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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

#222
post #186

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…

Mattermost CEO here, Thanks for the feedback, replies on both issues posted: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 Please let us know what y'all think? The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018. >Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack Mattermost isn't intended to compete with Slack's free tie…

I can't really tell for the github issues you posted what was done about these two issues.

I don't really feel like reading all that just to figure it out.

Did you resolve both of the issues brought up by OP or not?

(Answering: "The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.", isn't the same as answering, "the free tier allows passwords of length >5 characters.")

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

#223

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…

[deleted]

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

#224
post #215

My Fortune 500 healthcare company successfully uses Mattermost because the lawyers aren't comfortable with us using slack. It's been great. Thank you @it33 and team. p.s. we haven't run into the issue 6320 (users archiving channels), for exactly the reasons @it33 described in the issue report. He didn't explain it well, but permissions is a complex rathole, un-archive is a simple workflow for admins and if there's co…

Thanks for wording it so much more concisely and clearly! Love your post, sharing it here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#...

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

#225

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…

They're doing it wrong. There are many successful, profitable companies making open source products with a subset of the features that their commercial offerings have. These guys are intentionally crippling the open source offering. It's practically a bait and switch.

The right way is to release an open source product that is full-featured and robust, and upsell things like support, managed hosting, and the kind of plugins and addons that primarily appeal to enterprise customers (although increasingly the latter are indistinguishable from advanced small users).

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

#226

One more differentiating factor for Mattermost is its extra special focus security. The product offers the industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities across all devices. Isn't Mattermost fundamentally the same thing, architecturally, as Slack? Slack has one of the industry's stronger security teams. I don't see the differentiator here.

I'm a big fan of Mattermost but industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities might be a tad exaggerated.

By way of comparison, I will indulge in a shameless plug for Webex Teams: our customers have the option of hosting their own key server, on-premise, under their control. We have no ways of seeing any content in messages: payload and title are encrypted and participants are IDs that are usually federated with their own identity provider.

Decryption happens locally in the desktop/mobile client, after obtaining the right keys. Yes that's more computationally expensive and carries some complexity. But it's a very different model than just building a single big vault of data. And it also works when users in 2 different companies talk to each other, both with their own key servers.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cloudCol...

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

#227
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattermost CEO here, Thanks for the feedback, replies on both issues posted: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 Please let us know what y'all think? The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018. >Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack Mattermost isn't intended to compete with Slack's free tie…

I can't really tell for the github issues you posted what was done about these two issues. I don't really feel like reading all that just to figure it out. Did you resolve both of the issues brought up by OP or not? (Answering: "The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.", isn't the same as answering, "the free tier allows passwords of length >5 characters.")

Sorry about that. Thanks for the feedback. It is very helpful. Trying again:

1) Enforcing password requirements for end users was put in free tier last year - Here's why, with a link on how to use it: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935#...

2) Non-admins are still able to archive channels they belong to but did not create - Here's why: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#...

3) I need to work on speaking more concisely, here is another version of #2 from an HN user who puts things more simply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824219

Does this help?

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

#228
post #208

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…

The open-source version also lack any data retention option, meaning that your only option is to let the database grow indefinitely; you can manually delete stuff from the db, but last time I've checked that was not recommended. Deploying Mattermost is not ideal, as the server requires write access to its JSON configuration file and will overwrite it from time to time, which makes using any configuration manager poin…

In 5.10 Mattermost added the ability to move the configuration to the database, which solves the issue of having a config.json file. This also has the advantage of versioning your configuration in the database which makes rolling back changes very easy.

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

#229
post #19

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

> 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…

Nearly every client I work with these days expires their email after N days, where N ranges from 90 days to a year. Even corporate email pretty much has little history any longer, and it won't be long before the chat systems also come under the same policies across most corporates.

I don't quite understand why history is such a big deal for US-based enterprise chat, when the consistent US trend has been to nerf internal communications history.

Not that I agree with this nerfing. It just causes people in my observations to inefficiently store and retrieve items of interest to them elsewhere, mostly into files.

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

#230
post #38

I like Mattermost. My only gripe with it is that it's a bit of a pain to upgrade. Would be nice if they were to automate the upgrade procedure.

Check out the Kubernetes operator, which handles zero-downtime upgrades as well as blue/green deployments and canary builds: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-operator
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