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Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

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141–150 of 248 posts

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

#141
I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff.

While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could maybe even reclaim some of my RAM and get to choose a client to my preference (which is not an Electron app).

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

#142

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 lif…

RIP Inbox. Still a drastically better UI for a lot of users than Gmail is.

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

#143

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positivel…

In my experience, the competition is pidgin slash outlook communicator slash whatever brain dead enterprise messaging app. Not slack (or hipchat or...). Mattermost has seen a lot of adoption atthe Big Dumb Corps I’ve seen.

That’s my take on the market at least. I’d buy stock in it if I could.

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

#144

I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could…

The only reason I haven't advocated replacing Slack with IRC is it lacks a sensible way of keeping history. Everyone either has to keep their client running and connected all the time (usually this is only feasible with tmux/screen on a server), rely on bouncer hacks, or something like IRCCloud which maintains the connection for you but is proprietary and not self-hostable.

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

#145

I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could…

>I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff.

I've heard this so many times I'm surprised nobody has done it yet.

You'd need a client-proxy, or server extension to detect idle desktop clients so you can route messages to a mobile device, for maximum "life work balance."

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do any integrations for voice chat?

Hi, Mattermost PM here. We also have other voice, video and screenshare integrations, including self-hosted on-prem and private cloud options. Zoom, Webex, BigBlueButton, WebRTC and more: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/video-and-audio-calli...

Cool, thank you both. I think WebRTC or Jitsi are closest to what I would be looking for, as I want to keep it open source, but I appreciate the Zoom and other integrations for how they could be useful to business.

You guys might consider Mumble/Murmur integration, I think it could be a great addition, as it was my favorite voice app before Discord took over everything (still is).

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

#147
post #144

I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could…

The only reason I haven't advocated replacing Slack with IRC is it lacks a sensible way of keeping history. Everyone either has to keep their client running and connected all the time (usually this is only feasible with tmux/screen on a server), rely on bouncer hacks, or something like IRCCloud which maintains the connection for you but is proprietary and not self-hostable.

This is the big thing that IRC would need to have to make it on parity with Slack. A bit more involved than a trivial change.

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

#148

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’s entirely broken for any open source community, which is pretty telling.

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

#149
post #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.

Paying $15/month for a managed database is not self-hosting.

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

#150

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positivel…

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