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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

#241

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…

Well, then there is even more open sourced alternative than Mattermost: https://github.com/tinode/chat

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

#242

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 have XMPP for 1 to 1 messaging, IRC for group messaging and SMTP for store and forward messaging. All are way easier to set up local instances of than setting up a PBX. The difference is that there was a whole lot of money to be made by installing and maintaining PBXes.There was no good way to monetize phone services by advertising or privacy violation. The equipment and trunk lines simply cost too much. Every PBX…

Funnily (or not) XMPP was designed to replace them all, at least functionally. Too bad there wasn't an XMPP champion pushing the development early on.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was terribly slow/heavy though. Although the Gmail hi isn't much faster either. I think outlook/office365 email has a much faster and better ui.

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

#244
post #182

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

Mattermost CEO here, Thanks for highlighting this. It's a ticket from two years ago and this thread is a good opportunity to share more of the context and intention of how we think about Team Edition vs Enterprise Edition. I've shared a reply on the ticket here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#... Also, I don't know if the ticket title is highly accurate--a non-admin can't delete any chann…

I think the concern here is a pre-emptive rage-quit of channels. A team member is aware they are about to be let go, and decide to archive every channel they are a part of on the way out.

What controls are in place to prevent this from happening in the Team Edition?

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

#245
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have XMPP for 1 to 1 messaging, IRC for group messaging and SMTP for store and forward messaging. All are way easier to set up local instances of than setting up a PBX. The difference is that there was a whole lot of money to be made by installing and maintaining PBXes.There was no good way to monetize phone services by advertising or privacy violation. The equipment and trunk lines simply cost too much. Every PBX…

Funnily (or not) XMPP was designed to replace them all, at least functionally. Too bad there wasn't an XMPP champion pushing the development early on.

Well, IRC sorta as it does group chats. But email? Is there an XEP for that? XMPP can probably gateway to/from email, but XMPP can gateway to pretty much everything in the known universe...

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

#246
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily (or not) XMPP was designed to replace them all, at least functionally. Too bad there wasn't an XMPP champion pushing the development early on.

Well, IRC sorta as it does group chats. But email? Is there an XEP for that? XMPP can probably gateway to/from email, but XMPP can gateway to pretty much everything in the known universe...

An Email is a message with a subject line and potentially attachments. XMPP has the former in the core, can do the latter with XEP-231 (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html). A message can have one or multiple recipients, just like an XMPP message.

Email is really a simple form of messaging, where you put some content and expect the chain to route it to your destination; pretty much any IM system can emulate it, and XMPP goes a little bit beyond in providing the bits that different an email message from an IM message.

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

#247
post #174

Used Mattermost for a year, and I can attest to it's shittiness. There is a bug during switching channels that pins your view to some random location weeks before the latest post. The result is that switching channel in Mattermost has a 60% chance of requiring you to spend the next 30 seconds scrolling the window to the bottommost-recent-message. Horrible.

Mattermost PM here, I agree that this is not a good experience, thank you for sharing @jetru.

There is development in progress to let you jump directly to new messages when you land on the oldest unread message in a channel. This lets you get directly to the latest message.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the same use case you have, but if you're open to testing the new development and share feedback, we'd love to hear!

Pull request with an open test server is available here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/4132#is...

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

#248
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattermost CEO here, Thanks for highlighting this. It's a ticket from two years ago and this thread is a good opportunity to share more of the context and intention of how we think about Team Edition vs Enterprise Edition. I've shared a reply on the ticket here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#... Also, I don't know if the ticket title is highly accurate--a non-admin can't delete any chann…

I think the concern here is a pre-emptive rage-quit of channels. A team member is aware they are about to be let go, and decide to archive every channel they are a part of on the way out. What controls are in place to prevent this from happening in the Team Edition?

Archiving a channel in Mattermost just sets a flag in the database. Once the bad actor is removed a simple query can restore the channels they archived. Something like: `UPDATE Channels SET DeleteAt = 0 WHERE DeleteAt > [some timestamp]`

There's also a CLI command to restore the channels. While this won't keep it from happening it should get things back to normal fairly quickly.

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