4 ms·

It's got a beautiful landing page, but I don't understand the key benefits over Slack. Has any of the reasons for building it changed since you started the pro

It's got a beautiful landing page, but I don't understand the key benefits over Slack. Has any of the reasons for building it changed since you started the project in 2012?

benbristow 7y ago
I love Slack but if you get a big enough team you start losing messages quickly on the free tier to the void and it's expensive to upgrade. Stuff like this and Mattermost/RocketChat could be handy. Fling on a VM/Container Host of your choice and job's a good'un. Also probably good if your company has to adhere to certain data security legislations keeping the instance firewalled and not giving data to Slack.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I first want to say I think companies should be paid for their services. Everybody's first complaint is that history isn't preserved with Slack's free tier, but in practice it tends to enforce that those things should be in something more permanent and organized than chat.
kemayo 7y ago
At my workplace the main Slack-objection is ideological, on the grounds that we shouldn't be supporting a closed-source project when open-source options exist. But we're an ideological non-profit, so we're unusually aligned in this direction...
CleanCoder 7y ago
Given the current data handling practices I believe it might be appealing to many companies/individuals to keep as much in-house as possible.
- jamesponddotco 7y ago
  True. We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com. Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.
hhaidar 7y ago
Original author here. I started the project in my early 20s when I had lots of free time. Slack didn't really exist back then and the other web based chat offerings weren't great (our company used Campfire). I gradually stopped working on it as I got busier in both work and life. Part of me regrets not spinning it off as a company, especially after seeing RocketChat take off over the last couple years (we inspired them!).

It's got a beautiful landing page, but I don't understand the key benefits over Slack. Has any of the reasons for building it changed since you started the project in 2012?

benbristow 7y ago

I love Slack but if you get a big enough team you start losing messages quickly on the free tier to the void and it's expensive to upgrade. Stuff like this and Mattermost/RocketChat could be handy. Fling on a VM/Container Host of your choice and job's a good'un. Also probably good if your company has to adhere to certain data security legislations keeping the instance firewalled and not giving data to Slack.

pfranz 7y ago
I first want to say I think companies should be paid for their services. Everybody's first complaint is that history isn't preserved with Slack's free tier, but in practice it tends to enforce that those things should be in something more permanent and organized than chat.

kemayo 7y ago

At my workplace the main Slack-objection is ideological, on the grounds that we shouldn't be supporting a closed-source project when open-source options exist. But we're an ideological non-profit, so we're unusually aligned in this direction...

CleanCoder 7y ago

Given the current data handling practices I believe it might be appealing to many companies/individuals to keep as much in-house as possible.

jamesponddotco 7y ago
True. We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com. Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.

hhaidar 7y ago

Original author here. I started the project in my early 20s when I had lots of free time. Slack didn't really exist back then and the other web based chat offerings weren't great (our company used Campfire). I gradually stopped working on it as I got busier in both work and life. Part of me regrets not spinning it off as a company, especially after seeing RocketChat take off over the last couple years (we inspired them!).