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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

#111

Post by e12e »

ergothus wrote: post #100
e12e wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I didn't mean technical overhead, I meant presentational overhead. Email was fine, nay, great, for people to have extended group discussions in, so long as everyone was willing to follow some rules. Then Outlook plus the Eternal September came along and now everyone is reinventing quoting repeatedly (and poorly). Branching is a whole thing (or mostly, not a thing when it needs to be a thing). And we don't even need t…

Right, real-world email certainly has a lot of problems - mostly between keyboard and screen - and another large portion in boardrooms.

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

#112

Post by viraptor »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #98
ryanisnan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control Until one day, when you have some sort of incident, and it will have become very worth your while to "deal with" access control.

So, at your workplace, do you put unpickable locks on everyone's individual office door and enforce a policy that all doors are locked when not occupied (or heck even when occupied), so you won't have to "deal with" some insane coworker trashing someone elses office? How about tracking of who is in the bathroom when, with camera monitoring, so you can deal with it in case someone smears their poop on the walls?

Your employees may not be the problem. But their accounts with brute-forced passwords or shared credentials will be a problem once a 3rd party finds out.

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

#113

Post by e12e »

mrmuagi wrote: post #89
e12e wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting points. I suspect this is why chat is such a crap, low-throughput form communication; it's trivial for the sender to ship of a half-assed message - and very hard for the receiver to handle low-hundred conversations in a work-day - precisely because few(er) senders take the time to write a short, but dense message - and expect a reply-response dialogue "to quickly sort things out".

Which is much harder to both do in parallell and concurrently when busy with more than one snowflake problem at a time.

I'm sometimes shocked at how slowly things get done now, compared to when I worked a support desk in the early 2000s. But mostly I'm just a little sad at the overhead generated by chat.

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

#114

Post by londons_explore »

duskwuff wrote: post #36
johnchristopher wrote: post #31

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

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 you'll find all you need to do is compile with `BUILD_TYPE_NAME=enterprise make`, and suddenly all features appear. Whats peoples moral position on opensourcing the features but not including them in pre-built images unless you pay?

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

#115

Post by sjburt »

The biggest problem with Mattermost is that the mobile client cannot connect to multiple teams. You can add the beta client and connect to a second team, but more than two teams is impossible. This may be a function of living in the Bay Area but I'm on 4 or 5 different Slack groups for various communities.

All but my employer would be in great shape to switch to Mattermost but it's just not possible. Some have switched to Discourse but it's not great for real-time communication and people have a hard time with the UI.

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

#116

Post by type0 »

syvanen wrote: post #77
type0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more like a feature-limited demo. demoware

Shareware is making a comeback?

It's worse than that, expectation are different and actually doing disservice to the whole open source ethos. I recently heard a couple of regular users talking and equating Free Software//Open Source with Freeware, I didn't bother correcting them because from their perspective the difference is meaningless. Only us geeks care enough, but not enough to go and fork it.

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

#117

Post by fractalf »

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)

The best comment was the guy who said he fixed all these issues by installing matrix/riot :)

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

#118

Post by PeterisP »

davidw wrote: post #53
sonthonax wrote: post #42

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.

As soon as you update the protocol in any way, then it becomes an incompatible new not-IRC protocol. And if whatever you're building is not going to be compatible with IRC, then what's the point in starting with IRC? You might as well make a protocol from scratch like Mattermost or Slack has done.
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