / discussion

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

#42

Post by sonthonax »

hnaccy wrote: post #25
davidw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I second this. Things like the lack of multiline messages is something one would expect out of the early 90s.

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

#43

Post by antisthenes »

ergothus wrote: post #24
davidw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I didn't really feel the overhead of email until Gmail switched to their current theme. Now everything feels so sluggish and unwieldy that it really does constitute overhead, in real time seconds.

Whenever I used a native desktop software, like Thunderbird or Opera Mail, I was able to have conversations with people as quickly as in a chat client (and faster than texting, because of a real keyboard)

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

#45

Post by bob1029 »

We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything.

I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment failed for our developers, so we now maintain 2 stacks - Teams for company-wide communications, and Mattermost for developer-intensive communications (or anyone else willing to teach themselves how to use a new thing).

Mattermost has proven to be an incredible solution for our development duties. I just installed it directly on a EC2 t3.small instance and we've been using it for about 9 months now without any pain points to speak of. I literally haven't touched that machine since I turned it on day 1. To be fair, we are <10 developers, but we get pretty heavy with the screenshots and json/code dumps throughout the day. We did make some compromises with authentication in favor of expediency of deployment, but it's really not a big deal for our developers to keep track of their LDAP vs their mattermost credentials. If someone complains enough I'll spend a few hours to hook up LDAP too.

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

#46

Post by virtualpotato »

As with mastodon and similar projects - having to deploy, secure and maintain a db server is a big friction point, I wish projects aiming at self-hosting would internalize that and use something like sqlite for small to moderate deployments and would even as go as far as suggesting that it is unlikely to ever be deployed at a scale that a single-writer-multi-reader sqlite service on a decent machine can't handle.

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

#47

Post by robohoe »

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.

What issues did you have with pasting code in it? It supports Markdown so it supports whatever a typical README.md would.

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

#48

Post by andybak »

bob1029 wrote: post #45

We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything. I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment fail…

So - non-developers resisted Slack or Slack-like things?

That's interesting. I'm a developer but I find it easy to empathize with non-developers because I hate any tech orthogonal to the actual task at hand that requires a learning curve. I usually find that other things have pushed that thing out of my brain by the time I have to use it again.

Unlike most developers I'm no fan of Markdown (I can manage links and list formatting in a WYSIWIG editor without needing to reach for the docs. I hate reading docs).

I've got the hang of Slack but I tire of teaching new adopters the correct etiquette and usage that means they don't overly interrupt those of us that have tuned their notifications. Or teaching people how to ensure their messages aren't missed entirely.

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