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On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser activ
by mgbmtl 10y ago
On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser active users, to ~ 100 active and ~ 500 lesser active users. I agree that more folks should consider moving away from IRC.
The sign-up process for Mattermost is easy. It's intuitive, cross-platform, mobile-friendly, etc. While we geeks are used to IRC, onboarding people to IRC is no different than any other product: the smallest glitch, weird UI, confusing elements will make people drop off pretty quickly. I have always had to sit down with someone to show them how to connect to IRC. We would waste time at code sprints showing people how to connect.
With Mattermost, we have unlimited logs (so we can cross-ref/permalink conversations in the issue trackers), threaded conversations (great for when the channel is noizy), emoji reactions (friendlier atmosphere), etc.
However, I agree with the article: Slack is inappropriate for open source communities. Mattermost and Rocket Chat are good alternatives. Between my IRC habits and what I can do with Mattermost, I find Slack very frustrating (and I don't use it anymore). Then again, as much as I like IRC, it's not an alternative either.
- it33 10y agoThanks for the mention on Mattermost! For anyone who'd like to try an open source Slack-alternative, you can start in less than a minute with auto-deploy via Bitnami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s Goes to AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, all data under your control, Mattermost Team Edition runs under MIT license. Also, check out our new React Native mobile apps: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile
- frikk 10y agoWe migrated from IRC to Mattermost and haven't looked back. It integrates so well with our Gitlab/Jenkins flow, too. It's been great. The biggest benefits for us: - Easy to use web push endpoints w/ API keys (great for scripting with curl) - Integration with Gitlab / Jenkins - Chat Logs (see what happened while you were away) - Public listing of channels (no more "oh you have to join #whatever to see that") - Mobile Web App (I can't get the Android app to work with our self signed cert, but that's OK).
- it33 10y agoFantastic! Thanks for the mention! Yeah, scripting integrations with curl is super useful. For others, here's another article of replacing IRC with Mattermost in education: https://opensource.com/education/16/3/mattermost-open-source-chat https://opensource.com/education/16/3/mattermost-open-source...
- Arzh 10y agoWhy do you want a chat client to integrate with gitlab or jenkins?
- aiiane 10y agoOftentimes the 'sync' conversations are either triggered or resolved by commit/build events.
- Arzh 10y agoDo you mind expanding on this and showing a full flow? That sounds a little wonky to me but I could be missing something.
- frikk 10y agoOur flow is like this: 1) Person pushes to dev branch 2) Chat log shows the feature pushed 3) Chat log shows Jenkins received push and is downloading 4) Chat log shows whether tests were successful (yay) or not (boo). ^^ that's the basis. It helps keep everyone up to speed on what's going on, especially for testing. One more example: Notifications when merge requests are made / merged in the chat.
- wazanator 10y agoHow do you like mattermost compared to rocket.chat? My group switched from flowdock to rocket.chat to save money and we've definitely seen a dip in participation. Rocket.chat's mobile app constantly seems to have issues with remembering what server you were logged into between updates and the desktop version doesn't recognize when you're caught up with a channels messages leaving it marked unread unless you go out of your way to manually tell it. Plus I really miss threads...