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Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

395 points by ankitkumar98 7y ago

virtualpotato 7y ago
As with mastodon and similar projects - having to deploy, secure and maintain a db server is a big friction point, I wish projects aiming at self-hosting would internalize that and use something like sqlite for small to moderate deployments and would even as go as far as suggesting that it is unlikely to ever be deployed at a scale that a single-writer-multi-reader sqlite service on a decent machine can't handle.
- slig 7y ago
  For $20/m ($5 for a droplet and $15 for a managed DB instance) you can have that peace of mind on DO.
  - sjy 7y ago
    Paying $15/month for a managed database is not self-hosting.
    - slig 7y ago
      One would still have the fun of maintaining the application server updated.
  - kevindong 7y ago
    There's much more to hosting a service than standing it up on the modern equivalent of an VM and assuming it'll never need to be touched again.
    - slig 7y ago
      Sure, but the parent was talking about the difficulties of handling a DB server.
j88439h84 7y ago
Riot seems like a good option these days.
- ian-bateman 7y ago
  Riot / Matrix is also open source, has integration with Slack, Gitter, & IRC out of the box, and is self-hostable entirely for free.
- fractalf 7y ago
  Isn't just matrix with all it's bridges and clients the one ring to rule them all?
newsat13 7y ago
When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  You can create private channels in MatterMost for as long as I can remember.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    But are there access controls other than private channels?
- 153791098c 7y ago
  That restriction aside, how do you compare rocket chat to mattermost? Is it better?
- ondrej_s 7y ago
  I'm trying to push the agenda to switch our comms between developers fully to Keybase, but it will be probably rejected.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    Keybase is.. not ready for prime time. It's pretty janky, channel discovery is a pain as is spam, and it's still got that weird crypto half-baked nonsense.
    - mclehman 7y ago
      Team discovery could be a pain, but channel discovery within a team is pretty much everything I would expect it to be.
- kfrzcode 7y ago
mikece 7y ago
I like that Mattermost is written in Go and can deploy on-prem with Docker. Those are two huge points for MM over Slack IMO.
- matusnovak 7y ago
  For anyone looking to give it a try, here is a Dockerized version of Mattermost: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker Very straightforward and easy to set up.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    This is one of the reasons I love docker, for personal use it makes experimenting with new projects soooo easy. Plus I have a simple traefik + compose setup so I can easily have it all automatically routed with a subdomain and https. I might recommend something more robust for businesses in production but man is it easy. Want to try node-red? Done. Want to destroy - and it's gone, no need to futz around with dependencies.
- tcbasche 7y ago
  Why does what language it's written in matter? I like Go too but I'm genuinely curious
  - dsm9000 7y ago
    I am guilty of favoriting both go and rust for production deployments for the simplicity (usually a single binary, not a million files of some framework’s and dependencies files). Also it’s my hope that the modern libraries and language safety features and smaller size might be helpful in efficiency and security.
  - it33 7y ago
    Mattermost CEO here for a biased opinion. In my mind, the properties of a language can shape the outcome of an open source project. As an example, when we were starting the Mattermost open source project we were considering a few options for different reasons: 1) Erlang - Real time properties made it nice for a high scale collaboration platform. The trade-off was that it's a really specialized language and there aren't that many people excited to learn Erlang. 2) C/C++ - Really powerful language and can compile to binary format, making install and upgrade easier for admins who don't want to be managing interpreted languages. Trade-off was it was an older language and there's fewer people excited about writing for it, and there can be a fair bit of nuance. 3) Python - Really popular, easy-to-read. Trade-off is things could get tricky as performance and scale needs increase. Also, doesn't support binary format, so more complex install and maintenance options would need to be used. In the end we used Golang because it had many of the positive properties of Erlang, Python and C/C++ (compiles to binary, easy-to-read with gofmt, real-time support, etc.) and the trade-offs were fewer.
sinnombre 7y ago
What about zulip? They seem to fare well in terms of features against slack and mattermost.
- slykar 7y ago
  I love Zulip but the concept of topics is repelant for (lazy?) users. When you chat on a channel (Slack, Mattermost) and people start fragmenting the discussion into several topics that interlace... Ugh! I yet have to meet people that would at last utilize Threads.
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > When you chat on a channel (Slack, Mattermost) and people start fragmenting the discussion into several topics that interlace... Ugh! I yet have to meet people that would at last utilize Threads. Slack threads are an utter abomination. I'd rather they removed the feature entirely; they're harder to keep track of than the linear stream of a channel (which is saying something, because the chronological, linear stream is already pretty bad for ongoing discussions)
- axegon_ 7y ago
  I've tried both and imo mattermost has the edge when it comes to hooks and integrations. It's also insanely flexible with the configuration options it gives. The one thing I don't like about zulip topics... Not really my thing...
  - maccam94 7y ago
    Zulip topics are the best implementation of chat threads that I've seen yet. You can view all of them simultaneously like a regular chat room, or focus down on one. You can mute either a single chat topic or an entire stream (channel). In most chat systems, if I don't read the messages within a day, I'll never bother reading the chat history because I have no idea whether there's anything relevant in it. In contrast, I can open the Rust Zulip once every few weeks and see if there were any interesting topics. And if you're really sure you don't want to use topics, you can always just make a single "general" topic in your stream.
yulaow 7y ago
My team uses it since a year, it works flawlessly for what we need.
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, thanks yulaow!! Our contributors love comments like this, hugely appreciated,
mikece 7y ago
The article talks about Hipchat as a competitor but HipChat was shut down by Atlassian and HipChat users were strongly encouraged to adopt Slack: https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Just for clarity, Hipchat users were strongly encouraged to move to Slack because slack purchased Hipchat from Atlassian.
  - jnwatson 7y ago
    Only because Atlassian abandoned HipChat after trying to replace it.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  > HipChat was shut down by Atlassian Not entirely accurate. It's was bought by Slack, and then shut down.
  - orliesaurus 7y ago
    Didn't they just buy the userbase? I don't think they bought the technology - they also made a lot of devs redundant after the purchase?
    - saghul 7y ago
      They bought the IP, not the product.
    - alias_neo 7y ago
      I'm not sure the exact details of the purchase, I just know that a deadline was placed on our HipChat installation at work (it would not be renewed, and only supported until date X). It seems their ultimate goal was to shut down a competitor, so, with the result being the same, I suppose the specifics matter very little.
jjeaff 7y ago
I have a small team, but about a year ago, we deployed Mattermost on our K8s cluster using their Helm chart and I have been very pleased with the performance and stability. We never looked back at slack. I have not had to fiddle with the configuration at all since deploying it. It just works. And that is also considering that to save costs, I launched it on preemptible instances which go down usually once every 24 hours. Mattermost recovers and reboots flawlessly every time.
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  Did you do any integrations for voice chat?
  - it33 7y ago
    Mattermost CEO here, Zoom plug-in is built in so one click for starting a Zoom meeting. There is also some voice features in our latest hackathon: https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-hackathon-2019-highlights/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-hackathon-2019-highli... (see mobile apps section). Where either of these what you were interested in?
  - jasonblais 7y ago
    Hi, Mattermost PM here. We also have other voice, video and screenshare integrations, including self-hosted on-prem and private cloud options. Zoom, Webex, BigBlueButton, WebRTC and more: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/video-and-audio-calling.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/video-and-audio-calli...
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      Cool, thank you both. I think WebRTC or Jitsi are closest to what I would be looking for, as I want to keep it open source, but I appreciate the Zoom and other integrations for how they could be useful to business. You guys might consider Mumble/Murmur integration, I think it could be a great addition, as it was my favorite voice app before Discord took over everything (still is).
alias_neo 7y ago
We've been using Hipchat for years at $work. There's very little is say is "good" about it, it was just the best option at the time as it needed to be self-hosted. Mattermost is being trialled now, pasting code doesn't seem a lot better, but the overall experience is. As a place that likes Go/Docker it has potential for us.
- askafriend 7y ago
  The "$work" notation could be mistaken for the Slack stock ticker. The "$" is how you commonly denote stocks, and "WORK" is the ticker for Slack.
  - jamie_ca 7y ago
    The $ dates back to either shell scripting or perl (and applies to PHP as well), and this is a reasonably common usage in tech/programming circles. See also $dayjob. It's unfortunate that there's a specific terminology conflict in this case.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    Apologies, I had no idea. I was simply placing a variable for "insert workplace here".
- robohoe 7y ago
  What issues did you have with pasting code in it? It supports Markdown so it supports whatever a typical README.md would.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    It just didn't always behave and syntax highlighting didn't work at all sometimes; but it may have been that the system as a whole was misconfigured.
    - it33 7y ago
      Mattermost CEO here, thanks for trying us out! Would love to squash the bug for you, open to filing an issue?> https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/new https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/new We used to send bug coins just for release candidates, but if you find a bug in production you get one too now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6FJsdE_aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6FJsdE_aY
zer00eyz 7y ago
This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.
- davidw 7y ago
  > We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    You can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1] to get history and make some folks happy that prefer using a http client. [1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
  - ergothus 7y ago
    > Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. I don't actually agree with this. Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications, which does NOT mean you can't have a history. Indeed, history and search is the real selling point of Slack for me. Everything else Slack has over IRC is trivial and not worth abandoning the standards.
    - antisthenes 7y ago
      I didn't really feel the overhead of email until Gmail switched to their current theme. Now everything feels so sluggish and unwieldy that it really does constitute overhead, in real time seconds. Whenever I used a native desktop software, like Thunderbird or Opera Mail, I was able to have conversations with people as quickly as in a chat client (and faster than texting, because of a real keyboard)
gmenegatti 7y ago
Rocket.chat is also a very nice alternative and supports more use cases. We use it internally and also as part of our product.
- oso2k 7y ago
  I completely concur. We used Rocket.Chat (running containerized on OpenShift, our Kubernetes distro) for a time at Red Hat to support the bulk of Red Hat Consulting. Many thousands of messages per minute sustained throughput. All of Red Hat has "restandardized" in the last year but I personally miss Rocket.Chat.
moedersmooiste 7y ago
Does Mattermost still have LDAP issues? The company I work for was looking for a Slack alternative but in the end decided to stick with Slack because of this.
- CreatedAccount 7y ago
  What do you mean by LDAP issues? You don't get ldap with a free license, but there are still ways to get ldap auth despite that. (For instance, https://medium.com/p/mattermost-teams-edition-replacing-gitlab-sso-with-keycloak-dabf13ebb99e https://medium.com/p/mattermost-teams-edition-replacing-gitl...)
- jasonblais 7y ago
  Thanks moedersmooiste, Mattermost PM here. Would be curious to hear more about your LDAP issues. We have many organizations who have deployed with LDAP, including with group sync to teams and channels. Those eligible for a nonprofit license can also get the benefits of E10 offering (including LDAP) with special pricing https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/
subsaharancoder 7y ago
Uber currently uses Mattermost but will most likely move to Slack. During my 2 years at Amazon, the SFO based Prime Now team used Mattermost but we were eventually forced to move to Chime a pitiful example of a chat client.
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, if Amazon is open to it, I’d love to see if there is a “Better together” story across AWS, Chime (meetings, voice, video, screen sharing) and Mattermost (developer, Ops and SRE workflows and integrations). We’ve heard the same from different Amazon teams looking to accelerate developer productivity
  - bubba1236 7y ago
    don't waste ur time they're pushing chime hard at Amazon lol
    - it33 7y ago
      True, but everywhere else they are pushing Teams hard for general users. Mattermost is already certified on Aurora, we work with S3, it's available in AWS Marketplace--if there's a dev team at Amazon interested in an open source alternative to Slack that runs natively on AWS infra--potentially connects with Chime for voice/video/meetings/screenshare it's potentially a healthy thing for everyone.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Yeah. But. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 Non-admins can delete/archive any channel #6320
- duskwuff 7y ago
  What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially controversial opinion: This isn't really open source. When major features like permissions and access controls are stripped from the "community" version of a software package, it starts looking more like a feature-limited demo.
  - type0 7y ago
    > more like a feature-limited demo. demoware
    - syvanen 7y ago
      Shareware is making a comeback?
      - type0 7y ago
        It's worse than that, expectation are different and actually doing disservice to the whole open source ethos. I recently heard a couple of regular users talking and equating Free Software//Open Source with Freeware, I didn't bother correcting them because from their perspective the difference is meaningless. Only us geeks care enough, but not enough to go and fork it.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    I think "all team members are admins" is more usable than you think it is; I generally do this for many cloud services on most of my teams even at my day job; it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control, setting it up, and then someone who can't do what they need to do for their job cause you didn't give them enough access, or the only person who can do what needs done is on vacation, etc. I often say "We don't have (or use the) locks on our doors at our physical individual offices, but that doesn't mean any of us would go into someone elses office when they aren't there and trash everything on their desk. And it's not a problem. What makes electronic resources different?" [I know HN audience will now give me an exhaustive list of what makes electronic resources different; please don't bother; I know this approach doesn't always work. With physical offices either]. But I agree with you that that level of feature-crippling makes me want to all it more like demoware than open source.
gregf 7y ago
I been a mattermost user for two years, can't say enough good things about it. Love that it's written in go. We run ours with very little resources and it still chugs along.
- bathtub365 7y ago
  Why does it matter what it’s written in?
  - sonthonax 7y ago
    Go will often be faster than NodeJS. It can also be deployed as a binary rather than a blob of Node modules.
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      Why does any of that truly matter? What matters most is if it meets the needs of people using the product, not what language it is written in nor how it is deployed.
      - buckminster 7y ago
        Cost matters too. If one solution needs more hardware or is a pain to deploy then these are additional costs that need to be taken into account.
      - type0 7y ago
        Fairly anecdotal but feature breakages usually more common in Node apps than Go, it does "matter:most" for end users. It's not because of Node itself but the sheer amount of npm packages what's responsible for those.
      - gramakri 7y ago
        I guess it matters to people who deploy the app and not the users as such.
      - shantly 7y ago
Tharkun 7y ago
I like Mattermost. My only gripe with it is that it's a bit of a pain to upgrade. Would be nice if they were to automate the upgrade procedure.
- gramakri 7y ago
  We support Mattermost on Cloudron which automates app updates. disclaimer: co-founder of cloudron.io
- the_icelander 7y ago
  Check out the Kubernetes operator, which handles zero-downtime upgrades as well as blue/green deployments and canary builds: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-operator https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-operator
secfirstmd 7y ago
I'm a big Mattermost fan but it really needs end to ends encryption. Also the Android mobile app is pretty weak.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Standard tls between server and client helps against any outside threat. The only threat from which e2ee helps better than tls comes from the server admin. Now, do you REALLY need end to end encryption to protect yourself from a person running your team chat server?
  - secfirstmd 7y ago
    Well I mean Matrix/Riot.im has that function.
  - the_icelander 7y ago
    Not for business, but if you want to get your friends on a chat server it would be easier if they knew you couldn't see everything they said.
bob1029 7y ago
We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything. I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment failed for our developers, so we now maintain 2 stacks - Teams for company-wide communications, and Mattermost for developer-intensive communications (or anyone else willing to teach themselves how to use a new thing). Mattermost has proven to be an incredible solution for our development duties. I just installed it directly on a EC2 t3.small instance and we've been using it for about 9 months now without any pain points to speak of. I literally haven't touched that machine since I turned it on day 1. To be fair, we are <10 developers, but we get pretty heavy with the screenshots and json/code dumps throughout the day. We did make some compromises with authentication in favor of expediency of deployment, but it's really not a big deal for our developers to keep track of their LDAP vs their mattermost credentials. If someone complains enough I'll spend a few hours to hook up LDAP too.
- andybak 7y ago
  So - non-developers resisted Slack or Slack-like things? That's interesting. I'm a developer but I find it easy to empathize with non-developers because I hate any tech orthogonal to the actual task at hand that requires a learning curve. I usually find that other things have pushed that thing out of my brain by the time I have to use it again. Unlike most developers I'm no fan of Markdown (I can manage links and list formatting in a WYSIWIG editor without needing to reach for the docs. I hate reading docs). I've got the hang of Slack but I tire of teaching new adopters the correct etiquette and usage that means they don't overly interrupt those of us that have tuned their notifications. Or teaching people how to ensure their messages aren't missed entirely.
  - bob1029 7y ago
    I share some of your resentment for having to learn new things to engage in what is arguably a trivial activity at this point in time - sharing (formatted) text or other media with your teammates. This is probably a factor in why many of our users prefer "simpler" approaches... At least from their perspective. One would argue markdown is simpler and faster than using any MS Word-style interface if you are experienced in its syntax and rules. Learning markdown is pretty easy for many developers, and for some it becomes 2nd nature when typing into things that support it on a regular basis: Git[Hub/Lab], Slack, Mattermost, WhatsApp (partial support), etc. The value-add as you put additional markdown-enabled platforms into your workflow is pretty substantial. I don't have to do a mental context switch every time I go between editing a GitHub issue comment and typing some code block to another developer in Mattermost. You can create some really nice looking README.md files if you spend a little extra time with things like headings and quote/code blocks. I believe there are several options (one hosted in GitHub's API if you prefer GFM) for taking MD files and generating high-quality HTML or PDF output. I'd conclude by saying that markdown documents are much easier to source control. Taking a diff of a docx or a pdf is going to get you nowhere. A diff of a markdown file might as well just be a diff of any arbitrary plain text document. The syntax itself has a very small footprint, so you are looking at mostly just plain text minus 5-10% overhead on the markdown.
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
Could anyone elaborate as to how Microsoft Teams overtook Slack so quickly?
- kube-system 7y ago
  They put it in Office 365, migrated over Skype For Business users, and made the starting price $0.
- Chyzwar 7y ago
  It is free (bundled with office 365). Lots of places prefer to save a few dollars per person and loose hundreds in productivity.
  - galacticdessert 7y ago
    This. At work we use it because it is already included in our Office365 subscription, but it is so painfully slow. Really, unbelievably slow.
  - e12e 7y ago
    Well, it's not free (or gratis) is it? It just happens to be included in the azure ad/o365/exchange plans? So, if you're on gsuite, for example - ms teams isn't "free"?
  - mderazon 7y ago
    Same is true for Google Hangouts Chat and you don't see anyone using that...
- kmlx 7y ago
  > Could anyone elaborate as to how Microsoft Teams overtook Slack so quickly? easy. they didn't: https://twitter.com/msquinn/status/1179874609899827200 https://twitter.com/msquinn/status/1179874609899827200 https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/21/microsoft-teams-giddy-growth-looks-impressive-but-it-doesnt-tell-the-full-story/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/21/microsoft-teams-giddy-gro... MSFT decided that one clear way to increase their share price is for their new product to run at all times for everyone.
aidenn0 7y ago
Last I checked, Jabber could completely replace all of these things except there were no good iPhone clients. Anyone know of an even remotely usable iPhone Jabber client?
- theamk 7y ago
  Last time I checked, you had to have a very specific server/client combo for very basic features like mobile app, offline messages, and multi-device message history. Grabbing a random server or client may result in some (or all) features missing. That’s why we recommended Slack for the next workplace. No chance to get anything wrong, and no need for backups either.
bblpeter 7y ago
That’s the problem with Slack — too easy to switch to equivalent or superior alternatives. I suspect this issue will continue to weigh on their stock price.
sircastor 7y ago
For a while we used Mattermost at my office. At the time we had a handful of startups in our incubator. Eventually we ended up switching to Slack. I don't think it had to do with anything other than momentum and popularity of Slack, in spite of Mattermost accomplishing the same thing with virtually the same interface, people just liked and wanted to be on Slack...
- AzzieElbab 7y ago
  Slack is using cloud/external storage. Many companies have policies against that,making MM is surprisingly popular in banks and such. Personally, can't tell the difference between two
mderazon 7y ago
Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product. We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite But - The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results - Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent - App doesn't see any meaningful updates - The Android app is so crappy I don't even know when to begin. Try initiating a conversation with some person by searching them. Or try sharing something from Android to a channel only to realize you cannot search for the channel in the list - Api to write bots is pretty badly designed - When you edit your message you cannot mention people anymore - Deleted GSuite users just keep floating around as ghosts I give this product a year top before it is canned
- outworlder 7y ago
  > since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results Not for long, as it's been killed and is now moribund.
- outime 7y ago
  I stopped using it about a year ago and was quite dissatisfied as well. Kinda thought they’d put a bit more effort to create a good product afterwards but somehow it looks like a low priority thing for Google. I don’t know why, they could be a very solid competitor and maybe even have an excuse to raise GSuite prices.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    Google products experience a self-fullfilling prophecy of not getting serious effort put into them because everyone expects Google to kill it in 16 months, so it never takes off with users, so Google cuts the project. The really goats part is that the engagement levels that Google considers to be "crap" would make any SV startup a darling Unicorn in their next funding round. But compared to making money hand over fist on click-fraud-plagued ads, it just can't compete.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  It's amazing just how bad Google's UIs are, across all their products. There are two different versions of "archived" in Gmail. Maps hides options for types of routes under a settings menu under a screen fold (rather than toggles when you ask for alternate routes). Basic Android features like "stop a process" moves location seemingly every year. I was so confused by GCP that I just went with Azure and got on with life. I find Apple's interfaces confusing because I've been a Windows developer for 20 years, but at least they seem to stay consistent. Microsoft is in the middle of completely revamping their settings UI, but I agree with the forgot they are going on and they at least didn't delete the old UIs. WTF is wrong with Google?
sjburt 7y ago
The biggest problem with Mattermost is that the mobile client cannot connect to multiple teams. You can add the beta client and connect to a second team, but more than two teams is impossible. This may be a function of living in the Bay Area but I'm on 4 or 5 different Slack groups for various communities. All but my employer would be in great shape to switch to Mattermost but it's just not possible. Some have switched to Discourse but it's not great for real-time communication and people have a hard time with the UI.
- it33 7y ago
  Thanks sjburt, Mattermost CEO here. We have 800+ upvotes that agree with you, here a link to the feature proposal forum post and open tickets on this: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/10975938-ios-and-android-apps-should-allow-multiple-server https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge... Anyone interested in contributing to the work, we’d welcome your help
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    The ticket you linked to said the feature is “planned”, so I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’d welcome help. Are you working on this internally (and as such this is essentially a “we’re looking for mobile engineers”) or are you soliciting contributions from the open source community to work on this?
    - it33 7y ago
      Ticket is unscheduled, work is open source, if you're interested in contributing please comment on the ticket and the team can discuss: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 On hiring, yes, we're hiring too, that's perhaps the most committed route to take: https://mattermost.com/careers/ https://mattermost.com/careers/
jiberwarrior 7y ago
As some commenters pointed out, the name "MatterMost" might be a crucial thing holding this from reaching the development mainstream as an alternative to slack/teams, which aren't very dev friendly
gaogao 7y ago
> The company was founded in 2011 as “SpinPunch, Inc”, an HTML5 game engine developer. Neat that both Mattermost and Slack have the same origin story of game developers building an internal chat app and then pivoting to that.
antioedipus 7y ago
The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.
- marktangotango 7y ago
  In my experience, the competition is pidgin slash outlook communicator slash whatever brain dead enterprise messaging app. Not slack (or hipchat or...). Mattermost has seen a lot of adoption atthe Big Dumb Corps I’ve seen. That’s my take on the market at least. I’d buy stock in it if I could.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 7y ago
  As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home. It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/utils/license.go https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...
  - 7y ago
lillesvin 7y ago
I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could maybe even reclaim some of my RAM and get to choose a client to my preference (which is not an Electron app).
- shric 7y ago
  The only reason I haven't advocated replacing Slack with IRC is it lacks a sensible way of keeping history. Everyone either has to keep their client running and connected all the time (usually this is only feasible with tmux/screen on a server), rely on bouncer hacks, or something like IRCCloud which maintains the connection for you but is proprietary and not self-hostable.
  - VectorLock 7y ago
    This is the big thing that IRC would need to have to make it on parity with Slack. A bit more involved than a trivial change.
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    I use https://riot.im https://riot.im for IRC for some channels. It stays connected, keeps archives, etc. For small communities, I recommend Mattermost or Rocket Chat. I used to be a die-hard fan of irssi inside tmux, but seeing how tiny usability issues can really cause adoption issues, I wouldn't even recommend riot.im to less technical people.
- VectorLock 7y ago
  >I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. I've heard this so many times I'm surprised nobody has done it yet. You'd need a client-proxy, or server extension to detect idle desktop clients so you can route messages to a mobile device, for maximum "life work balance."
alexnewman 7y ago
The days of free as in sabotage are over. Linux broke it.
tptacek 7y ago
One more differentiating factor for Mattermost is its extra special focus security. The product offers the industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities across all devices. Isn't Mattermost fundamentally the same thing, architecturally, as Slack? Slack has one of the industry's stronger security teams. I don't see the differentiator here.
- athenot 7y ago
  I'm a big fan of Mattermost but industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities might be a tad exaggerated. By way of comparison, I will indulge in a shameless plug for Webex Teams: our customers have the option of hosting their own key server, on-premise, under their control. We have no ways of seeing any content in messages: payload and title are encrypted and participants are IDs that are usually federated with their own identity provider. Decryption happens locally in the desktop/mobile client, after obtaining the right keys. Yes that's more computationally expensive and carries some complexity. But it's a very different model than just building a single big vault of data. And it also works when users in 2 different companies talk to each other, both with their own key servers. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cloudCollaboration/spark/hybridservices/datasecurity/cmgt_b_hybrid-data-security/cmgt_b_deployment-guide-for-hybrid-data_chapter_00.html#concept_74088EF79823B0DD92298C21924E6EC3 https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cloudCol...
jetru 7y ago
Used Mattermost for a year, and I can attest to it's shittiness. There is a bug during switching channels that pins your view to some random location weeks before the latest post. The result is that switching channel in Mattermost has a 60% chance of requiring you to spend the next 30 seconds scrolling the window to the bottommost-recent-message. Horrible.
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here. That is a terrible experience. Could I ask your help go to "About Mattermost" and let us know the version where you saw the bug? Opened a ticket here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/13422 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/13422
- Walf 7y ago
  That's no good, but wouldn't hitting/holding your `End` key be faster?
- jasonblais 7y ago
  Mattermost PM here, I agree that this is not a good experience, thank you for sharing @jetru. There is development in progress to let you jump directly to new messages when you land on the oldest unread message in a channel. This lets you get directly to the latest message. I'm not entirely sure if this is the same use case you have, but if you're open to testing the new development and share feedback, we'd love to hear! Pull request with an open test server is available here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/4132#issuecomment-566993406 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/4132#is...
maxpert 7y ago
Love the fact people are adopting Opensource solutions but corporates won’t budge. I think the hardest penetration for anyone right now is Microsoft Teams. Since they started bundling teams with Office they have been able to boast about numbers and actually hurt Slack. I wonder what is roadmap for Mattermost. Shameless plug I myself did an opensource version of a chat server called raspchat https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat which was able to handle almost 5K very active chatters on a Raspberry Pi Model B (Just 512 MB of RAM). My original dream was to build a drop and run server on cheap raspberry pi for local areas but man has to feed his family and I had to make a tough choice. It’s harsh IMHO out there to get attention and then convince folks to develop integrations for you. I hope this space doesn’t endup with duopoly and products like Mattermost take off.
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, Awesome work on raspchat! And thanks for the kind words. Often we see users and customers have both Microsoft Teams for Office365 users and Mattermost as the "developer's choice" given the open source code base and flexibility in high security environments. Per the article, the market is very large, and there's many different user segments to serve. Therefore there should be multiple winners here, in my mind. I think this category is only just starting.
- indigochill 7y ago
  In my org we have Teams and Slack (and Skype for Business!). Corporate (and our one token diehard Microsoft fanboy) gave a weak effort at pushing Teams, but everyone was already on one of the other two so for us Teams is just sitting on our computers like an appendix that's useless but also just enough effort to cut out that it stays in.
  - dijit 7y ago
    I have the inverse. The only thing _everyone_ is on is teams. Slack is too expensive and introducing yet another chat program is not going to be met with anything other than resistance. I really dislike teams.
- 7y ago
shmerl 7y ago
It's not using Matrix? What's the point in making an open source however non federated IM service?
- detaro 7y ago
  Many companies using such a system wouldn't even want federation, and it adds a bunch of complexity.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    So run a local server and turn federation off. Like you can run a private e-mail server. Why not use and contribute to the common protocol that does allow federation? I see no point for a FOSS project in proliferating non federated IM protocols, and wasting resources on that, while federated ones still didn't even reach wide adoption.
    - detaro 7y ago
      Because then you're bound to the common protocol and it's development process, which is a waste if you have no intention of using federation.
      - shmerl 7y ago
        I view it the opposite way. It's waste of time to reinvent the wheel and not concentrate resources. Federated protocol can be used without federation fine, but not the other way around. For FOSS projects, not doing it is strange, especially when lack of adoption for federated options is still a major global problem. So I'd question the intent behind this particular project. For those who don't care about openness (like Slack), I'd expect such behavior. But for open projects - not really.
  - kqr 7y ago
    That might be true for many companies, but I think also that many companies could benefit from federation -- they just don't know it. It has been standard practise everywhere I've worked that in business-to-business relations, people have to create accounts for each other's Slack networks. That is ridiculous. Imagine having to sign up for separate email accounts on the email servers of all of your customers. It just wouldn't be acceptable other than in extreme circumstances; you already have an email account -- why shouldn't you be able to email with your customers/suppliers/vendors from that? But we accept it with IM because we're so jaded by now. Though if federation was a more well understood concept, I'm sure multiple of the companies I've worked at would jump at the chance of not putting its business relations through the pain of registering dozens of accounts to IM with different people.
pyrosome 7y ago
Does anyone have legal experience and know what the restrictions are to forking of the Mattermost project? I'm a programmer with experience in backend development and security and would be willing to donate some time to work on developing a stronger community implementation of Mattermost - only I'm not sure what the legally correct way is to go about it. What I'm hoping to find is a FOSS sherpa to help me navigate setting up a new project.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  The Mattermost source code is AGPL. Fork away!
asah 7y ago
My Fortune 500 healthcare company successfully uses Mattermost because the lawyers aren't comfortable with us using slack. It's been great. Thank you @it33 and team. p.s. we haven't run into the issue 6320 (users archiving channels), for exactly the reasons @it33 described in the issue report. He didn't explain it well, but permissions is a complex rathole, un-archive is a simple workflow for admins and if there's continued abuse, just ban the user.
- it33 7y ago
  Thanks for wording it so much more concisely and clearly! Love your post, sharing it here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#issuecomment-567051983 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#...

395 points by ankitkumar98 7y ago

As with mastodon and similar projects - having to deploy, secure and maintain a db server is a big friction point, I wish projects aiming at self-hosting would internalize that and use something like sqlite for small to moderate deployments and would even as go as far as suggesting that it is unlikely to ever be deployed at a scale that a single-writer-multi-reader sqlite service on a decent machine can't handle.

slig 7y ago
For $20/m ($5 for a droplet and $15 for a managed DB instance) you can have that peace of mind on DO.
- sjy 7y ago
  Paying $15/month for a managed database is not self-hosting.
  - slig 7y ago
    One would still have the fun of maintaining the application server updated.
- kevindong 7y ago
  There's much more to hosting a service than standing it up on the modern equivalent of an VM and assuming it'll never need to be touched again.
  - slig 7y ago
    Sure, but the parent was talking about the difficulties of handling a DB server.

j88439h84 7y ago

Riot seems like a good option these days.

ian-bateman 7y ago
Riot / Matrix is also open source, has integration with Slack, Gitter, & IRC out of the box, and is self-hostable entirely for free.
fractalf 7y ago
Isn't just matrix with all it's bridges and clients the one ring to rule them all?

newsat13 7y ago

When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?

Freak_NL 7y ago
You can create private channels in MatterMost for as long as I can remember.
- penagwin 7y ago
  But are there access controls other than private channels?
153791098c 7y ago
That restriction aside, how do you compare rocket chat to mattermost? Is it better?
ondrej_s 7y ago
I'm trying to push the agenda to switch our comms between developers fully to Keybase, but it will be probably rejected.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  Keybase is.. not ready for prime time. It's pretty janky, channel discovery is a pain as is spam, and it's still got that weird crypto half-baked nonsense.
  - mclehman 7y ago
    Team discovery could be a pain, but channel discovery within a team is pretty much everything I would expect it to be.
kfrzcode 7y ago

mikece 7y ago

I like that Mattermost is written in Go and can deploy on-prem with Docker. Those are two huge points for MM over Slack IMO.

matusnovak 7y ago
For anyone looking to give it a try, here is a Dockerized version of Mattermost: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker Very straightforward and easy to set up.
- penagwin 7y ago
  This is one of the reasons I love docker, for personal use it makes experimenting with new projects soooo easy. Plus I have a simple traefik + compose setup so I can easily have it all automatically routed with a subdomain and https. I might recommend something more robust for businesses in production but man is it easy. Want to try node-red? Done. Want to destroy - and it's gone, no need to futz around with dependencies.
tcbasche 7y ago
Why does what language it's written in matter? I like Go too but I'm genuinely curious
- dsm9000 7y ago
  I am guilty of favoriting both go and rust for production deployments for the simplicity (usually a single binary, not a million files of some framework’s and dependencies files). Also it’s my hope that the modern libraries and language safety features and smaller size might be helpful in efficiency and security.
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here for a biased opinion. In my mind, the properties of a language can shape the outcome of an open source project. As an example, when we were starting the Mattermost open source project we were considering a few options for different reasons: 1) Erlang - Real time properties made it nice for a high scale collaboration platform. The trade-off was that it's a really specialized language and there aren't that many people excited to learn Erlang. 2) C/C++ - Really powerful language and can compile to binary format, making install and upgrade easier for admins who don't want to be managing interpreted languages. Trade-off was it was an older language and there's fewer people excited about writing for it, and there can be a fair bit of nuance. 3) Python - Really popular, easy-to-read. Trade-off is things could get tricky as performance and scale needs increase. Also, doesn't support binary format, so more complex install and maintenance options would need to be used. In the end we used Golang because it had many of the positive properties of Erlang, Python and C/C++ (compiles to binary, easy-to-read with gofmt, real-time support, etc.) and the trade-offs were fewer.

sinnombre 7y ago

What about zulip? They seem to fare well in terms of features against slack and mattermost.

slykar 7y ago
I love Zulip but the concept of topics is repelant for (lazy?) users. When you chat on a channel (Slack, Mattermost) and people start fragmenting the discussion into several topics that interlace... Ugh! I yet have to meet people that would at last utilize Threads.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > When you chat on a channel (Slack, Mattermost) and people start fragmenting the discussion into several topics that interlace... Ugh! I yet have to meet people that would at last utilize Threads. Slack threads are an utter abomination. I'd rather they removed the feature entirely; they're harder to keep track of than the linear stream of a channel (which is saying something, because the chronological, linear stream is already pretty bad for ongoing discussions)
axegon_ 7y ago
I've tried both and imo mattermost has the edge when it comes to hooks and integrations. It's also insanely flexible with the configuration options it gives. The one thing I don't like about zulip topics... Not really my thing...
- maccam94 7y ago
  Zulip topics are the best implementation of chat threads that I've seen yet. You can view all of them simultaneously like a regular chat room, or focus down on one. You can mute either a single chat topic or an entire stream (channel). In most chat systems, if I don't read the messages within a day, I'll never bother reading the chat history because I have no idea whether there's anything relevant in it. In contrast, I can open the Rust Zulip once every few weeks and see if there were any interesting topics. And if you're really sure you don't want to use topics, you can always just make a single "general" topic in your stream.

yulaow 7y ago

My team uses it since a year, it works flawlessly for what we need.

it33 7y ago
Mattermost CEO here, thanks yulaow!! Our contributors love comments like this, hugely appreciated,

mikece 7y ago

The article talks about Hipchat as a competitor but HipChat was shut down by Atlassian and HipChat users were strongly encouraged to adopt Slack: https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack

jjeaff 7y ago
Just for clarity, Hipchat users were strongly encouraged to move to Slack because slack purchased Hipchat from Atlassian.
- jnwatson 7y ago
  Only because Atlassian abandoned HipChat after trying to replace it.
alias_neo 7y ago
> HipChat was shut down by Atlassian Not entirely accurate. It's was bought by Slack, and then shut down.
- orliesaurus 7y ago
  Didn't they just buy the userbase? I don't think they bought the technology - they also made a lot of devs redundant after the purchase?
  - saghul 7y ago
    They bought the IP, not the product.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    I'm not sure the exact details of the purchase, I just know that a deadline was placed on our HipChat installation at work (it would not be renewed, and only supported until date X). It seems their ultimate goal was to shut down a competitor, so, with the result being the same, I suppose the specifics matter very little.

jjeaff 7y ago

I have a small team, but about a year ago, we deployed Mattermost on our K8s cluster using their Helm chart and I have been very pleased with the performance and stability. We never looked back at slack. I have not had to fiddle with the configuration at all since deploying it. It just works. And that is also considering that to save costs, I launched it on preemptible instances which go down usually once every 24 hours. Mattermost recovers and reboots flawlessly every time.

arminiusreturns 7y ago
Did you do any integrations for voice chat?
- it33 7y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, Zoom plug-in is built in so one click for starting a Zoom meeting. There is also some voice features in our latest hackathon: https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-hackathon-2019-highlights/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-hackathon-2019-highli... (see mobile apps section). Where either of these what you were interested in?
- jasonblais 7y ago
  Hi, Mattermost PM here. We also have other voice, video and screenshare integrations, including self-hosted on-prem and private cloud options. Zoom, Webex, BigBlueButton, WebRTC and more: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/video-and-audio-calling.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/video-and-audio-calli...
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    Cool, thank you both. I think WebRTC or Jitsi are closest to what I would be looking for, as I want to keep it open source, but I appreciate the Zoom and other integrations for how they could be useful to business. You guys might consider Mumble/Murmur integration, I think it could be a great addition, as it was my favorite voice app before Discord took over everything (still is).

alias_neo 7y ago

We've been using Hipchat for years at $work. There's very little is say is "good" about it, it was just the best option at the time as it needed to be self-hosted. Mattermost is being trialled now, pasting code doesn't seem a lot better, but the overall experience is. As a place that likes Go/Docker it has potential for us.

askafriend 7y ago
The "$work" notation could be mistaken for the Slack stock ticker. The "$" is how you commonly denote stocks, and "WORK" is the ticker for Slack.
- jamie_ca 7y ago
  The $ dates back to either shell scripting or perl (and applies to PHP as well), and this is a reasonably common usage in tech/programming circles. See also $dayjob. It's unfortunate that there's a specific terminology conflict in this case.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  Apologies, I had no idea. I was simply placing a variable for "insert workplace here".
robohoe 7y ago
What issues did you have with pasting code in it? It supports Markdown so it supports whatever a typical README.md would.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  It just didn't always behave and syntax highlighting didn't work at all sometimes; but it may have been that the system as a whole was misconfigured.
  - it33 7y ago
    Mattermost CEO here, thanks for trying us out! Would love to squash the bug for you, open to filing an issue?> https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/new https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/new We used to send bug coins just for release candidates, but if you find a bug in production you get one too now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6FJsdE_aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6FJsdE_aY

zer00eyz 7y ago

This space is downright awful. 20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint). They put one there on the back of a PBX. They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to. It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone). We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.

davidw 7y ago
> We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it. IRC works pretty well. The only thing I sometimes miss is history, but... in some ways that's not a bad thing, and could be added without too much trouble. Slack has history because Slack wants you to live in it. No history emphasizes that chat is ephemeral and something to tune in and out. Use email or something else for more permanent discussions.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  You can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1] to get history and make some folks happy that prefer using a http client. [1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
- ergothus 7y ago
  > Use email or something else for more permanent discussions. I don't actually agree with this. Email has hefty overhead per message. Chat allows for faster and easier communications, which does NOT mean you can't have a history. Indeed, history and search is the real selling point of Slack for me. Everything else Slack has over IRC is trivial and not worth abandoning the standards.
  - antisthenes 7y ago
    I didn't really feel the overhead of email until Gmail switched to their current theme. Now everything feels so sluggish and unwieldy that it really does constitute overhead, in real time seconds. Whenever I used a native desktop software, like Thunderbird or Opera Mail, I was able to have conversations with people as quickly as in a chat client (and faster than texting, because of a real keyboard)

gmenegatti 7y ago

Rocket.chat is also a very nice alternative and supports more use cases. We use it internally and also as part of our product.

oso2k 7y ago
I completely concur. We used Rocket.Chat (running containerized on OpenShift, our Kubernetes distro) for a time at Red Hat to support the bulk of Red Hat Consulting. Many thousands of messages per minute sustained throughput. All of Red Hat has "restandardized" in the last year but I personally miss Rocket.Chat.

moedersmooiste 7y ago

Does Mattermost still have LDAP issues? The company I work for was looking for a Slack alternative but in the end decided to stick with Slack because of this.

CreatedAccount 7y ago
What do you mean by LDAP issues? You don't get ldap with a free license, but there are still ways to get ldap auth despite that. (For instance, https://medium.com/p/mattermost-teams-edition-replacing-gitlab-sso-with-keycloak-dabf13ebb99e https://medium.com/p/mattermost-teams-edition-replacing-gitl...)
jasonblais 7y ago
Thanks moedersmooiste, Mattermost PM here. Would be curious to hear more about your LDAP issues. We have many organizations who have deployed with LDAP, including with group sync to teams and channels. Those eligible for a nonprofit license can also get the benefits of E10 offering (including LDAP) with special pricing https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/

subsaharancoder 7y ago

Uber currently uses Mattermost but will most likely move to Slack. During my 2 years at Amazon, the SFO based Prime Now team used Mattermost but we were eventually forced to move to Chime a pitiful example of a chat client.

it33 7y ago
Mattermost CEO here, if Amazon is open to it, I’d love to see if there is a “Better together” story across AWS, Chime (meetings, voice, video, screen sharing) and Mattermost (developer, Ops and SRE workflows and integrations). We’ve heard the same from different Amazon teams looking to accelerate developer productivity
- bubba1236 7y ago
  don't waste ur time they're pushing chime hard at Amazon lol
  - it33 7y ago
    True, but everywhere else they are pushing Teams hard for general users. Mattermost is already certified on Aurora, we work with S3, it's available in AWS Marketplace--if there's a dev team at Amazon interested in an open source alternative to Slack that runs natively on AWS infra--potentially connects with Chime for voice/video/meetings/screenshare it's potentially a healthy thing for everyone.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Yeah. But. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 Non-admins can delete/archive any channel #6320

duskwuff 7y ago
What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially controversial opinion: This isn't really open source. When major features like permissions and access controls are stripped from the "community" version of a software package, it starts looking more like a feature-limited demo.
- type0 7y ago
  > more like a feature-limited demo. demoware
  - syvanen 7y ago
    Shareware is making a comeback?
    - type0 7y ago
      It's worse than that, expectation are different and actually doing disservice to the whole open source ethos. I recently heard a couple of regular users talking and equating Free Software//Open Source with Freeware, I didn't bother correcting them because from their perspective the difference is meaningless. Only us geeks care enough, but not enough to go and fork it.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  I think "all team members are admins" is more usable than you think it is; I generally do this for many cloud services on most of my teams even at my day job; it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control, setting it up, and then someone who can't do what they need to do for their job cause you didn't give them enough access, or the only person who can do what needs done is on vacation, etc. I often say "We don't have (or use the) locks on our doors at our physical individual offices, but that doesn't mean any of us would go into someone elses office when they aren't there and trash everything on their desk. And it's not a problem. What makes electronic resources different?" [I know HN audience will now give me an exhaustive list of what makes electronic resources different; please don't bother; I know this approach doesn't always work. With physical offices either]. But I agree with you that that level of feature-crippling makes me want to all it more like demoware than open source.

gregf 7y ago

I been a mattermost user for two years, can't say enough good things about it. Love that it's written in go. We run ours with very little resources and it still chugs along.

bathtub365 7y ago
Why does it matter what it’s written in?
- sonthonax 7y ago
  Go will often be faster than NodeJS. It can also be deployed as a binary rather than a blob of Node modules.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Why does any of that truly matter? What matters most is if it meets the needs of people using the product, not what language it is written in nor how it is deployed.
    - buckminster 7y ago
      Cost matters too. If one solution needs more hardware or is a pain to deploy then these are additional costs that need to be taken into account.
    - type0 7y ago
      Fairly anecdotal but feature breakages usually more common in Node apps than Go, it does "matter:most" for end users. It's not because of Node itself but the sheer amount of npm packages what's responsible for those.
    - gramakri 7y ago
      I guess it matters to people who deploy the app and not the users as such.
    - shantly 7y ago

Tharkun 7y ago

I like Mattermost. My only gripe with it is that it's a bit of a pain to upgrade. Would be nice if they were to automate the upgrade procedure.

gramakri 7y ago
We support Mattermost on Cloudron which automates app updates. disclaimer: co-founder of cloudron.io
the_icelander 7y ago
Check out the Kubernetes operator, which handles zero-downtime upgrades as well as blue/green deployments and canary builds: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-operator https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-operator

secfirstmd 7y ago

I'm a big Mattermost fan but it really needs end to ends encryption. Also the Android mobile app is pretty weak.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Standard tls between server and client helps against any outside threat. The only threat from which e2ee helps better than tls comes from the server admin. Now, do you REALLY need end to end encryption to protect yourself from a person running your team chat server?
- secfirstmd 7y ago
  Well I mean Matrix/Riot.im has that function.
- the_icelander 7y ago
  Not for business, but if you want to get your friends on a chat server it would be easier if they knew you couldn't see everything they said.

bob1029 7y ago

We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything. I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment failed for our developers, so we now maintain 2 stacks - Teams for company-wide communications, and Mattermost for developer-intensive communications (or anyone else willing to teach themselves how to use a new thing). Mattermost has proven to be an incredible solution for our development duties. I just installed it directly on a EC2 t3.small instance and we've been using it for about 9 months now without any pain points to speak of. I literally haven't touched that machine since I turned it on day 1. To be fair, we are <10 developers, but we get pretty heavy with the screenshots and json/code dumps throughout the day. We did make some compromises with authentication in favor of expediency of deployment, but it's really not a big deal for our developers to keep track of their LDAP vs their mattermost credentials. If someone complains enough I'll spend a few hours to hook up LDAP too.

andybak 7y ago
So - non-developers resisted Slack or Slack-like things? That's interesting. I'm a developer but I find it easy to empathize with non-developers because I hate any tech orthogonal to the actual task at hand that requires a learning curve. I usually find that other things have pushed that thing out of my brain by the time I have to use it again. Unlike most developers I'm no fan of Markdown (I can manage links and list formatting in a WYSIWIG editor without needing to reach for the docs. I hate reading docs). I've got the hang of Slack but I tire of teaching new adopters the correct etiquette and usage that means they don't overly interrupt those of us that have tuned their notifications. Or teaching people how to ensure their messages aren't missed entirely.
- bob1029 7y ago
  I share some of your resentment for having to learn new things to engage in what is arguably a trivial activity at this point in time - sharing (formatted) text or other media with your teammates. This is probably a factor in why many of our users prefer "simpler" approaches... At least from their perspective. One would argue markdown is simpler and faster than using any MS Word-style interface if you are experienced in its syntax and rules. Learning markdown is pretty easy for many developers, and for some it becomes 2nd nature when typing into things that support it on a regular basis: Git[Hub/Lab], Slack, Mattermost, WhatsApp (partial support), etc. The value-add as you put additional markdown-enabled platforms into your workflow is pretty substantial. I don't have to do a mental context switch every time I go between editing a GitHub issue comment and typing some code block to another developer in Mattermost. You can create some really nice looking README.md files if you spend a little extra time with things like headings and quote/code blocks. I believe there are several options (one hosted in GitHub's API if you prefer GFM) for taking MD files and generating high-quality HTML or PDF output. I'd conclude by saying that markdown documents are much easier to source control. Taking a diff of a docx or a pdf is going to get you nowhere. A diff of a markdown file might as well just be a diff of any arbitrary plain text document. The syntax itself has a very small footprint, so you are looking at mostly just plain text minus 5-10% overhead on the markdown.

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

Could anyone elaborate as to how Microsoft Teams overtook Slack so quickly?

kube-system 7y ago
They put it in Office 365, migrated over Skype For Business users, and made the starting price $0.
Chyzwar 7y ago
It is free (bundled with office 365). Lots of places prefer to save a few dollars per person and loose hundreds in productivity.
- galacticdessert 7y ago
  This. At work we use it because it is already included in our Office365 subscription, but it is so painfully slow. Really, unbelievably slow.
- e12e 7y ago
  Well, it's not free (or gratis) is it? It just happens to be included in the azure ad/o365/exchange plans? So, if you're on gsuite, for example - ms teams isn't "free"?
- mderazon 7y ago
  Same is true for Google Hangouts Chat and you don't see anyone using that...
kmlx 7y ago
> Could anyone elaborate as to how Microsoft Teams overtook Slack so quickly? easy. they didn't: https://twitter.com/msquinn/status/1179874609899827200 https://twitter.com/msquinn/status/1179874609899827200 https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/21/microsoft-teams-giddy-growth-looks-impressive-but-it-doesnt-tell-the-full-story/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/21/microsoft-teams-giddy-gro... MSFT decided that one clear way to increase their share price is for their new product to run at all times for everyone.

aidenn0 7y ago

Last I checked, Jabber could completely replace all of these things except there were no good iPhone clients. Anyone know of an even remotely usable iPhone Jabber client?

theamk 7y ago
Last time I checked, you had to have a very specific server/client combo for very basic features like mobile app, offline messages, and multi-device message history. Grabbing a random server or client may result in some (or all) features missing. That’s why we recommended Slack for the next workplace. No chance to get anything wrong, and no need for backups either.

bblpeter 7y ago

That’s the problem with Slack — too easy to switch to equivalent or superior alternatives. I suspect this issue will continue to weigh on their stock price.

sircastor 7y ago

For a while we used Mattermost at my office. At the time we had a handful of startups in our incubator. Eventually we ended up switching to Slack. I don't think it had to do with anything other than momentum and popularity of Slack, in spite of Mattermost accomplishing the same thing with virtually the same interface, people just liked and wanted to be on Slack...

AzzieElbab 7y ago
Slack is using cloud/external storage. Many companies have policies against that,making MM is surprisingly popular in banks and such. Personally, can't tell the difference between two

mderazon 7y ago

Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product. We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite But - The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results - Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent - App doesn't see any meaningful updates - The Android app is so crappy I don't even know when to begin. Try initiating a conversation with some person by searching them. Or try sharing something from Android to a channel only to realize you cannot search for the channel in the list - Api to write bots is pretty badly designed - When you edit your message you cannot mention people anymore - Deleted GSuite users just keep floating around as ghosts I give this product a year top before it is canned

outworlder 7y ago
> since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results Not for long, as it's been killed and is now moribund.
outime 7y ago
I stopped using it about a year ago and was quite dissatisfied as well. Kinda thought they’d put a bit more effort to create a good product afterwards but somehow it looks like a low priority thing for Google. I don’t know why, they could be a very solid competitor and maybe even have an excuse to raise GSuite prices.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  Google products experience a self-fullfilling prophecy of not getting serious effort put into them because everyone expects Google to kill it in 16 months, so it never takes off with users, so Google cuts the project. The really goats part is that the engagement levels that Google considers to be "crap" would make any SV startup a darling Unicorn in their next funding round. But compared to making money hand over fist on click-fraud-plagued ads, it just can't compete.
moron4hire 7y ago
It's amazing just how bad Google's UIs are, across all their products. There are two different versions of "archived" in Gmail. Maps hides options for types of routes under a settings menu under a screen fold (rather than toggles when you ask for alternate routes). Basic Android features like "stop a process" moves location seemingly every year. I was so confused by GCP that I just went with Azure and got on with life. I find Apple's interfaces confusing because I've been a Windows developer for 20 years, but at least they seem to stay consistent. Microsoft is in the middle of completely revamping their settings UI, but I agree with the forgot they are going on and they at least didn't delete the old UIs. WTF is wrong with Google?

sjburt 7y ago

The biggest problem with Mattermost is that the mobile client cannot connect to multiple teams. You can add the beta client and connect to a second team, but more than two teams is impossible. This may be a function of living in the Bay Area but I'm on 4 or 5 different Slack groups for various communities. All but my employer would be in great shape to switch to Mattermost but it's just not possible. Some have switched to Discourse but it's not great for real-time communication and people have a hard time with the UI.

it33 7y ago
Thanks sjburt, Mattermost CEO here. We have 800+ upvotes that agree with you, here a link to the feature proposal forum post and open tickets on this: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/10975938-ios-and-android-apps-should-allow-multiple-server https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge... Anyone interested in contributing to the work, we’d welcome your help
- saagarjha 7y ago
  The ticket you linked to said the feature is “planned”, so I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’d welcome help. Are you working on this internally (and as such this is essentially a “we’re looking for mobile engineers”) or are you soliciting contributions from the open source community to work on this?
  - it33 7y ago
    Ticket is unscheduled, work is open source, if you're interested in contributing please comment on the ticket and the team can discuss: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 On hiring, yes, we're hiring too, that's perhaps the most committed route to take: https://mattermost.com/careers/ https://mattermost.com/careers/

jiberwarrior 7y ago

As some commenters pointed out, the name "MatterMost" might be a crucial thing holding this from reaching the development mainstream as an alternative to slack/teams, which aren't very dev friendly

gaogao 7y ago

> The company was founded in 2011 as “SpinPunch, Inc”, an HTML5 game engine developer. Neat that both Mattermost and Slack have the same origin story of game developers building an internal chat app and then pivoting to that.

antioedipus 7y ago

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935 As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.

marktangotango 7y ago
In my experience, the competition is pidgin slash outlook communicator slash whatever brain dead enterprise messaging app. Not slack (or hipchat or...). Mattermost has seen a lot of adoption atthe Big Dumb Corps I’ve seen. That’s my take on the market at least. I’d buy stock in it if I could.
deleted 7y ago
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sneak 7y ago
As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home. It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/utils/license.go https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...
- 7y ago

lillesvin 7y ago

I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could maybe even reclaim some of my RAM and get to choose a client to my preference (which is not an Electron app).

shric 7y ago
The only reason I haven't advocated replacing Slack with IRC is it lacks a sensible way of keeping history. Everyone either has to keep their client running and connected all the time (usually this is only feasible with tmux/screen on a server), rely on bouncer hacks, or something like IRCCloud which maintains the connection for you but is proprietary and not self-hostable.
- VectorLock 7y ago
  This is the big thing that IRC would need to have to make it on parity with Slack. A bit more involved than a trivial change.
- mgbmtl 7y ago
  I use https://riot.im https://riot.im for IRC for some channels. It stays connected, keeps archives, etc. For small communities, I recommend Mattermost or Rocket Chat. I used to be a die-hard fan of irssi inside tmux, but seeing how tiny usability issues can really cause adoption issues, I wouldn't even recommend riot.im to less technical people.
VectorLock 7y ago
>I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. I've heard this so many times I'm surprised nobody has done it yet. You'd need a client-proxy, or server extension to detect idle desktop clients so you can route messages to a mobile device, for maximum "life work balance."

alexnewman 7y ago

The days of free as in sabotage are over. Linux broke it.

tptacek 7y ago

One more differentiating factor for Mattermost is its extra special focus security. The product offers the industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities across all devices. Isn't Mattermost fundamentally the same thing, architecturally, as Slack? Slack has one of the industry's stronger security teams. I don't see the differentiator here.

athenot 7y ago
I'm a big fan of Mattermost but industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities might be a tad exaggerated. By way of comparison, I will indulge in a shameless plug for Webex Teams: our customers have the option of hosting their own key server, on-premise, under their control. We have no ways of seeing any content in messages: payload and title are encrypted and participants are IDs that are usually federated with their own identity provider. Decryption happens locally in the desktop/mobile client, after obtaining the right keys. Yes that's more computationally expensive and carries some complexity. But it's a very different model than just building a single big vault of data. And it also works when users in 2 different companies talk to each other, both with their own key servers. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cloudCollaboration/spark/hybridservices/datasecurity/cmgt_b_hybrid-data-security/cmgt_b_deployment-guide-for-hybrid-data_chapter_00.html#concept_74088EF79823B0DD92298C21924E6EC3 https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cloudCol...

jetru 7y ago

Used Mattermost for a year, and I can attest to it's shittiness. There is a bug during switching channels that pins your view to some random location weeks before the latest post. The result is that switching channel in Mattermost has a 60% chance of requiring you to spend the next 30 seconds scrolling the window to the bottommost-recent-message. Horrible.

it33 7y ago
Mattermost CEO here. That is a terrible experience. Could I ask your help go to "About Mattermost" and let us know the version where you saw the bug? Opened a ticket here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/13422 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/13422
Walf 7y ago
That's no good, but wouldn't hitting/holding your `End` key be faster?
jasonblais 7y ago
Mattermost PM here, I agree that this is not a good experience, thank you for sharing @jetru. There is development in progress to let you jump directly to new messages when you land on the oldest unread message in a channel. This lets you get directly to the latest message. I'm not entirely sure if this is the same use case you have, but if you're open to testing the new development and share feedback, we'd love to hear! Pull request with an open test server is available here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/4132#issuecomment-566993406 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/4132#is...

maxpert 7y ago

Love the fact people are adopting Opensource solutions but corporates won’t budge. I think the hardest penetration for anyone right now is Microsoft Teams. Since they started bundling teams with Office they have been able to boast about numbers and actually hurt Slack. I wonder what is roadmap for Mattermost. Shameless plug I myself did an opensource version of a chat server called raspchat https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat which was able to handle almost 5K very active chatters on a Raspberry Pi Model B (Just 512 MB of RAM). My original dream was to build a drop and run server on cheap raspberry pi for local areas but man has to feed his family and I had to make a tough choice. It’s harsh IMHO out there to get attention and then convince folks to develop integrations for you. I hope this space doesn’t endup with duopoly and products like Mattermost take off.

it33 7y ago
Mattermost CEO here, Awesome work on raspchat! And thanks for the kind words. Often we see users and customers have both Microsoft Teams for Office365 users and Mattermost as the "developer's choice" given the open source code base and flexibility in high security environments. Per the article, the market is very large, and there's many different user segments to serve. Therefore there should be multiple winners here, in my mind. I think this category is only just starting.
indigochill 7y ago
In my org we have Teams and Slack (and Skype for Business!). Corporate (and our one token diehard Microsoft fanboy) gave a weak effort at pushing Teams, but everyone was already on one of the other two so for us Teams is just sitting on our computers like an appendix that's useless but also just enough effort to cut out that it stays in.
- dijit 7y ago
  I have the inverse. The only thing _everyone_ is on is teams. Slack is too expensive and introducing yet another chat program is not going to be met with anything other than resistance. I really dislike teams.
7y ago

shmerl 7y ago

It's not using Matrix? What's the point in making an open source however non federated IM service?

detaro 7y ago
Many companies using such a system wouldn't even want federation, and it adds a bunch of complexity.
- shmerl 7y ago
  So run a local server and turn federation off. Like you can run a private e-mail server. Why not use and contribute to the common protocol that does allow federation? I see no point for a FOSS project in proliferating non federated IM protocols, and wasting resources on that, while federated ones still didn't even reach wide adoption.
  - detaro 7y ago
    Because then you're bound to the common protocol and it's development process, which is a waste if you have no intention of using federation.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      I view it the opposite way. It's waste of time to reinvent the wheel and not concentrate resources. Federated protocol can be used without federation fine, but not the other way around. For FOSS projects, not doing it is strange, especially when lack of adoption for federated options is still a major global problem. So I'd question the intent behind this particular project. For those who don't care about openness (like Slack), I'd expect such behavior. But for open projects - not really.
- kqr 7y ago
  That might be true for many companies, but I think also that many companies could benefit from federation -- they just don't know it. It has been standard practise everywhere I've worked that in business-to-business relations, people have to create accounts for each other's Slack networks. That is ridiculous. Imagine having to sign up for separate email accounts on the email servers of all of your customers. It just wouldn't be acceptable other than in extreme circumstances; you already have an email account -- why shouldn't you be able to email with your customers/suppliers/vendors from that? But we accept it with IM because we're so jaded by now. Though if federation was a more well understood concept, I'm sure multiple of the companies I've worked at would jump at the chance of not putting its business relations through the pain of registering dozens of accounts to IM with different people.

pyrosome 7y ago

Does anyone have legal experience and know what the restrictions are to forking of the Mattermost project? I'm a programmer with experience in backend development and security and would be willing to donate some time to work on developing a stronger community implementation of Mattermost - only I'm not sure what the legally correct way is to go about it. What I'm hoping to find is a FOSS sherpa to help me navigate setting up a new project.

saagarjha 7y ago
The Mattermost source code is AGPL. Fork away!

asah 7y ago

My Fortune 500 healthcare company successfully uses Mattermost because the lawyers aren't comfortable with us using slack. It's been great. Thank you @it33 and team. p.s. we haven't run into the issue 6320 (users archiving channels), for exactly the reasons @it33 described in the issue report. He didn't explain it well, but permissions is a complex rathole, un-archive is a simple workflow for admins and if there's continued abuse, just ban the user.

it33 7y ago
Thanks for wording it so much more concisely and clearly! Love your post, sharing it here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#issuecomment-567051983 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#...