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With free self-hosted open source alternatives like Rocket Chat and Mattermost entering the scene, along with easy internal installation from Sandstorm, does a

With free self-hosted open source alternatives like Rocket Chat and Mattermost entering the scene, along with easy internal installation from Sandstorm, does a new business really need Slack?

notatoad 11y ago
It does if there's a whole ecosystem of bots and services built on top of slack that don't run on the alternatives.
- studentrob 11y ago
  For sure! I wonder which services people love in Slack that aren't available in Rocket Chat. So far in this thread there aren't many details. Bots are mentioned, and that's available in Rocket Chat too via Hubot.
robzyb 11y ago
> does a new business really need Slack? How many man-hours am I going to spend fracking around Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Sandstorm? I think I'd much prefer just paying Slack to worry about that for my hypothetical new business with 10 employees. 6.67 * 10 * 12 = $800/annum. Peanuts. Especially compared to the value of my time or my employees time.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Less than 30 minutes for your tech team. 1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io https://install.sandstorm.io | bash) 2) Install Rocket Chat (one click) 3) Set up a domain. Done Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
  - nkozyra 11y ago
    This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.
    - kentonv 11y ago
      > It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Have you tried Sandstorm? It is in fact designed to be "set it and forget it" -- that's a major goal of the project. Everything auto-updates, you never have to edit config files, it can configure DNS and fetch/renew SSL certificates automatically, installing new apps takes one click, etc. (Disclosure: I'm the lead developer.)
      - deathanatos 11y ago
        The "How It works" wasn't bad. But nonetheless: does it distribute itself (and my data) to multiple VMs? If it needs a kernel patch, does it appropriately plan downtimes and/or shed load from that VM before applying the patch and rebooting the instance? Does it handle machine failure?
        kentonv 11y ago
        We actually have tools to do all of that -- high-availability / fault tolerance / load balancing, entirely transparent to users, admins, and apps -- which we use to run Sandstorm Oasis, our paid managed hosting service. We are working on productizing these tools to sell to "enterprise" customers. For individual users and small companies, single-machine Sandstorm is pretty reliable, but it's true we don't automate kernel updates yet (which will require scheduling reboots for off-hours). We'll add that eventually. (Sorry for all the vaporware.)
    - mnutt 11y ago
      Sandstorm's updates are closer to Chrome's than regular open source software. Stick to the 'release' channel can you can be sure that you're always up to date. And Sandstorm locks its apps down so tightly that they often don't suffer from the same security vulnerabilities the same apps do outside Sandstorm. That being said, to roll your own you'll need to run a box somewhere, select secure defaults, and keep on top of patching the box itself. It's not worth it unless you're really willing to spend the time to do it correctly.
      - 11y ago

With free self-hosted open source alternatives like Rocket Chat and Mattermost entering the scene, along with easy internal installation from Sandstorm, does a new business really need Slack?

notatoad 11y ago

It does if there's a whole ecosystem of bots and services built on top of slack that don't run on the alternatives.

studentrob 11y ago
For sure! I wonder which services people love in Slack that aren't available in Rocket Chat. So far in this thread there aren't many details. Bots are mentioned, and that's available in Rocket Chat too via Hubot.

robzyb 11y ago

> does a new business really need Slack? How many man-hours am I going to spend fracking around Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Sandstorm? I think I'd much prefer just paying Slack to worry about that for my hypothetical new business with 10 employees. 6.67 * 10 * 12 = $800/annum. Peanuts. Especially compared to the value of my time or my employees time.

studentrob 11y ago
Less than 30 minutes for your tech team. 1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io https://install.sandstorm.io | bash) 2) Install Rocket Chat (one click) 3) Set up a domain. Done Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
- nkozyra 11y ago
  This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.
  - kentonv 11y ago
    > It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Have you tried Sandstorm? It is in fact designed to be "set it and forget it" -- that's a major goal of the project. Everything auto-updates, you never have to edit config files, it can configure DNS and fetch/renew SSL certificates automatically, installing new apps takes one click, etc. (Disclosure: I'm the lead developer.)
    - deathanatos 11y ago
      The "How It works" wasn't bad. But nonetheless: does it distribute itself (and my data) to multiple VMs? If it needs a kernel patch, does it appropriately plan downtimes and/or shed load from that VM before applying the patch and rebooting the instance? Does it handle machine failure?
      - kentonv 11y ago
        We actually have tools to do all of that -- high-availability / fault tolerance / load balancing, entirely transparent to users, admins, and apps -- which we use to run Sandstorm Oasis, our paid managed hosting service. We are working on productizing these tools to sell to "enterprise" customers. For individual users and small companies, single-machine Sandstorm is pretty reliable, but it's true we don't automate kernel updates yet (which will require scheduling reboots for off-hours). We'll add that eventually. (Sorry for all the vaporware.)
  - mnutt 11y ago
    Sandstorm's updates are closer to Chrome's than regular open source software. Stick to the 'release' channel can you can be sure that you're always up to date. And Sandstorm locks its apps down so tightly that they often don't suffer from the same security vulnerabilities the same apps do outside Sandstorm. That being said, to roll your own you'll need to run a box somewhere, select secure defaults, and keep on top of patching the box itself. It's not worth it unless you're really willing to spend the time to do it correctly.
    - 11y ago