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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

#121

Post by it33 »

sjburt wrote: post #115

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 switch…

Thanks sjburt, Mattermost CEO here. We have 800+ upvotes that agree with you, here a link to the feature proposal forum post and open tickets on this: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...

Anyone interested in contributing to the work, we’d welcome your help

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

#122

Post by e12e »

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?

* made gtalk unusable.. (auto-correct on the other hand..)

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

#123

Post by Maxious »

kfrzcode wrote: post #88
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

Access control is intentionally missing from the open source "team" version:

> Team Edition is "virtual office" where a team works together as trusted colleagues. It means people can walk anywhere they want, and move the furniture if they choose.

> I need to ask this ticket be closed since it's not a bug

> You're of course more than welcome to fork as well.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320

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

#124

Post by bob1029 »

andybak wrote: post #48
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 lis…

I share some of your resentment for having to learn new things to engage in what is arguably a trivial activity at this point in time - sharing (formatted) text or other media with your teammates. This is probably a factor in why many of our users prefer "simpler" approaches... At least from their perspective. One would argue markdown is simpler and faster than using any MS Word-style interface if you are experienced in its syntax and rules.

Learning markdown is pretty easy for many developers, and for some it becomes 2nd nature when typing into things that support it on a regular basis: Git[Hub/Lab], Slack, Mattermost, WhatsApp (partial support), etc. The value-add as you put additional markdown-enabled platforms into your workflow is pretty substantial. I don't have to do a mental context switch every time I go between editing a GitHub issue comment and typing some code block to another developer in Mattermost.

You can create some really nice looking README.md files if you spend a little extra time with things like headings and quote/code blocks. I believe there are several options (one hosted in GitHub's API if you prefer GFM) for taking MD files and generating high-quality HTML or PDF output.

I'd conclude by saying that markdown documents are much easier to source control. Taking a diff of a docx or a pdf is going to get you nowhere. A diff of a markdown file might as well just be a diff of any arbitrary plain text document. The syntax itself has a very small footprint, so you are looking at mostly just plain text minus 5-10% overhead on the markdown.

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

#125

Post by ludamad »

teddyh wrote: post #103
rakoo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potentially controversial opinion: This isn't really open source. I know you were looking for this but I don't agree. Let's remind that Open Source fundamentally means _no expectations_. No expectations of support, no expectations of features, not even expectations of goodwill. Whenever a company complains that this or that open-source software doesn't work as expected and should do this, we all shout in chorus "th…

> Let's remind that Open Source fundamentally means _no expectations_. No. Open Source, as defined, is about what the end user is allowed to do with the code they have. That’s it. What you describe is common , but not inherent. There are plenty of exceptions, like if you get Red Hat, you’ll get to have plenty of expectations, and Red Hat is still Open Source . Please stop the ancient FUD about Open Source means havin…

Right, open source, like all software, has a variety of vectors of usability and suitability. Purposefully leaving out features weakens it along some vectors - especially the "I want to modify software I run in production" vector.

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

#126

Post by secfirstmd »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #58
secfirstmd wrote: post #44

I'm a big Mattermost fan but it really needs end to ends encryption. Also the Android mobile app is pretty weak.

Standard tls between server and client helps against any outside threat. The only threat from which e2ee helps better than tls comes from the server admin. Now, do you REALLY need end to end encryption to protect yourself from a person running your team chat server?

Well I mean Matrix/Riot.im has that function.

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

#127

Post by btown »

kfrzcode wrote: post #88
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

But would Mattermost accept a PR that cuts into the differentiation on "advanced access control" of their enterprise product? https://mattermost.com/pricing/

Open source is only as powerful as the community's willingness to maintain a fork.

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

#128

Post by dsm9000 »

tcbasche wrote: post #87
mikece wrote: post #4

I like that Mattermost is written in Go and can deploy on-prem with Docker. Those are two huge points for MM over Slack IMO.

Why does what language it's written in matter? I like Go too but I'm genuinely curious

I am guilty of favoriting both go and rust for production deployments for the simplicity (usually a single binary, not a million files of some framework’s and dependencies files). Also it’s my hope that the modern libraries and language safety features and smaller size might be helpful in efficiency and security.

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

#129

Post by moron4hire »

mderazon wrote: post #97

Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product. We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite But - The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results - Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent - App doesn't see any meaningful updates - The Android…

It's amazing just how bad Google's UIs are, across all their products. There are two different versions of "archived" in Gmail. Maps hides options for types of routes under a settings menu under a screen fold (rather than toggles when you ask for alternate routes). Basic Android features like "stop a process" moves location seemingly every year. I was so confused by GCP that I just went with Azure and got on with life.

I find Apple's interfaces confusing because I've been a Windows developer for 20 years, but at least they seem to stay consistent. Microsoft is in the middle of completely revamping their settings UI, but I agree with the forgot they are going on and they at least didn't delete the old UIs. WTF is wrong with Google?

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

#130

Post by Thorentis »

johnchristopher wrote: post #31

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

Wow this is crazy. So the free edition of Mattermost has even less access control functionality than Facebook Messenger? Disappointing.

It seems to me that "open source" is now being used as a marketing label for what used to be known as "shareware" or "trial". You get a trial version of the software (but where you can see the code) and the big essential features you need to pay for.

Open source no longer means what it used to mean.

And for the CEO to join in that ticket discussion and say "yeah it's a bug - there shouldn't be channel admins at all in the free version" basically confirms this.

Don't complain it's missing features! Make them yourself ... but we'll just steal them if they're better than the paid version because hey, open source!

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