15 ms·

Mattermost 1.0 released – open-source Slack alternative

332 points by shuoli84 11y ago

pionar 11y ago
So, what does this offer over Slack, besides being open-source? I see no mention of any actual features, besides basic chat features.
- netcraft 11y ago
  open-source, self-hosting, non-english channels, better markdown support. No limits on searching and self-hosting I think are the biggest things.
netcraft 11y ago
I think Slack serves its stated purpose very well (smaller, business oriented teams), but many groups have started using it for larger communities, mostly because it has unlimited users for free. But it isn't made for that and there is no way that most of these groups would ever be able to pay for a premium subscription due to the per-user costs. 10K messages across all channels is surprisingly easy to hit, need the ability to ignore users, etc. I think this project has great potential to fill that niche if it is marketed properly. Slack is so close to working well in that area but really needs to pivot to be able to serve it well and make money doing it.
- g4k 11y ago
  Yes, recently Slack even told Reactiflux that they need to move to another service as more than a few thousand users can not be handled by the Slack infrastructure.
  - silentrob 11y ago
    That isn't true. My office slack has a few thousand users and it works just fine. I'm not saying it can scale to infinity, but it does handle a few thousand users without any issues.
    - detaro 11y ago
      I have no clue what the exact numbers are, but apparently it is an issue: http://www.reactiflux.com/ http://www.reactiflux.com/
jhildings 11y ago
Why not just use IRC ?
- 91bananas 11y ago
  Because this is better.
- alexandre_m 11y ago
  Why not use horses instead of cars? Note, I'm not especially praising for this product, but I am for slack vs irc.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Is IRC supposed to be the car or horse in this analogy? I'm convinced of the former.
    - 0942v8653 11y ago
      The main issue with IRC is that you have to stay connected all the time to recieve messages, and you have to leave your IRC client to see and search the logs (unless you have some intermediate IRC client server that runs all the time). It's just not as nice.
      - falcolas 11y ago
        > intermediate IRC client A bouncer? Usually pretty straightforward to install, and quite mature in features.
        steeef 11y ago
        Yet it's not something that IRC provides out of the box. I've got no issues running my own ZNC bouncer, but when you're choosing a product that an entire organization will use (including people who have no idea what "ZNC" means other than 3 letters), IRC is lacking a lot of features that get mentioned in every HN chat solution thread.
DannoHung 11y ago
Interesting that it will be a default feature of Gitlab. That's a move that seems like it may push Gitlab ahead of GitHub in some ways (well, to me at least).
jeffjose 11y ago
In my past job, I was desperately looking to get an open source Slack alternative. The ones I tested then (few months back) didnt hold up nicely against Slack. I'm happy to see that finally there's some good competition.
- oddvar 11y ago
  did you ever come across matrix.org? We are similar to mattermost in that we are open source and you can host your own server.
kentt 11y ago
I'm trying to decide if this is better than Zulip. They're both open source, backed by someone trusted, and I can run it on my own server.
- evook 11y ago
  Let's chat, Zulip, Kaiwa, Mattermost there are probably a hundred more. Depending on the Scale, I'd personally go with an own Kaiwa Fork, backed by an Erlang MongooseIM Backend and LDAP.
- web007 11y ago
  We tried Mattermost at work, and it was pretty terrible. Things like "show new messages" didn't work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a chat app. After that we tried RocketChat, which seems a lot closer to Slack in terms of features and appearance. From our perspective they were just too rough around the edges for functionality, with a lot of things almost-working-but-not-quite. The caveat to all of this is that we wanted something that JustWorks, so while we did put in some effort to fix configuration and even some bugs in the software, we didn't commit to them 100% so YMMV. We started up on Zulip when it came out a few weeks back, and it's been much better and more consistent. Streams and topics take a while to get used to, but they make it easier to have public conversations with some semblance of organization. If you don't like / can't afford Slack, or if you have privacy needs that make it a non-starter, I would recommend giving Zulip a try.
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    do you know if Zulip exposes an API ? We are currently using Slack as a chat dashboard for operations .. and we do some funky stuff like create channels,etc through the API. I wonder if Zulip allows that.
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      They have an API, not sure about channels specifically though. https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/endpoints/ https://zulip.com/api/endpoints/
artribou 11y ago
Does anyone know who the old provider was that locked in their data?
lorenzhs 11y ago
If what you really want is a pretty web-based way to access IRC, then you might want to check out Glowing Bear -- it connects to your WeeChat IRC client via websockets and works nicely on the Desktop and on mobile. It doesn't have a voice recorder, but it gives you the infinite possibilities of a mature IRC client. It's a project I've been contributing to for a while now and I still absolutely love using it. https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://latest.glowing-bear.org/ https://latest.glowing-bear.org/
- Arathorn 11y ago
  It also supports Matrix natively as well as IRC, which almost gives you best of both worlds :) http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/ http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
    Yep! It can do whatever WeeChat can do. Tor, who made the Matrix script for WeeChat, is also one of the core developers of Glowing Bear :)
rpedela 11y ago
Overall I like it because they closely follow Slack's UI. However I question the choice of fully supporting Markdown. A comment isn't supposed to be documentation. Supporting things like bold, italic makes sense for emphasis or making code easier to read. But headings? When would one ever want really large text in a comment?
- woah 11y ago
  Perhaps you can submit a pull request disabling the markdown features you don't like
- it33 11y ago
  Mattermost team here, We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense. Now we really love it and can't go back: http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adopts-markdown/ http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adop... Headings have a lot of uses for emphasizing text, and there's fun uses too like creating different sized emoticons: http://www.mattermost.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.png http://www.mattermost.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.p... ##### :sheep: #### :sheep: ### :sheep: ## :sheep: # :sheep:
  - JD557 11y ago
    What about text preceded by a # (eg. HTML colors, hash tags, numerals...)? Do you escape # if it's next character is not a whitespace?
    - it33 11y ago
      Correct, escape if # is not followed by whitespace. Mattermost markdown is based on GitLab Flavored Markdown: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/6-4-stable/doc/markdown/markdown.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/6-4-stable/doc/...
  - rpedela 11y ago
    > We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense. What made sense? Is there a use case that requires full Markdown support? If so, what is it?
ju-st 11y ago
Why do I have to go to slack.com to learn what this is? I clicked on this link, no explanation. I checked mattermost.org, no explanation. I went to slack.com, no explanation. Then I clicked on a "Product" link on top of the webpage. Finally some information what this actually is. Even open source projects could benefit from a little bit of marketing.
- e_proxus 11y ago
  Agree about the Mattermost page, but the first thing I saw on Slack.com was "A messaging app for teams"
- ironsides 11y ago
  This x100
- tarr11 11y ago
  It's marketed as an "open source Slack clone". I suspect that if you don't know what Slack is, you aren't really the target market (at least for this version)
  - baq 11y ago
    i beg to disagree. i'm in the market for notification, chat, etc. service for an internal application that doesn't have any cloud dependencies and we'd be most happy if it could stay this way. apparently this thing fits the bill at least in some capacity.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Did Apple market the iPhone as "a blackberry with a bigger screen"? No, and by not limiting themselves to an existing competitor's market, they kind of crushed them.
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  If you don't what Slack is you are not the target audience for this tool, and that's ok.
- 11y ago
SEJeff 11y ago
This is great. Also see: https://zulip.org https://zulip.org And the blog on why Dropbox decided to OSS it: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a...
- dj-wonk 11y ago
  > Every conversation in Zulip has a topic, so it’s easy to keep conversations straight. Threads! Hooray.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    Also my biggest feature request. I tweeted it at Slack and they seemed surprised actually. (I didn't get the vibe like they're shipping it anytime soon.)
mholt 11y ago
Congratulations, Mattermost team! Huge accomplishment :)
- it33 11y ago
  Thanks mholt!! We're working every day to make something people want,
pwenzel 11y ago
Can it send push notifications or other alerts to my phone?
pbreit 11y ago
There was a time when I thought something like this was a good idea. But after using Slack for about a week, there's no way I would give up all the benefits of a well-integrated centrally controlled service. All the clients work together perfectly. We have Slack channels with customers. It just all works much better than I can imagine any self-hosted, decentralized service would.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  How a self-hosted service prevents you from having channels with customers or whatever else Slack offers? The only upside of third-party SaaS is that you don't have to bother yourself to set things up and maintain them. Otherwise, I really don't see any limits that Slack can do but a self-hosted system can't.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    I'm involved in a few communities that have slack setups. One of the other nice things that Slack offers is that I only need to have one login to all of them. That's something that none of the self-hosted systems can do right now.
    - drdaeman 11y ago
      Not sure I understand. What prevents you from using a same identity to log in to multiple self-hosted instances? I think it's the same. As far as I get it - haven't used Slack much - with Slack you either have to use different email address to create account for each team (subdomain), or you have to be explicitly invited. Or maybe I got a wrong idea. Either way, while I'm not sure all self-hosted alternatives have options to consume external identities (be it third-party leased ones like Google account or self-originating ones), at least some have those. Which means the authentication is fairly transparent.
      - Sanddancer 11y ago
        I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a bit is an actual benefit.
jgrowl 11y ago
Props for open-sourcing, but I'm putting my money on http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
- calebm 11y ago
  Matrix does look awesome.
  - fabrice_d 11y ago
    There's also "friends": http://moose-team.github.io/friends/ http://moose-team.github.io/friends/
- colordrops 11y ago
  So, open source version of the original Skype architecture but using web standards?
lucaspottersky 11y ago
Feature idea: a canvas where people could draw instead of typing a text.
cdnsteve 11y ago
It's good to have options. The takeaway I'm getting from this story, and Mattermost, is: 1. Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them. 2. Test that this works before putting years of data into a service. There's nothing wrong with SaaS services, they just mean users must do their due diligence in any business partnership. I can't see how a game company can put their resources into delivering this as an open source project with no future plans for monetization. Frankly, without monetization, open source projects generally wither up and disappear. Then you're no further ahead. http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-sou...
- cvburgess 11y ago
  I'm really hoping they charge for a hosted option? It would make sense.
- javajosh 11y ago
  >Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them You know, my thinking on this has really changed. Consider how many relatively successful life-forms cannot exist without a very specific other species of life. It is also a good strategy to be flexible with your dependencies - but I think nature proves it's not required to survive and thrive. Taking the long view, it's interesting to consider the possibility (which I'm sure has already happened multiple times in tech and elsewhere) when a company has absorbed it's dependency, and also when a dependency absorbs what was, at first, it's host, and successfully so. The one thing that throws a monkey wrench into all of this is centralized human control, and a single mind is notoriously ephemeral, changing, and emotional. The CEO of your dependency might wake up one day from a terrible dream of humiliation and failure, and decide that he can't and won't just exist to serve his wretched, ungrateful customers in some insignificant and petty way, and will instead take a completely different path! (This risk is why greedy sociopaths make excellent corporate leaders: their drives are stable, predictable and unemotional, which makes them both competent and, ironically, safe.)
  - dfc 11y ago
giovannibonetti 11y ago
Since we are talking about open source software, maybe the guys that own the Mattermost account on Github could create a placeholder repo for Android (I wonder if this idea would work for iPhone, too) and accept Pull Requests until there is at least a beta native app.
yannis 11y ago
Besides being an excellent application, this is a valuable resource for anyone studying Golang.
- it33 11y ago
  Pull requests from Golang community highly appreciated, you can view our process and tickets accepting pull requests at: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/developer/Code-Contribution-Guidelines.md https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/devel...
ywecur 11y ago
Would be happy to move over to an open source alternative, but at the moment they don't seem to support mobile apps. It would be very difficult for us to move because of this, we talk a lot on the move.
finnn 11y ago
http://getkaiwa.com/ http://getkaiwa.com/ is another Slack alternative that uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far the only open source Slack clone I've seen that uses an existing standard for the backend
- rakoo 11y ago
  I'd rather have it the other way around: start from a solution that works (like Mattermost) and progressively plug XMPP into it. Mattermost and its friends have the huge advantage of having everything built-in and well working together, and if you take a good look at it XMPP should be more like a "compatibility protocol" on top of a working solution.
  - it33 11y ago
    Mattermost v1.1 (ships Oct 16) has incoming webhooks support with samples (www.mattermost.org/webhooks/), and we're planning outgoing webhooks v1.2 (Nov 16), which provides the ground work for XMPP Community has asked this for a while, we want to build an effective, well documented API to let the community create what they want: http://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/9495150-add-xmpp-support http://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugges...
- genericacct 11y ago
  https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat is open source and supports XMPP as well. Tried it, it's very slick.
- joeyspn 11y ago
  https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ built with Meteor and with WebRTC videocalls, is another great open source alternative... The list of current and upcoming features is quite impressive: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#features https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#features
- yourapostasy 11y ago
  There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these developers? [1] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber [2] http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/ http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 [4] https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302 For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve around project governance. [6] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP just fine. To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle with it "raw" in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain, they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol/library that exposes only that subset to them. It's almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.
fsiefken 11y ago
If it supports SSL XMPP it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of companies.
djmashko2 11y ago
I wonder how this compares to Rocket.Chat, another open-source alternative: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
api 11y ago
There are many OSS alternatives to Slack. Some are clones and some are different approaches and many of them are quite good. The thing these and all other similar efforts miss is the importance of network effects. Everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack. The real problem that needs to be tackled is one layer down: providing an open, distributed alternative for authentication, identity management, and data interchange that is secure and robust enough to provide a backplane for things like this and that is easy enough for anyone to use that it can be pushed out to the mass market. I can't stress the last point enough. It must be stupid simple easy to use or it will fail. It also must offer a good and simple developer experience (DX) or it will fail. DX is part of UX. Things like XMPP are nightmares for devs and sysadmins and fail badly here. This is a huge missing piece of the web.
e12e 11y ago
This looks very nice. Is there any plans for an API/client protocol? Web client is all well and good, but I'd want to have a solid console client, as well as some command line tools (eg: "echo "Some message" | xmpp user@host -- where the equivalent for Mattermost would allow to set the topic, or message a group via a bot etc.)?
- it33 11y ago
  Thanks e12e! We're working on shipping a high quality set of APIs. We're doing these in parts so we can design and document them well. Mattermost v1.1 ships on October 16 and offers incoming webhooks as a start: http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/ http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/ You'll find a link there to an open source sample app for customizing how you want webhook events from GitLab to appear. Mattermost incoming webhook support ships with GitLab 8.1 on October 22. For Mattermost v1.2 (November 16), we're working on outgoing webhooks, which could offer the ability to fire off console commands.
copsarebastards 11y ago
Just what we need, another solution to a problem that was solved two decades ago!
mugsie 11y ago
Well.... this is depressing - Mattermost server is made available under two separate licensing options: - Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or - Commercial licenses available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com "To simplify licensing, we’ve responded to community feedback and the compiled version of Mattermost v1.0 is now under the MIT open source license" (Emphasis mine) Why just the compiled version?
- mugsie 11y ago
  They also seem to use a hosted JIRA, but restrict some of the tickets from being viewed, and you need an account to file Jira's. There is also no mention of it in the "getting involved" section, just a link to github issues This is not how you do open source.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    > This is not how you do open source. Sure, maybe they should have never released this useful software at all. /S Mattermost started, and is still developed AFAIK, as an internal app from a for-profit company, that they've generalized and started releasing to the community.[1] Considering that they only just hit 1.0, maybe your tone is a bit harsh compared to their ever-so-slight mis-steps. Let's be constructive. 1 http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-sou...
- detaro 11y ago
  Why is that depressing? I guess the compiled version as MIT is to make it easier for people to deploy in enterprises that might have issues with AGPL, given that the consequences of MIT are easier to evaluate.
bachmeier 11y ago
Doesn't this have some heavy hardware requirements? Three machines with at least 2 GB of RAM? Is that really necessary if I'm going to chat with five people?
ChicagoDave 11y ago
I've spent a couple of hours trying to get Docker running on my linode Ubuntu server to no avail. A non-docker implementation would be nice.
- dopamean 11y ago
  I consider myself to be a person of reasonable competence and I find Docker to be confounding.
  - ChicagoDave 11y ago
    I have 30 years in IT, my friend who is a sysadmin also tried to get Docker running on my server. He gave up too.
    - cpitman 11y ago
      Maybe give CentOS 7 a try? It's literally install the rpm, start the docker service, then run whatever container you want to run.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Ubuntu might be the problem there I'm guessing. On CentOS 7 or Fedora 22/23 it takes less than 15 seconds to install to a complete, working state. Then the command line tools are very basic to work with.
BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
The blog post is dated October 2nd; Is HN just learning of this announcement late, or is their blog displaying the draft date rather than the publication date?

332 points by shuoli84 11y ago

So, what does this offer over Slack, besides being open-source? I see no mention of any actual features, besides basic chat features.

netcraft 11y ago
open-source, self-hosting, non-english channels, better markdown support. No limits on searching and self-hosting I think are the biggest things.

netcraft 11y ago

I think Slack serves its stated purpose very well (smaller, business oriented teams), but many groups have started using it for larger communities, mostly because it has unlimited users for free. But it isn't made for that and there is no way that most of these groups would ever be able to pay for a premium subscription due to the per-user costs. 10K messages across all channels is surprisingly easy to hit, need the ability to ignore users, etc. I think this project has great potential to fill that niche if it is marketed properly. Slack is so close to working well in that area but really needs to pivot to be able to serve it well and make money doing it.

g4k 11y ago
Yes, recently Slack even told Reactiflux that they need to move to another service as more than a few thousand users can not be handled by the Slack infrastructure.
- silentrob 11y ago
  That isn't true. My office slack has a few thousand users and it works just fine. I'm not saying it can scale to infinity, but it does handle a few thousand users without any issues.
  - detaro 11y ago
    I have no clue what the exact numbers are, but apparently it is an issue: http://www.reactiflux.com/ http://www.reactiflux.com/

jhildings 11y ago

Why not just use IRC ?

91bananas 11y ago
Because this is better.
alexandre_m 11y ago
Why not use horses instead of cars? Note, I'm not especially praising for this product, but I am for slack vs irc.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Is IRC supposed to be the car or horse in this analogy? I'm convinced of the former.
  - 0942v8653 11y ago
    The main issue with IRC is that you have to stay connected all the time to recieve messages, and you have to leave your IRC client to see and search the logs (unless you have some intermediate IRC client server that runs all the time). It's just not as nice.
    - falcolas 11y ago
      > intermediate IRC client A bouncer? Usually pretty straightforward to install, and quite mature in features.
      - steeef 11y ago
        Yet it's not something that IRC provides out of the box. I've got no issues running my own ZNC bouncer, but when you're choosing a product that an entire organization will use (including people who have no idea what "ZNC" means other than 3 letters), IRC is lacking a lot of features that get mentioned in every HN chat solution thread.

DannoHung 11y ago

Interesting that it will be a default feature of Gitlab. That's a move that seems like it may push Gitlab ahead of GitHub in some ways (well, to me at least).

jeffjose 11y ago

In my past job, I was desperately looking to get an open source Slack alternative. The ones I tested then (few months back) didnt hold up nicely against Slack. I'm happy to see that finally there's some good competition.

oddvar 11y ago
did you ever come across matrix.org? We are similar to mattermost in that we are open source and you can host your own server.

kentt 11y ago

I'm trying to decide if this is better than Zulip. They're both open source, backed by someone trusted, and I can run it on my own server.

evook 11y ago
Let's chat, Zulip, Kaiwa, Mattermost there are probably a hundred more. Depending on the Scale, I'd personally go with an own Kaiwa Fork, backed by an Erlang MongooseIM Backend and LDAP.
web007 11y ago
We tried Mattermost at work, and it was pretty terrible. Things like "show new messages" didn't work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a chat app. After that we tried RocketChat, which seems a lot closer to Slack in terms of features and appearance. From our perspective they were just too rough around the edges for functionality, with a lot of things almost-working-but-not-quite. The caveat to all of this is that we wanted something that JustWorks, so while we did put in some effort to fix configuration and even some bugs in the software, we didn't commit to them 100% so YMMV. We started up on Zulip when it came out a few weeks back, and it's been much better and more consistent. Streams and topics take a while to get used to, but they make it easier to have public conversations with some semblance of organization. If you don't like / can't afford Slack, or if you have privacy needs that make it a non-starter, I would recommend giving Zulip a try.
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  do you know if Zulip exposes an API ? We are currently using Slack as a chat dashboard for operations .. and we do some funky stuff like create channels,etc through the API. I wonder if Zulip allows that.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    They have an API, not sure about channels specifically though. https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/endpoints/ https://zulip.com/api/endpoints/

artribou 11y ago

Does anyone know who the old provider was that locked in their data?

lorenzhs 11y ago

If what you really want is a pretty web-based way to access IRC, then you might want to check out Glowing Bear -- it connects to your WeeChat IRC client via websockets and works nicely on the Desktop and on mobile. It doesn't have a voice recorder, but it gives you the infinite possibilities of a mature IRC client. It's a project I've been contributing to for a while now and I still absolutely love using it. https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://latest.glowing-bear.org/ https://latest.glowing-bear.org/

Arathorn 11y ago
It also supports Matrix natively as well as IRC, which almost gives you best of both worlds :) http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/ http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/
- lorenzhs 11y ago
  Yep! It can do whatever WeeChat can do. Tor, who made the Matrix script for WeeChat, is also one of the core developers of Glowing Bear :)

rpedela 11y ago

Overall I like it because they closely follow Slack's UI. However I question the choice of fully supporting Markdown. A comment isn't supposed to be documentation. Supporting things like bold, italic makes sense for emphasis or making code easier to read. But headings? When would one ever want really large text in a comment?

woah 11y ago
Perhaps you can submit a pull request disabling the markdown features you don't like
it33 11y ago
Mattermost team here, We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense. Now we really love it and can't go back: http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adopts-markdown/ http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adop... Headings have a lot of uses for emphasizing text, and there's fun uses too like creating different sized emoticons: http://www.mattermost.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.png http://www.mattermost.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.p... ##### :sheep: #### :sheep: ### :sheep: ## :sheep: # :sheep:
- JD557 11y ago
  What about text preceded by a # (eg. HTML colors, hash tags, numerals...)? Do you escape # if it's next character is not a whitespace?
  - it33 11y ago
    Correct, escape if # is not followed by whitespace. Mattermost markdown is based on GitLab Flavored Markdown: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/6-4-stable/doc/markdown/markdown.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/6-4-stable/doc/...
- rpedela 11y ago
  > We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense. What made sense? Is there a use case that requires full Markdown support? If so, what is it?

ju-st 11y ago

Why do I have to go to slack.com to learn what this is? I clicked on this link, no explanation. I checked mattermost.org, no explanation. I went to slack.com, no explanation. Then I clicked on a "Product" link on top of the webpage. Finally some information what this actually is. Even open source projects could benefit from a little bit of marketing.

e_proxus 11y ago
Agree about the Mattermost page, but the first thing I saw on Slack.com was "A messaging app for teams"
ironsides 11y ago
This x100
tarr11 11y ago
It's marketed as an "open source Slack clone". I suspect that if you don't know what Slack is, you aren't really the target market (at least for this version)
- baq 11y ago
  i beg to disagree. i'm in the market for notification, chat, etc. service for an internal application that doesn't have any cloud dependencies and we'd be most happy if it could stay this way. apparently this thing fits the bill at least in some capacity.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Did Apple market the iPhone as "a blackberry with a bigger screen"? No, and by not limiting themselves to an existing competitor's market, they kind of crushed them.
sergiotapia 11y ago
If you don't what Slack is you are not the target audience for this tool, and that's ok.
11y ago

SEJeff 11y ago

This is great. Also see: https://zulip.org https://zulip.org And the blog on why Dropbox decided to OSS it: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a...

dj-wonk 11y ago
> Every conversation in Zulip has a topic, so it’s easy to keep conversations straight. Threads! Hooray.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  Also my biggest feature request. I tweeted it at Slack and they seemed surprised actually. (I didn't get the vibe like they're shipping it anytime soon.)

mholt 11y ago

Congratulations, Mattermost team! Huge accomplishment :)

it33 11y ago
Thanks mholt!! We're working every day to make something people want,

pwenzel 11y ago

Can it send push notifications or other alerts to my phone?

pbreit 11y ago

There was a time when I thought something like this was a good idea. But after using Slack for about a week, there's no way I would give up all the benefits of a well-integrated centrally controlled service. All the clients work together perfectly. We have Slack channels with customers. It just all works much better than I can imagine any self-hosted, decentralized service would.

drdaeman 11y ago
How a self-hosted service prevents you from having channels with customers or whatever else Slack offers? The only upside of third-party SaaS is that you don't have to bother yourself to set things up and maintain them. Otherwise, I really don't see any limits that Slack can do but a self-hosted system can't.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  I'm involved in a few communities that have slack setups. One of the other nice things that Slack offers is that I only need to have one login to all of them. That's something that none of the self-hosted systems can do right now.
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    Not sure I understand. What prevents you from using a same identity to log in to multiple self-hosted instances? I think it's the same. As far as I get it - haven't used Slack much - with Slack you either have to use different email address to create account for each team (subdomain), or you have to be explicitly invited. Or maybe I got a wrong idea. Either way, while I'm not sure all self-hosted alternatives have options to consume external identities (be it third-party leased ones like Google account or self-originating ones), at least some have those. Which means the authentication is fairly transparent.
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a bit is an actual benefit.

jgrowl 11y ago

Props for open-sourcing, but I'm putting my money on http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/

calebm 11y ago
Matrix does look awesome.
- fabrice_d 11y ago
  There's also "friends": http://moose-team.github.io/friends/ http://moose-team.github.io/friends/
colordrops 11y ago
So, open source version of the original Skype architecture but using web standards?

lucaspottersky 11y ago

Feature idea: a canvas where people could draw instead of typing a text.

cdnsteve 11y ago

It's good to have options. The takeaway I'm getting from this story, and Mattermost, is: 1. Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them. 2. Test that this works before putting years of data into a service. There's nothing wrong with SaaS services, they just mean users must do their due diligence in any business partnership. I can't see how a game company can put their resources into delivering this as an open source project with no future plans for monetization. Frankly, without monetization, open source projects generally wither up and disappear. Then you're no further ahead. http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-sou...

cvburgess 11y ago
I'm really hoping they charge for a hosted option? It would make sense.
javajosh 11y ago
>Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them You know, my thinking on this has really changed. Consider how many relatively successful life-forms cannot exist without a very specific other species of life. It is also a good strategy to be flexible with your dependencies - but I think nature proves it's not required to survive and thrive. Taking the long view, it's interesting to consider the possibility (which I'm sure has already happened multiple times in tech and elsewhere) when a company has absorbed it's dependency, and also when a dependency absorbs what was, at first, it's host, and successfully so. The one thing that throws a monkey wrench into all of this is centralized human control, and a single mind is notoriously ephemeral, changing, and emotional. The CEO of your dependency might wake up one day from a terrible dream of humiliation and failure, and decide that he can't and won't just exist to serve his wretched, ungrateful customers in some insignificant and petty way, and will instead take a completely different path! (This risk is why greedy sociopaths make excellent corporate leaders: their drives are stable, predictable and unemotional, which makes them both competent and, ironically, safe.)
- dfc 11y ago

giovannibonetti 11y ago

Since we are talking about open source software, maybe the guys that own the Mattermost account on Github could create a placeholder repo for Android (I wonder if this idea would work for iPhone, too) and accept Pull Requests until there is at least a beta native app.

yannis 11y ago

Besides being an excellent application, this is a valuable resource for anyone studying Golang.

it33 11y ago
Pull requests from Golang community highly appreciated, you can view our process and tickets accepting pull requests at: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/developer/Code-Contribution-Guidelines.md https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/devel...

ywecur 11y ago

Would be happy to move over to an open source alternative, but at the moment they don't seem to support mobile apps. It would be very difficult for us to move because of this, we talk a lot on the move.

finnn 11y ago

http://getkaiwa.com/ http://getkaiwa.com/ is another Slack alternative that uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far the only open source Slack clone I've seen that uses an existing standard for the backend

rakoo 11y ago
I'd rather have it the other way around: start from a solution that works (like Mattermost) and progressively plug XMPP into it. Mattermost and its friends have the huge advantage of having everything built-in and well working together, and if you take a good look at it XMPP should be more like a "compatibility protocol" on top of a working solution.
- it33 11y ago
  Mattermost v1.1 (ships Oct 16) has incoming webhooks support with samples (www.mattermost.org/webhooks/), and we're planning outgoing webhooks v1.2 (Nov 16), which provides the ground work for XMPP Community has asked this for a while, we want to build an effective, well documented API to let the community create what they want: http://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/9495150-add-xmpp-support http://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugges...
genericacct 11y ago
https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat is open source and supports XMPP as well. Tried it, it's very slick.
joeyspn 11y ago
https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ built with Meteor and with WebRTC videocalls, is another great open source alternative... The list of current and upcoming features is quite impressive: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#features https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#features
yourapostasy 11y ago
There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these developers? [1] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber [2] http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/ http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 [4] https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302 For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve around project governance. [6] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP just fine. To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle with it "raw" in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain, they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol/library that exposes only that subset to them. It's almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.

fsiefken 11y ago

If it supports SSL XMPP it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of companies.

djmashko2 11y ago

I wonder how this compares to Rocket.Chat, another open-source alternative: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/

api 11y ago

There are many OSS alternatives to Slack. Some are clones and some are different approaches and many of them are quite good. The thing these and all other similar efforts miss is the importance of network effects. Everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack. The real problem that needs to be tackled is one layer down: providing an open, distributed alternative for authentication, identity management, and data interchange that is secure and robust enough to provide a backplane for things like this and that is easy enough for anyone to use that it can be pushed out to the mass market. I can't stress the last point enough. It must be stupid simple easy to use or it will fail. It also must offer a good and simple developer experience (DX) or it will fail. DX is part of UX. Things like XMPP are nightmares for devs and sysadmins and fail badly here. This is a huge missing piece of the web.

e12e 11y ago

This looks very nice. Is there any plans for an API/client protocol? Web client is all well and good, but I'd want to have a solid console client, as well as some command line tools (eg: "echo "Some message" | xmpp user@host -- where the equivalent for Mattermost would allow to set the topic, or message a group via a bot etc.)?

it33 11y ago
Thanks e12e! We're working on shipping a high quality set of APIs. We're doing these in parts so we can design and document them well. Mattermost v1.1 ships on October 16 and offers incoming webhooks as a start: http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/ http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/ You'll find a link there to an open source sample app for customizing how you want webhook events from GitLab to appear. Mattermost incoming webhook support ships with GitLab 8.1 on October 22. For Mattermost v1.2 (November 16), we're working on outgoing webhooks, which could offer the ability to fire off console commands.

copsarebastards 11y ago

Just what we need, another solution to a problem that was solved two decades ago!

mugsie 11y ago

Well.... this is depressing - Mattermost server is made available under two separate licensing options: - Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or - Commercial licenses available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com "To simplify licensing, we’ve responded to community feedback and the compiled version of Mattermost v1.0 is now under the MIT open source license" (Emphasis mine) Why just the compiled version?

mugsie 11y ago
They also seem to use a hosted JIRA, but restrict some of the tickets from being viewed, and you need an account to file Jira's. There is also no mention of it in the "getting involved" section, just a link to github issues This is not how you do open source.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  > This is not how you do open source. Sure, maybe they should have never released this useful software at all. /S Mattermost started, and is still developed AFAIK, as an internal app from a for-profit company, that they've generalized and started releasing to the community.[1] Considering that they only just hit 1.0, maybe your tone is a bit harsh compared to their ever-so-slight mis-steps. Let's be constructive. 1 http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-sou...
detaro 11y ago
Why is that depressing? I guess the compiled version as MIT is to make it easier for people to deploy in enterprises that might have issues with AGPL, given that the consequences of MIT are easier to evaluate.

bachmeier 11y ago

Doesn't this have some heavy hardware requirements? Three machines with at least 2 GB of RAM? Is that really necessary if I'm going to chat with five people?

ChicagoDave 11y ago

I've spent a couple of hours trying to get Docker running on my linode Ubuntu server to no avail. A non-docker implementation would be nice.

dopamean 11y ago
I consider myself to be a person of reasonable competence and I find Docker to be confounding.
- ChicagoDave 11y ago
  I have 30 years in IT, my friend who is a sysadmin also tried to get Docker running on my server. He gave up too.
  - cpitman 11y ago
    Maybe give CentOS 7 a try? It's literally install the rpm, start the docker service, then run whatever container you want to run.
mrmondo 11y ago
Ubuntu might be the problem there I'm guessing. On CentOS 7 or Fedora 22/23 it takes less than 15 seconds to install to a complete, working state. Then the command line tools are very basic to work with.

BHSPitMonkey 11y ago

The blog post is dated October 2nd; Is HN just learning of this announcement late, or is their blog displaying the draft date rather than the publication date?