Relay is a Slack alternative: https://www.relay-chat.com https://www.relay-chat.com So far, a Relay organization is a hosted Mattermost instance. Slack isn't e

Relay is a Slack alternative: https://www.relay-chat.com https://www.relay-chat.com So far, a Relay organization is a hosted Mattermost instance. Slack isn't exactly revolutionary software and it seems silly that persistent IRC (that's all Slack is) should cost so much money or run on a proprietary, users-as-inventory, data-gobbling platform. 1. Why does Relay exist? We built Relay for precisely this reason. Mattermost is pretty cool but we (nilenso.com) are not a military contractor or a bank. We didn't need Mattermost hidden deep in our datacenter; we just wanted hosted Mattermost so we could stop handing over every byte of our internal data to Slack, Inc. If Relay existed a year ago, we would have paid for it. So we built it (for) ourselves. 2. What's the plan, Stan? As long as we can, we want to stay in sync with the Mattermost mainline. All our code is open source (https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-backend https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-backend and https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-ops https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-ops so far) but we'd like it if our users could move to their own self-hosted Mattermost instance as easily as a self-hosted Relay instance. We have some pretty specific near-term plans: First, Integrations are a pain with Mattermost and we'll be releasing a server to make that a one-click operation (like it is on Slack) soon. Second, a fully-automated (one-click) Matterbridge server so you can migrate from Slack slowly or keep or IRC users happy. But beyond that? We're not sure. There are some UI/UX bugs that annoy us (especially on the Mattermost/Relay mobile clients). Some of the issues Abe mentions are low-hanging usability fruit, but from a lot of the replies on this thread, it sounds like not everyone feels the pain. It's not immediately obvious to use what we should prioritize; we don't have an issue people at nilenso sending us photos of their cats, for example. We're probably far from the norm, though. If you want to shout at us about how we can fix Relay (née Slack) and, as a consequence, Mattermost, usability we'd really like to hear it. This is our 9-to-5. Shout on Twitter: https://twitter.com/relay_chat/status/962936101919838208 https://twitter.com/relay_chat/status/962936101919838208 Shout on Open Relay [1]: https://open.relay-chat.com/signup_email https://open.relay-chat.com/signup_email Or shout on this thread, obviously. Thanks HN. -steven [1] This is our open Relay server. Create channels, teams, whatever. Think Freenode or any other community IRC network. No 10k message limits or any of that garbage (it seems insane to me that language communities like Elixir and Clojure moved chat to Slack, given this restriction).