6 ms·

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes s

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

JeremyNT 8y ago
I'll counter that anecdote with an observation that I have never observed any of those issues. In our deployment Mattermost is reliable and I've never heard any complaints like those from my colleagues. It could be a question of scale; we only have probably 50 or so regular users. That said, even though it works as advertised the product is not perfect. The Mattermost UI is bare bones and some things like conversation threading are implemented poorly.
- it33 8y ago
  Thanks @JeremyNT! Mattermost team here. May I ask which Mattermost version you're running? Also, what features would you like to see? We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.
  - _V_ 8y ago
    I, for one, would like to see normal package upgrade process - atleast for debian-based distros. I really don't like the current way of "copy old directory somewehere, copy a new one and replace some files from the old one". That is very painfull and this process does not really invoke a lot of confidence. edit: typo
  - JeremyNT 8y ago
    We're on 4.10.1, so I think we have most if not all of what you mentioned. Thanks for the great open source product! I should be clear, my own UI complaints are minor, but I want to acknowledge that people expecting a 1:1 copy of Slack won't exactly find it. Mattermost works well for us, but I recognize that an enhanced UI with tight media integration must be important to many people, otherwise Slack would not have become as popular as it has. Threading is really the only gripe I have personally - I don't like how it works, and I don't use it much because of that. But then I also don't have any real observations about how it could be improved either, and not using it (and basically operating as if it's IRC) is a perfectly fine solution!
  - h1d 8y ago
    I wish the search feature to be more straightforward. It seems to be trying to be smart about searching close matches but it just misses exact matches and when I really have to search some messages I have to search it with SQL in the database. It's not good when I can't tell my members to use the search feature when I know it's unreliable. For instance, I try to search for "pass" hoping to dig out the password someone pasted and it shows results containing words like "wordpress" and "css" that petty much buries the actual matches even if they're somewhere way down in the result.
it33 8y ago
Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#please-check-connection-mattermost-unreachable-if-issue-persists-ask-administrator-to-check-websocket-port https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...
- brendanr 8y ago
  Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/ https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/)
  - lawl 8y ago
    > Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.
    - Freak_NL 8y ago
      It's supported in all relevant browsers after all. Mattermost works perfectly for us.
      - brendanr 8y ago
        It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of infrastructure support. When I was using them years ago, there were a lot of networks which blocked them.
acoard 8y ago
Approx how many users?
- shaan7 8y ago
  And Mattermost's UI team was considerate enough to have a dark theme. Something Slack couldn't be bothered for.
Groxx 8y ago
Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.
  - ahojka 8y ago
    the fact that companies like HP builds/sells mattermost deployment/support/... yet internally still relies on lync is a joke (and pain to live with)
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      They use Mattermost internally, they don't sell it to customers (not sure if you were assuming I was talking about HP or a similar company that just deploys Mattermost for customers).
      - ahojka 8y ago
        hp, hpe, dxc.. whatever 'division' is one part of .. then it must be deployed in a small amount of centres as most support teams (of any kind) that I've interacted with were all tied to lync only
  - Groxx 8y ago
    Neat. Thanks! I haven't kept up on other-users outside of the uber post, good to hear there are more fish in the ocean :)
sams99 8y ago
For us at Discourse we find Mattermost perfectly acceptable as a chat program. 10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.
Shivatron 8y ago
Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client) 1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.) 2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing). 3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus. 4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man. 5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?
locusofself 8y ago
I run 25+ deployments of mattermost (some free and some enterprise for LDAP support) and don't have those issues on any of my systems. Some features we would love to see arent there, but all the basics work great if your network and configuration is good.
lloeki 8y ago
Something seems off in your setup. I've been doing some crazy live database massaging straight from psql and everything has been reflected basically instantly across all Mattermost clients.
tadzik_ 8y ago
We had a similar experience (moved from IRC to Mattermost). We're on Matrix now, running with no problems.
me551ah 8y ago
Doing on premise is hard. Office networks have firewalls with not so great configurations. Mobile networks can be incredibly flaky and unless you have geographically distributed servers it's hard to guarantee latency and performance. While building Flock , we faced multiple issues with firewalls which took us a great deal of time to tackle to ensure that notifications work well ( We ditched TCP with TLS and came up with our own protocol similar to Facebook zero which relies on shared secured key for encryption). Cloud based solutions are much easier to set up and much more reliable compared to on premise solutions , which is another reason why Atlassian also created Hipchat cloud and Confluence cloud. Disclaimer:  I'm from Flock ( https://flock.com https://flock.com ) . It’s currently rated the #1 slack alternative on PC Mag(https://goo.gl/eGZqH8 https://goo.gl/eGZqH8). We've also created a tool to help you quickly import all your team data from HipChat to Flock in case you're interested in trying us out. Please let me know if you have any queries !
h1d 8y ago
I'm using Mattermost in a small team but a web app that's taking hours to update seems like a problem with your server or network setup unless your team is so large that it was never designed for such load even with serious hardware thrown in.

JeremyNT 8y ago

I'll counter that anecdote with an observation that I have never observed any of those issues. In our deployment Mattermost is reliable and I've never heard any complaints like those from my colleagues. It could be a question of scale; we only have probably 50 or so regular users. That said, even though it works as advertised the product is not perfect. The Mattermost UI is bare bones and some things like conversation threading are implemented poorly.

it33 8y ago
Thanks @JeremyNT! Mattermost team here. May I ask which Mattermost version you're running? Also, what features would you like to see? We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.
- _V_ 8y ago
  I, for one, would like to see normal package upgrade process - atleast for debian-based distros. I really don't like the current way of "copy old directory somewehere, copy a new one and replace some files from the old one". That is very painfull and this process does not really invoke a lot of confidence. edit: typo
- JeremyNT 8y ago
  We're on 4.10.1, so I think we have most if not all of what you mentioned. Thanks for the great open source product! I should be clear, my own UI complaints are minor, but I want to acknowledge that people expecting a 1:1 copy of Slack won't exactly find it. Mattermost works well for us, but I recognize that an enhanced UI with tight media integration must be important to many people, otherwise Slack would not have become as popular as it has. Threading is really the only gripe I have personally - I don't like how it works, and I don't use it much because of that. But then I also don't have any real observations about how it could be improved either, and not using it (and basically operating as if it's IRC) is a perfectly fine solution!
- h1d 8y ago
  I wish the search feature to be more straightforward. It seems to be trying to be smart about searching close matches but it just misses exact matches and when I really have to search some messages I have to search it with SQL in the database. It's not good when I can't tell my members to use the search feature when I know it's unreliable. For instance, I try to search for "pass" hoping to dig out the password someone pasted and it shows results containing words like "wordpress" and "css" that petty much buries the actual matches even if they're somewhere way down in the result.

it33 8y ago

Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#please-check-connection-mattermost-unreachable-if-issue-persists-ask-administrator-to-check-websocket-port https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...

brendanr 8y ago
Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/ https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/)
- lawl 8y ago
  > Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    It's supported in all relevant browsers after all. Mattermost works perfectly for us.
    - brendanr 8y ago
      It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of infrastructure support. When I was using them years ago, there were a lot of networks which blocked them.

acoard 8y ago

Approx how many users?

shaan7 8y ago
And Mattermost's UI team was considerate enough to have a dark theme. Something Slack couldn't be bothered for.

Groxx 8y ago

Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.

lucb1e 8y ago
Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.
- ahojka 8y ago
  the fact that companies like HP builds/sells mattermost deployment/support/... yet internally still relies on lync is a joke (and pain to live with)
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    They use Mattermost internally, they don't sell it to customers (not sure if you were assuming I was talking about HP or a similar company that just deploys Mattermost for customers).
    - ahojka 8y ago
      hp, hpe, dxc.. whatever 'division' is one part of .. then it must be deployed in a small amount of centres as most support teams (of any kind) that I've interacted with were all tied to lync only
- Groxx 8y ago
  Neat. Thanks! I haven't kept up on other-users outside of the uber post, good to hear there are more fish in the ocean :)

sams99 8y ago

For us at Discourse we find Mattermost perfectly acceptable as a chat program. 10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.

Shivatron 8y ago

Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client) 1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.) 2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing). 3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus. 4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man. 5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?

locusofself 8y ago

I run 25+ deployments of mattermost (some free and some enterprise for LDAP support) and don't have those issues on any of my systems. Some features we would love to see arent there, but all the basics work great if your network and configuration is good.

lloeki 8y ago

Something seems off in your setup. I've been doing some crazy live database massaging straight from psql and everything has been reflected basically instantly across all Mattermost clients.

tadzik_ 8y ago

We had a similar experience (moved from IRC to Mattermost). We're on Matrix now, running with no problems.

me551ah 8y ago

Doing on premise is hard. Office networks have firewalls with not so great configurations. Mobile networks can be incredibly flaky and unless you have geographically distributed servers it's hard to guarantee latency and performance. While building Flock , we faced multiple issues with firewalls which took us a great deal of time to tackle to ensure that notifications work well ( We ditched TCP with TLS and came up with our own protocol similar to Facebook zero which relies on shared secured key for encryption). Cloud based solutions are much easier to set up and much more reliable compared to on premise solutions , which is another reason why Atlassian also created Hipchat cloud and Confluence cloud. Disclaimer:  I'm from Flock ( https://flock.com https://flock.com ) . It’s currently rated the #1 slack alternative on PC Mag(https://goo.gl/eGZqH8 https://goo.gl/eGZqH8). We've also created a tool to help you quickly import all your team data from HipChat to Flock in case you're interested in trying us out. Please let me know if you have any queries !

h1d 8y ago

I'm using Mattermost in a small team but a web app that's taking hours to update seems like a problem with your server or network setup unless your team is so large that it was never designed for such load even with serious hardware thrown in.