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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

#61
post #28

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...

Zulip topics are the best implementation of chat threads that I've seen yet. You can view all of them simultaneously like a regular chat room, or focus down on one. You can mute either a single chat topic or an entire stream (channel). In most chat systems, if I don't read the messages within a day, I'll never bother reading the chat history because I have no idea whether there's anything relevant in it. In contrast, I can open the Rust Zulip once every few weeks and see if there were any interesting topics.

And if you're really sure you don't want to use topics, you can always just make a single "general" topic in your stream.

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

#62
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IRC is actually older than the web by a few years. No reason you couldn't update the protocol to improve some things if you wanted to invest in it somewhat seriously.

It's actually pretty hard to update the IRC protocol given the number of client and server implementations and IRC's federated nature.

https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html

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

#63
post #52

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

The Rust core dev teams are using Zulip extensively. It must be going well enough or they'd have moved onto something else. Instead, adoption has grown.

I absolutely love Zulip. I use it for a company team and it's been amazing. The stream model where you can zoom in is extremely convenient for catching up with messages and we love how well everything works.

I do miss GIFs, but eh.

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

#64
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is actually older than the web by a few years. No reason you couldn't update the protocol to improve some things if you wanted to invest in it somewhat seriously.

It's actually pretty hard to update the IRC protocol given the number of client and server implementations and IRC's federated nature. https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html

Correct, but, if you wanted to invest a chunk of change because it's important to you, you could get it done.

And it does work right now, pretty well, for a lot of people, even if it could be better, which was the original thing I was refuting.

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

#65

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.

The $ dates back to either shell scripting or perl (and applies to PHP as well), and this is a reasonably common usage in tech/programming circles. See also $dayjob.

It's unfortunate that there's a specific terminology conflict in this case.

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

#66

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.

For $20/m ($5 for a droplet and $15 for a managed DB instance) you can have that peace of mind on DO.

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

#67
post #3

When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?

You can create private channels in MatterMost for as long as I can remember.

But are there access controls other than private channels?

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

#68
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.

> Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications

I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the SMTP/LMTP format, or clients or what? If anything email lacks overhead - a proper thread meta data field that actually works across implantations (in-reply-to is a start, but not enough).

It's not like "xmpp overhead" made gräll unusable, is it?

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

#69
post #3

When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?

I'm trying to push the agenda to switch our comms between developers fully to Keybase, but it will be probably rejected.

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

#70
post #54

Could anyone elaborate as to how Microsoft Teams overtook Slack so quickly?

It is free (bundled with office 365). Lots of places prefer to save a few dollars per person and loose hundreds in productivity.

Well, it's not free (or gratis) is it? It just happens to be included in the azure ad/o365/exchange plans? So, if you're on gsuite, for example - ms teams isn't "free"?
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