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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

#81

Post by danpalmer »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #78
duskwuff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially…

I think "all team members are admins" is more usable than you think it is; I generally do this for many cloud services on most of my teams even at my day job; it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control, setting it up, and then someone who can't do what they need to do for their job cause you didn't give them enough access, or the only person who can do what needs done is on vacation, etc. I often s…

It works well for companies where there’s typically recourse in company policy to deal politics and bullying.

For communities, especially those that are open, this model often fails as soon as one bad actor comes along because there’s often no recourse against bad behaviour.

Unfortunately for Mattermost, it’s communities that are less likely to be able to pay, and more likely to be affected by this policy. That just feels like poor policy making.

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

#82

Post by duskwuff »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #78
duskwuff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially…

I think "all team members are admins" is more usable than you think it is; I generally do this for many cloud services on most of my teams even at my day job; it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control, setting it up, and then someone who can't do what they need to do for their job cause you didn't give them enough access, or the only person who can do what needs done is on vacation, etc. I often s…

"Everyone is an admin" might be usable for some small teams, but it makes the software absolutely unusable for any sort of public project -- like open-source developers, or public communities. It really makes it clear that the primary purpose of the "team edition" is to drive sales of the commercial product, not to be usable in its own right.

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

#84

Post by neumann »

sinnombre wrote: post #5

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

After trying all, I prefer zulip over all (including slack).

It is very polished, functional and easy to write extensions for! It is slightly annoying that I feel like none of these will last a decade and wonder why we couldn't have stuck with XMPP or an extended standard and figure out federation, privacy and enterprise.

Unfortunately, outside of tech, everyone is moving to Teams!

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

#85

Post by socceroos »

gramakri wrote: post #76
johnchristopher wrote: post #31

Yeah. But. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 Non-admins can delete/archive any channel #6320

there is a good comment/response by the co-founder of mattermost at https://rolfje.wordpress.com/2017/10/26/mattermost-delete-ch... (scroll to the end of post for the comments)

Not a great comment, in my opinion. He does nothing to address the artificial neutering of the community edition, especially when compared to all the open source products that Mattermost uses - as the blog post author's response sets out.

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

#86

Post by vorpalhex »

ondrej_s wrote: post #69
newsat13 wrote: 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.

Keybase is.. not ready for prime time. It's pretty janky, channel discovery is a pain as is spam, and it's still got that weird crypto half-baked nonsense.

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

#88

Post by kfrzcode »

newsat13 wrote: 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?

Be the change! https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server

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

#89

Post by mrmuagi »

e12e wrote: post #68
ergothus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Email has hefty overhead per message.

I don't think that poster was talking about protocol innards, although kudos for you for having that knowledge, but perhaps they were, but in terms of user experience, slack/group chat is very low cost in terms of requiring any sort of mental pause before sending the message, specifically as a cost for the message itself. So much so, that a type of usage of verbal diarrhea can occur, so as to caution oneself against such usage, a little bit of thought before sending messages is always advised.

Specifically, if I can echo the primary differentiation, all you need to initiate a chat communication is a name and a message, that simplicity works a lot for people. I've used both e-mail and Slack, and a combination of both is great in my opinion, but the comparison can seen by an example message in my workflows (I don't use Slack anymore though):

Slack: 1) Find user/group by name lookup 2) Hi X, QUESTION_TEXT. 3) When done conversation, write outro

E-mail 1) Find user/group by name lookup, if user is not encoded in e-mail alias, query relevant databases 2) Write subject 3) Write intro, message, and outro

From my experience the reply from Slack 2) vs. E-mail 3) is much faster in the former case.

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

#90

Post by _trampeltier »

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…

In our company we are the test team for MS TEAMS. Short but honest. MS TEAMS is a real mess. I have no idea why MS let this software going public like this. Does anybody think that's a good piece of software?
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