8 ms·

We Switched to Mattermost

246 points by gz5 5y ago

edoceo 5y ago
My small team uses and loves Mattermost. It's a great FOSS project. And, direct access to the PG database has been awesome for integrations. (Watch out tho, seems to be missing a bunch of FKs (that I think should be there))
- it33 5y ago
  Thanks @edoceo! Mattermost CEO here, appreciated the feedback. Just curious, what foreign keys do you feel should be added?
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Well, users aren't FKd to their messages for one. And basically every table with a user_id column. My install created none. My contact is in my profile if you want more info
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
reilly3000 5y ago
The content marketing came on a little strong for me, but a good post nonetheless. Messaging is the heart of a remote org and it should be “on premise” by default.
- gz5 5y ago
  Well said. We are strong believers in open source and zero trust but reading the post with fresh eyes instead of writing it does make me realize there are some parts of that post in which we can dial back our enthusiasm (OP here). Thanks for the candid comment.
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    That said, it worked on me :) I've subjected people to using VPNs and I would rather have a worse security posture than to do that again. I'm really intrigued by Netfoundry and agentless zero-trust networking. I've POC'ed ZeroTier + whitelisting but doing so in the app sounds like a great approach!
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Messaging is the heart of a remote org and it should be “on premise” by default Really not sure about that. I work at an MSP/MHP that has infrastructure everywhere ( multiple DCs, AWS, Azure, GCP, OVH, etc.) and recently we had a huge network outage at a few of our on-prem DCs due to a firmware bug in some redundant networking equipment. Having the communications software "in the cloud" allowed collaboration on fixing and communicating about the issue. Sometimes it's a good idea not to have all the eggs in one basket. In a similar vein, if your "on-prem" is dead, how do you access the documentation helping you debug/connect/etc.?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    Having multiple comms channels totally makes sense. I quoted “on premise” as most remote orgs are pretty much all cloud (though some may use colo)- which is really to say on hardware where a SaaS vendor doesn’t hold the keys. I can’t imagine how catastrophic a Slack hack would be for many orgs, and in that scenario you’re entirely dependent on their security and disclosure. It’s completely within their TOS to read your messages for various purposes, along with any apps that have been given access. That’s a pretty weak security posture if dealing with secret IP or other sensitive info. While nothing is guaranteed to be secure, limiting access to your team only seems like a smarter place to start for those who need privacy. Many companies really don’t, or at least accept a small level of risk. In terms of losing systems that you need to access while troubleshooting systems issues, that can be a mess with self-hosted tools, but nobody is immune. When AWS had a cascading network failure at US -East-1, their team was unable to access their logging service which made triage incredibly difficult. That’s super rare, and unlikely to happen again for AWS in that manner, but outages can cripple any ops team. Runbooks are a great thing to copy offline!
  - vbernat 5y ago
    As for documentation, it is quite easy to have it available offline.
- serial_dev 5y ago
  I don't think the messaging platform should always be on-premise. You can consider running it on premise, but it's not an obvious decision. I worked on a couple of teams, and somehow no IT team could make the chat apps run reliably: we always had disconnects, terrible loading times, lost messages and we had to jump through hoops to enable the most basic integrations. No regular updates, outdated apps that are years behind in looks, features and integrations. Whenever we just simply used Slack, it was snappy, reliable, and it was easy to set up connectors for different external services.
duffpkg 5y ago
The open source release of mattermost has a lot of underutilized potential in the healthcare industry.
- gz5 5y ago
  What is the attitude in the healthcare industry towards FOSS, and what are the barriers to greater adoption (of any open source)?
  - viraptor 5y ago
    This may differ between countries, but locally - knowing a specific app exists. A clinic buys software that fulfills the requirements and knows nothing about the license. As long as someone can install it, operate it and provide support, it can be literally anything. As long as the decision makers know something is available and actually provides value (and the decision makers are not stubborn and set in their ways for decades), it will be implemented. Caveat - people writing most medical/billing software don't have any incentive to release it as FOSS and they have more money for promotion than any FOSS project.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    At least in Germany, its healthcare digitalization agency gematik recently chose to base their interoperable messaging infrastructure on Matrix. (https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthcare-system-adopts-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthc...)
  - npteljes 5y ago
    Open Source doesn't have the well-funded salesmen to sell the solutions. And the other thing might be support.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      ...sell the solutions and provide kickbacks under the table. Bribery is very common in large software sales.
xvilka 5y ago
I can also recommend a console client (in Haskell) - Matterhorn [1]. For me, the biggest obstacle right now is the lack of support of chat categories in mobile [2] client and Matterhorn [3]. These chat categories are available in the web interface. [1] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn [2] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile/issues/5387 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile/issues/5387 [3] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn/issues/711 https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn/issues/711
- it33 5y ago
  Thanks @xvilka, Mattermost CEO here. Categories are a new feature, in beta in a lot of deployments. It’ll take a little bit for the other clients to catch up. Definitely one of the most popular new features.
nemosaltat 5y ago
I have a large family (many siblings, their SOs, some siblings of SOs, some cousins, etc). Many of us are not on Social Media, and the “group text” became untenable. I was able to get everyone to buy in on Slack sometime in 2017… it was great for awhile. Eventually, we hit message limits, and I wasn’t thrilled about Slacks data policies. After a bit of research, I landed on Mattermost. I explained the reason for the shift, and migrated the whole family over sometime in 2019. As far as the family is concerned, the process was painless, and other than the lack of collapsible threads (recently fixed as mentioned in TIFA!) everything has been great. I run the whole thing on a $5/mo VULTR VM, that also also acts as a WireGuard and PiHole server. On the backend, I’ve only had one major bump [0]- I went too long between server upgrades (I think I jumped from 5.21 to 5.29). The SQL encoding changed and caused messages to stay “unread.” Took me a day to find/correct the issue, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. [0] https://forum.mattermost.org/t/solved-after-upgrading-to-5-29-messages-fail-to-mark-as-read/10816 https://forum.mattermost.org/t/solved-after-upgrading-to-5-2...
- gz5 5y ago
  As former Slack users, threaded messaging is huge for us. I wonder if teams who landed on Mattermost before using an alternative which used threaded messaging feel the same way? Note: you do need to flip the feature flag to try it out: Account Settings > Display > Collapsed Reply Threads (Beta).
  - paulddraper 5y ago
    Threads are deal killer for Slack. Twist is kinda unreliable and flaky. But I'll put up with anything to get sane threading.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    I don't understand this post, are you saying threaded messaging in Slack is good?
  - snuxoll 5y ago
    Personally I cannot stand threaded messaging - maybe it’s the IRC user in me, but I cannot stand having new messages randomly pop up at random points instead of at the bottom. If you have a discussion that is longer term or needs a separate context then spin it off to a different/new channel, otherwise I’ll spend forever searching for it again anyway.
paxys 5y ago
Title: Why we switched to Mattermost Entire article: Try this cool product of ours!
- it33 5y ago
  Thanks @paxys, Mattermost CEO here. I appreciate your comment and I can see where you’re coming from. At the same time, if people are using our open source project to showcase their work, I am a fan. We definitely do that ourselves talking about React, React Native and Golang :)
dustingetz 5y ago
.
- it33 5y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, what are your thoughts on this page? https://mattermost.org/ https://mattermost.org/ We go back and forth on whether we should have a .org and a .com, curious as to your thoughts.
  - dustingetz 5y ago
    I googled you, i saw this https://imgur.com/lvEaBCQ https://imgur.com/lvEaBCQ got extremely confused and never new the .org existed until your comment
    - it33 5y ago
      Thanks @dustingetz, makes sense, we should spend some extra time looking at how we show up on Google, much appreciated!
  - yashasolutions 5y ago
    .org and .com is common practice for many project - just maybe should make sure there is a link between 2 sites - I checked your site .com and even when opensource is mentionnned, it's on the .com site - instead of linking to the .org... just my 2cents
    - it33 5y ago
      Thanks @yashasolutions, makes sense, we should take a look at those, highly appreciate the feedback!
  - JoBrad 5y ago
    I don’t know what the parent comment said, but more screenshots on your site would be great! The .org site you linked to had screenshots on the front page, which was great, but a gallery link would be fantastic.
mushufasa 5y ago
seems like this faced the hug of death. I would be curious whether they considered Zulip or any of the other open source chat alternatives in this decision, and how they compared. my sense is that chat is one of those areas where there's not so much obvious differentiation from the outside, and a lot of stickiness once you land somewhere, which implies there will remain 5-10 players in the space for some time to come.
karaterobot 5y ago
I've been running a MM server for about three years. It's been great, though lately I've been a little worried about it. They added stuff like in-app marketing to admins, under the guise of being helpful — you know, teaching us about exciting new premium features — oh, and by the way, you can't turn it off. When apps start to do things like that, it feels like more drastic monetization strategies can't be far behind.
- it33 5y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, sorry to hear you had a negative experience with the admin adviser. Thank you for the feedback. Mattermost Team Edition is designed for teams (I.e. groups of people that work together and trust each other) and there were issues when Team Edition was deployed to unintended use cases—-like hosting hundreds of users, saving millions of posts, or other scenarios outside of what a team was meant to do. Admin adviser was meant to help admins who hit those scenarios, and some of the advisory in scenarios Team Edition wasn’t intended to handle was for the Enterprise Edition. It sounds like that came across the wrong way and we should revisit. Note: I think a fair chunk of admin advisor was paused a while ago. Not sure how much is running these days. Regardless we should take a look.
  - mgbmtl 5y ago
    Any suggestions for FOSS communities? I run a fairly big instance with hundreds of users. We wanted to support/promote a more free/libre alternative to Slack, but you are basically saying we should not use Mattermost? (I think that channel deletion was a concern at some point, but archiving mitigates it, we are happy users in general)
    - jasonblais 5y ago
      Hi, Mattermost PM here, We offer a non-profit license for open-source projects [0] with special nonprofit pricing. We also plan to move the System Permissions Scheme into the open source Team Edition with the 6.0 release on September 15 [1]. Thanks for being a user, feedback is always welcome! [0] https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ [1] https://forum.mattermost.org/t/granular-permissions-coming-soon-to-team-edition/11929 https://forum.mattermost.org/t/granular-permissions-coming-s...
bachmeier 5y ago
A couple things stand out to me about Mattermost: 1. It's the most expensive chat out there, at $10/month and no free plan. 2. Focalboard is being integrated to be part of the chat. Focalboard doesn't currently do much that I find interesting, but I have hope that it will with time.
- it33 5y ago
  Hi @bachmeier, thanks for the feedback! On 1), our SaaS version is equivalent to our higher end Enterprise Edition E20 and aimed at larger orgs. For small orgs we have the open source version that can be easily self-hosted. That said, it sounds like price is material for you, so maybe there’s something we can do at a lower price tier, with features closer to our open source product. On 2), Focalboard is still in its early days. We are using it internally and with early adopters of the open source version and are pretty excited about where it could go—replacing Trello, Asana, Notion, Jire, Confluence on-prem and as SaaS in the long run, and on an open source platform you can customize. Our hope is in future there could be a “Why we switched to Mattermost and Focalboard” with a blog post on replacing a fair chunk of the collaboration stack with an open source alternative that could be extended.
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  Mattermost works just fine self-hosted. We’ve been using it for more than four years.
sjburt 5y ago
Do the Mattermost mobile apps let you log into multiple teams at the same time yet? That was always the sticking point for my social groups and the reason we went with Slack or Discord. I looked and saw some rather inconclusive JIRA tickets, ranging from "it's impossible" to "it's on the roadmap".
- it33 5y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, thanks for your question. While we haven’t announced an official date yet you can track progress and share feedback on screen concepts on this ticket: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSU/pages/1053327503/Multi-Server+Support https://mattermost.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSU/pages/10533...
  - zwayhowder 5y ago
    This is the thing that keeps me from recommending Mattermost in education. We had no end of trouble with MS Teams for the same reason. Students logged into our instance couldn't access their work systems. MS has made some progress to fixing this, though it has a way to go before it's as easy as Slack/Discord etc. In my mind the gold standard is Discord. One login/password/mfa and I have access to hundreds of "servers". I have over 30 slack passwords and MFA tokens in my password manager and I know people with many more. Though I suspect the ability to self host Mattermost will make it more like Slack than Discord there. I would also like to say thank you. Mattermost is one of the few products I've seen that doesn't lock MFA behind an enterprise subscription. I can't stress enough how happy I was to see that.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      Discord still has basic usability issues there if you want to, for example, keep your work and personal accounts separate. Slack is really the gold standard because it understands the need for that separation.
      - ec109685 5y ago
jonnycomputer 5y ago
I've run a Linode-hosted Mattermost server for four or five years now, mostly so that my brother and I can chat over multiple topics and projects. No regrets. Low maintenance. It's been mostly free of hiccups of any sort. Occasionally it crashes, but I haven't been curious enough to figure out if it is something I can fix.
ibgeek 5y ago
Hmm... your post is useful for others who are considering Mattermost -- certainly may help others who have similar priorities. That said, I think you could have made the same point without being negative about other product. You aren't trying to be negative, but it does come off that way. I think you could make the same statement and impact without even mentioning Slack or its negatives in your case -- just focus on the positives of Mattermost for your use case.
arpa 5y ago
I tried using Mattermost for internal projects a while ago. Apparently, it needs to call the mothership every so often and doesn't seem to work/install otherwise (IIRC, tried running docker images on "internal" network only), which i found to be pretty strange and a big nono. Ended up spinning up an IRC server instead. But MM is still nicer than slack/discord in terms of controlling your data.
- rkagerer 5y ago
  Apparently, it needs to call the mothership every so often and doesn't seem to work/install otherwise Can someone from Mattermost comment on that?
  - dschalla 5y ago
    I can confirm that's not the case. We have diagnostic and error reporting functionality built-in which is documented here https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html and can be disabled either through the config file before starting the server or in the UI afterwards. We have quite a few customers deploying Mattermost in air-gapped environments, so even for the enterprise versions we don't require internet connectivity. There are some things that may not work without any internet connectivity, such as mobile push notifications, since that requires Mattermost Server to connect to our Push Proxy by default. You can host that yourself but will need a custom Apple/Android mobile app then, and the push proxy still needs internet connectivity in the end to reach Apple/Android Push Notification Services. Also our plugin marketplace may not work and you need to download and upload plugins manually. So overall, some convenience functions may not work, but overall Mattermost can be deployed air-gapped and doesn't have any phone-home aside from optional diagnostics. Let me know if there are any other questions! (Disclosure: I am working at Mattermost in Security)
    - tremon 5y ago
      even for the enterprise versions we don't require internet connectivity That's an odd phrasing to me. I would expect the enterprise version to offer more admin features, so of course that version would have the option to disable the Internet requirements. Can you confirm it's the same for all other versions?
andrewshadura 5y ago
Mattermost is great, but I wish they natively supported the Matrix protocol to enable federation. Or — at least — made it possible to integrate a "natively-looking" third-party bridge, similarly to how Gitter does it.
- xvilka 5y ago
  There is Matterbridge[1] that supports many different protocols including Matrix. [1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
  - andrewshadura 5y ago
    Yes, but it’s not the same as native or near-native experience.
vim-guru 5y ago
Why did we all actually leave IRC? I haven’t tried Mattermost, but IRC is/was sure better than Slack
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Persistent on-server chat history that's identical across all devices is a major element for the non-technically-inclined.
  - liotier 5y ago
    And pasting images.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Quality of Life reasons in my opinion. I think, for one, emoji reactions add a lot to a group chat. If there's no option to simply "like", "laugh" etc, people will write their reactions as text, and that quickly pushes the original message up, out of the screen maybe too. (Same problem with old style forums, vs a reddit-like interface). But this is just UI candy, could be implemented in an IRC client too. From a protocol standpoint, what IRC really lacks is the consistent handling of chat history. I can imagine IRC handling this too; every registered user could always be "online" on the server, and therefore receiving all messages, and when their client actually connects, they would see the messages similarly how the IMAP works for email. But this is really reaching now, isn't it? Why not just use something that's similar in spirit, but actually updated to the moders internet, like the Matrix protocol?
- goodpoint 5y ago
  I miss the practicality of IRC for quick async conversations. Instead Slack & co add server side search and effectively turn company chat into a eternal meeting with random participants.
greengrom 5y ago
Good https://ru.wikipedia.org/ https://ru.wikipedia.org/
Bellamy 5y ago
I have experience from Slack and Rocket.chat, and I prefer Rocket.chat. Is Mattermost somehow a better choice?
- sgt 5y ago
  We're on Slack and gave Rocket.chat a chance, but the UI is cumbersome and wasn't very well received. Slack is not only free (we use it for hundreds of employees and we don't even pay a dime), and Rocket.chat is self hosted. Easy choice, for the time being.
mlang23 5y ago
Wild guess, do they have seraph in their logo? "I protect that which matters most" :-)
majkinetor 5y ago
I have used local FOSS mattermost with my entire team and it was much better experience then alternatives. Much better. The only thing I missed is FOSS LDAP connector, I am strong believer that at least in some basic form it should come in such products - after all, you don't use such tools if you are not in enterprise and not having at least login is seriously problematic. We finished using Gitlab auth instead of it but I don't like that we are coupled to it.
cyberpunk 5y ago
Having used essentially all of these kinds of software (life as a freelancer, I think I had 8 different chat apps on my laptop at one point :/) I can genuinely say that Zulip combined with Jitsi Meet is the happy path (at least for me). I found MM quite clunky (although it's been about 2 years since I saw it in the wild) and Slack intolerable. Weirdly, I actually didn't mind Teams too much, after you stop creating new conversations instead of replying (which took me WEEKS), it was reasonably stable and it just sort of worked for me. Although I hear a lot of people gripe about it.
ptman 5y ago
When looking for a slack alternative, please primarily look at matrix. It's open source (not open core or source available) and based on open federation. And it keeps improving at a nice rate.
- garmaine 5y ago
  So is Mattermost. https://github.com/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost
  - gefhfff 5y ago
    In what ways? Are they going to implement federation or E2EE?
    - garmaine 5y ago
      > It's open source (not open core or source available) Mattermost is fully open source. I pointed to the GitHub repos which contain the entire client and server systems.
      - ptman 5y ago
        Mattermost is open core. There are features that aren't available in the open source version and which you have to pay for https://mattermost.com/pricing-self-managed/ https://mattermost.com/pricing-self-managed/
        lucb1e 5y ago
        Can I make OpenSSL also disqualified for the open source title, requiring everyone to call it "open core", if I sell paid features on top of OpenSSL? I really don't see the difference between open core and open source if the "core" is a fully functional standalone product.
        vetinari 5y ago
thih9 5y ago
Could someone explain what is zero trust in this context? In what way using Slack differs from the zero trust approach? (Is this about being able to self host?)
- gz5 5y ago
  Zero trust means this solution does not depend on ('trust') hosts or networks (VPNs, firewalls, SD-WAN,etc) to communicate between the Mattermost client and the Mattermost server. This means: 1. You limit your attack surfaces. Threats on your LAN, WAN or Internet can't communicate with the user computer or the server, e.g. they can't be landing points (attack surfaces) for malware or ransomware. 2. You isolate any damage In a full zero trust architecture, if one app is compromised, then there is no network for the virus to leverage to spread. For example, a ransomware loader can't call home to acquire more robust functionality, and can't find other data on your network to infiltrate and encrypt. This is because the loader is not on a 'trust' network in which it has access simply because it found its way into a network. Other solutions are open to networks (large attack surfaces) and are susceptible to spreading attacks (as they spread through the 'trusted' network).
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I’ll have to give MM a try. I’m fairly unhappy with the basic quality of Slack, but it hasn’t been a showstopper for me. I’m definitely not a Slack “power user.” In fact, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using it (I don’t like IM communication, in general), because everyone else uses it. That “everyone else uses it” is the biggest hurdle for MM.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  We (well I) managed to get Mattermost pretty much standardised as a chat platform in a previous job. It was easy to just whip up a Docker container with it with the help of our IT folks and then it's go time. We managed to get the on-site license approved by appealing to the corp's high focus on security (the head of security was ex-military, so he was _strict_ about security). Slack would've been WAY too expensive to get approved. All this before the penny-pinchers figured out that Teams would've been free. At that point Mattermost was integrated into dev processes everywhere and it was too late to move out.
jwillmer 5y ago
We used MM in the past and switched to Zulip. The docker upgrade path of MM is a pain and lacks support. (They switched to a new postgres version without providing any upgrade tutorial.) But honestly if you like to use a team chat to get work done Zulip works the best. The thread tagging inside a group and the keyboard support makes it easy to follow different conversations in a stream.
janvdberg 5y ago
We've been using MM for about a year now as a company group chat, and it's pretty great! The only gripe I have now (besides collapsed threads looking awful: which seems to be fixed in the latest beta!) is that the data (i.e. chats) is stored unencrypted in our MySQL database. Being a tech company lots of ours engineer 'theoretically' have access to this database. I believe MM suggests to some higher level db encryption to solve this, but this is not ideal.
goda90 5y ago
My team at work piloted using Mattermost before my company finally settled on Microsoft Teams company-wide. Something about Mattermost was just so much more engaging than Teams. People chimed in with answers and opinions on things way more. There was team bonding in the form of custom reactions and plenty of "off-topic" banter in the appropriate places. Teams just feels so dead in comparison. Maybe it's the way channels and notifications work. Maybe it's the lack of custom reactions. Maybe my team just had too much turnover. I don't know.
tkambler 5y ago
> "Considering moving to Mattermost, or any other alternative, caused many folks to shiver." Oh yeah? Try being forced to move to MS Teams.

246 points by gz5 5y ago

My small team uses and loves Mattermost. It's a great FOSS project. And, direct access to the PG database has been awesome for integrations. (Watch out tho, seems to be missing a bunch of FKs (that I think should be there))

it33 5y ago
Thanks @edoceo! Mattermost CEO here, appreciated the feedback. Just curious, what foreign keys do you feel should be added?
- edoceo 5y ago
  Well, users aren't FKd to their messages for one. And basically every table with a user_id column. My install created none. My contact is in my profile if you want more info
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

reilly3000 5y ago

The content marketing came on a little strong for me, but a good post nonetheless. Messaging is the heart of a remote org and it should be “on premise” by default.

gz5 5y ago
Well said. We are strong believers in open source and zero trust but reading the post with fresh eyes instead of writing it does make me realize there are some parts of that post in which we can dial back our enthusiasm (OP here). Thanks for the candid comment.
- reilly3000 5y ago
  That said, it worked on me :) I've subjected people to using VPNs and I would rather have a worse security posture than to do that again. I'm really intrigued by Netfoundry and agentless zero-trust networking. I've POC'ed ZeroTier + whitelisting but doing so in the app sounds like a great approach!
sofixa 5y ago
> Messaging is the heart of a remote org and it should be “on premise” by default Really not sure about that. I work at an MSP/MHP that has infrastructure everywhere ( multiple DCs, AWS, Azure, GCP, OVH, etc.) and recently we had a huge network outage at a few of our on-prem DCs due to a firmware bug in some redundant networking equipment. Having the communications software "in the cloud" allowed collaboration on fixing and communicating about the issue. Sometimes it's a good idea not to have all the eggs in one basket. In a similar vein, if your "on-prem" is dead, how do you access the documentation helping you debug/connect/etc.?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- reilly3000 5y ago
  Having multiple comms channels totally makes sense. I quoted “on premise” as most remote orgs are pretty much all cloud (though some may use colo)- which is really to say on hardware where a SaaS vendor doesn’t hold the keys. I can’t imagine how catastrophic a Slack hack would be for many orgs, and in that scenario you’re entirely dependent on their security and disclosure. It’s completely within their TOS to read your messages for various purposes, along with any apps that have been given access. That’s a pretty weak security posture if dealing with secret IP or other sensitive info. While nothing is guaranteed to be secure, limiting access to your team only seems like a smarter place to start for those who need privacy. Many companies really don’t, or at least accept a small level of risk. In terms of losing systems that you need to access while troubleshooting systems issues, that can be a mess with self-hosted tools, but nobody is immune. When AWS had a cascading network failure at US -East-1, their team was unable to access their logging service which made triage incredibly difficult. That’s super rare, and unlikely to happen again for AWS in that manner, but outages can cripple any ops team. Runbooks are a great thing to copy offline!
- vbernat 5y ago
  As for documentation, it is quite easy to have it available offline.
serial_dev 5y ago
I don't think the messaging platform should always be on-premise. You can consider running it on premise, but it's not an obvious decision. I worked on a couple of teams, and somehow no IT team could make the chat apps run reliably: we always had disconnects, terrible loading times, lost messages and we had to jump through hoops to enable the most basic integrations. No regular updates, outdated apps that are years behind in looks, features and integrations. Whenever we just simply used Slack, it was snappy, reliable, and it was easy to set up connectors for different external services.

duffpkg 5y ago

The open source release of mattermost has a lot of underutilized potential in the healthcare industry.

gz5 5y ago
What is the attitude in the healthcare industry towards FOSS, and what are the barriers to greater adoption (of any open source)?
- viraptor 5y ago
  This may differ between countries, but locally - knowing a specific app exists. A clinic buys software that fulfills the requirements and knows nothing about the license. As long as someone can install it, operate it and provide support, it can be literally anything. As long as the decision makers know something is available and actually provides value (and the decision makers are not stubborn and set in their ways for decades), it will be implemented. Caveat - people writing most medical/billing software don't have any incentive to release it as FOSS and they have more money for promotion than any FOSS project.
- feanaro 5y ago
  At least in Germany, its healthcare digitalization agency gematik recently chose to base their interoperable messaging infrastructure on Matrix. (https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthcare-system-adopts-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthc...)
- npteljes 5y ago
  Open Source doesn't have the well-funded salesmen to sell the solutions. And the other thing might be support.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    ...sell the solutions and provide kickbacks under the table. Bribery is very common in large software sales.

xvilka 5y ago

I can also recommend a console client (in Haskell) - Matterhorn [1]. For me, the biggest obstacle right now is the lack of support of chat categories in mobile [2] client and Matterhorn [3]. These chat categories are available in the web interface. [1] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn [2] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile/issues/5387 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile/issues/5387 [3] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn/issues/711 https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn/issues/711

it33 5y ago
Thanks @xvilka, Mattermost CEO here. Categories are a new feature, in beta in a lot of deployments. It’ll take a little bit for the other clients to catch up. Definitely one of the most popular new features.

nemosaltat 5y ago

I have a large family (many siblings, their SOs, some siblings of SOs, some cousins, etc). Many of us are not on Social Media, and the “group text” became untenable. I was able to get everyone to buy in on Slack sometime in 2017… it was great for awhile. Eventually, we hit message limits, and I wasn’t thrilled about Slacks data policies. After a bit of research, I landed on Mattermost. I explained the reason for the shift, and migrated the whole family over sometime in 2019. As far as the family is concerned, the process was painless, and other than the lack of collapsible threads (recently fixed as mentioned in TIFA!) everything has been great. I run the whole thing on a $5/mo VULTR VM, that also also acts as a WireGuard and PiHole server. On the backend, I’ve only had one major bump [0]- I went too long between server upgrades (I think I jumped from 5.21 to 5.29). The SQL encoding changed and caused messages to stay “unread.” Took me a day to find/correct the issue, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. [0] https://forum.mattermost.org/t/solved-after-upgrading-to-5-29-messages-fail-to-mark-as-read/10816 https://forum.mattermost.org/t/solved-after-upgrading-to-5-2...

gz5 5y ago
As former Slack users, threaded messaging is huge for us. I wonder if teams who landed on Mattermost before using an alternative which used threaded messaging feel the same way? Note: you do need to flip the feature flag to try it out: Account Settings > Display > Collapsed Reply Threads (Beta).
- paulddraper 5y ago
  Threads are deal killer for Slack. Twist is kinda unreliable and flaky. But I'll put up with anything to get sane threading.
- XorNot 5y ago
  I don't understand this post, are you saying threaded messaging in Slack is good?
- snuxoll 5y ago
  Personally I cannot stand threaded messaging - maybe it’s the IRC user in me, but I cannot stand having new messages randomly pop up at random points instead of at the bottom. If you have a discussion that is longer term or needs a separate context then spin it off to a different/new channel, otherwise I’ll spend forever searching for it again anyway.

paxys 5y ago

Title: Why we switched to Mattermost Entire article: Try this cool product of ours!

it33 5y ago
Thanks @paxys, Mattermost CEO here. I appreciate your comment and I can see where you’re coming from. At the same time, if people are using our open source project to showcase their work, I am a fan. We definitely do that ourselves talking about React, React Native and Golang :)

dustingetz 5y ago

it33 5y ago
Mattermost CEO here, what are your thoughts on this page? https://mattermost.org/ https://mattermost.org/ We go back and forth on whether we should have a .org and a .com, curious as to your thoughts.
- dustingetz 5y ago
  I googled you, i saw this https://imgur.com/lvEaBCQ https://imgur.com/lvEaBCQ got extremely confused and never new the .org existed until your comment
  - it33 5y ago
    Thanks @dustingetz, makes sense, we should spend some extra time looking at how we show up on Google, much appreciated!
- yashasolutions 5y ago
  .org and .com is common practice for many project - just maybe should make sure there is a link between 2 sites - I checked your site .com and even when opensource is mentionnned, it's on the .com site - instead of linking to the .org... just my 2cents
  - it33 5y ago
    Thanks @yashasolutions, makes sense, we should take a look at those, highly appreciate the feedback!
- JoBrad 5y ago
  I don’t know what the parent comment said, but more screenshots on your site would be great! The .org site you linked to had screenshots on the front page, which was great, but a gallery link would be fantastic.

mushufasa 5y ago

seems like this faced the hug of death. I would be curious whether they considered Zulip or any of the other open source chat alternatives in this decision, and how they compared. my sense is that chat is one of those areas where there's not so much obvious differentiation from the outside, and a lot of stickiness once you land somewhere, which implies there will remain 5-10 players in the space for some time to come.

karaterobot 5y ago

I've been running a MM server for about three years. It's been great, though lately I've been a little worried about it. They added stuff like in-app marketing to admins, under the guise of being helpful — you know, teaching us about exciting new premium features — oh, and by the way, you can't turn it off. When apps start to do things like that, it feels like more drastic monetization strategies can't be far behind.

it33 5y ago
Mattermost CEO here, sorry to hear you had a negative experience with the admin adviser. Thank you for the feedback. Mattermost Team Edition is designed for teams (I.e. groups of people that work together and trust each other) and there were issues when Team Edition was deployed to unintended use cases—-like hosting hundreds of users, saving millions of posts, or other scenarios outside of what a team was meant to do. Admin adviser was meant to help admins who hit those scenarios, and some of the advisory in scenarios Team Edition wasn’t intended to handle was for the Enterprise Edition. It sounds like that came across the wrong way and we should revisit. Note: I think a fair chunk of admin advisor was paused a while ago. Not sure how much is running these days. Regardless we should take a look.
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  Any suggestions for FOSS communities? I run a fairly big instance with hundreds of users. We wanted to support/promote a more free/libre alternative to Slack, but you are basically saying we should not use Mattermost? (I think that channel deletion was a concern at some point, but archiving mitigates it, we are happy users in general)
  - jasonblais 5y ago
    Hi, Mattermost PM here, We offer a non-profit license for open-source projects [0] with special nonprofit pricing. We also plan to move the System Permissions Scheme into the open source Team Edition with the 6.0 release on September 15 [1]. Thanks for being a user, feedback is always welcome! [0] https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ https://mattermost.com/nonprofit/ [1] https://forum.mattermost.org/t/granular-permissions-coming-soon-to-team-edition/11929 https://forum.mattermost.org/t/granular-permissions-coming-s...

bachmeier 5y ago

A couple things stand out to me about Mattermost: 1. It's the most expensive chat out there, at $10/month and no free plan. 2. Focalboard is being integrated to be part of the chat. Focalboard doesn't currently do much that I find interesting, but I have hope that it will with time.

it33 5y ago
Hi @bachmeier, thanks for the feedback! On 1), our SaaS version is equivalent to our higher end Enterprise Edition E20 and aimed at larger orgs. For small orgs we have the open source version that can be easily self-hosted. That said, it sounds like price is material for you, so maybe there’s something we can do at a lower price tier, with features closer to our open source product. On 2), Focalboard is still in its early days. We are using it internally and with early adopters of the open source version and are pretty excited about where it could go—replacing Trello, Asana, Notion, Jire, Confluence on-prem and as SaaS in the long run, and on an open source platform you can customize. Our hope is in future there could be a “Why we switched to Mattermost and Focalboard” with a blog post on replacing a fair chunk of the collaboration stack with an open source alternative that could be extended.
andrewshadura 5y ago
Mattermost works just fine self-hosted. We’ve been using it for more than four years.

sjburt 5y ago

Do the Mattermost mobile apps let you log into multiple teams at the same time yet? That was always the sticking point for my social groups and the reason we went with Slack or Discord. I looked and saw some rather inconclusive JIRA tickets, ranging from "it's impossible" to "it's on the roadmap".

it33 5y ago
Mattermost CEO here, thanks for your question. While we haven’t announced an official date yet you can track progress and share feedback on screen concepts on this ticket: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSU/pages/1053327503/Multi-Server+Support https://mattermost.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSU/pages/10533...
- zwayhowder 5y ago
  This is the thing that keeps me from recommending Mattermost in education. We had no end of trouble with MS Teams for the same reason. Students logged into our instance couldn't access their work systems. MS has made some progress to fixing this, though it has a way to go before it's as easy as Slack/Discord etc. In my mind the gold standard is Discord. One login/password/mfa and I have access to hundreds of "servers". I have over 30 slack passwords and MFA tokens in my password manager and I know people with many more. Though I suspect the ability to self host Mattermost will make it more like Slack than Discord there. I would also like to say thank you. Mattermost is one of the few products I've seen that doesn't lock MFA behind an enterprise subscription. I can't stress enough how happy I was to see that.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Discord still has basic usability issues there if you want to, for example, keep your work and personal accounts separate. Slack is really the gold standard because it understands the need for that separation.
    - ec109685 5y ago

jonnycomputer 5y ago

I've run a Linode-hosted Mattermost server for four or five years now, mostly so that my brother and I can chat over multiple topics and projects. No regrets. Low maintenance. It's been mostly free of hiccups of any sort. Occasionally it crashes, but I haven't been curious enough to figure out if it is something I can fix.

ibgeek 5y ago

Hmm... your post is useful for others who are considering Mattermost -- certainly may help others who have similar priorities. That said, I think you could have made the same point without being negative about other product. You aren't trying to be negative, but it does come off that way. I think you could make the same statement and impact without even mentioning Slack or its negatives in your case -- just focus on the positives of Mattermost for your use case.

arpa 5y ago

I tried using Mattermost for internal projects a while ago. Apparently, it needs to call the mothership every so often and doesn't seem to work/install otherwise (IIRC, tried running docker images on "internal" network only), which i found to be pretty strange and a big nono. Ended up spinning up an IRC server instead. But MM is still nicer than slack/discord in terms of controlling your data.

rkagerer 5y ago
Apparently, it needs to call the mothership every so often and doesn't seem to work/install otherwise Can someone from Mattermost comment on that?
- dschalla 5y ago
  I can confirm that's not the case. We have diagnostic and error reporting functionality built-in which is documented here https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html and can be disabled either through the config file before starting the server or in the UI afterwards. We have quite a few customers deploying Mattermost in air-gapped environments, so even for the enterprise versions we don't require internet connectivity. There are some things that may not work without any internet connectivity, such as mobile push notifications, since that requires Mattermost Server to connect to our Push Proxy by default. You can host that yourself but will need a custom Apple/Android mobile app then, and the push proxy still needs internet connectivity in the end to reach Apple/Android Push Notification Services. Also our plugin marketplace may not work and you need to download and upload plugins manually. So overall, some convenience functions may not work, but overall Mattermost can be deployed air-gapped and doesn't have any phone-home aside from optional diagnostics. Let me know if there are any other questions! (Disclosure: I am working at Mattermost in Security)
  - tremon 5y ago
    even for the enterprise versions we don't require internet connectivity That's an odd phrasing to me. I would expect the enterprise version to offer more admin features, so of course that version would have the option to disable the Internet requirements. Can you confirm it's the same for all other versions?

andrewshadura 5y ago

Mattermost is great, but I wish they natively supported the Matrix protocol to enable federation. Or — at least — made it possible to integrate a "natively-looking" third-party bridge, similarly to how Gitter does it.

xvilka 5y ago
There is Matterbridge[1] that supports many different protocols including Matrix. [1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  Yes, but it’s not the same as native or near-native experience.

vim-guru 5y ago

Why did we all actually leave IRC? I haven’t tried Mattermost, but IRC is/was sure better than Slack

crooked-v 5y ago
Persistent on-server chat history that's identical across all devices is a major element for the non-technically-inclined.
- liotier 5y ago
  And pasting images.
npteljes 5y ago
Quality of Life reasons in my opinion. I think, for one, emoji reactions add a lot to a group chat. If there's no option to simply "like", "laugh" etc, people will write their reactions as text, and that quickly pushes the original message up, out of the screen maybe too. (Same problem with old style forums, vs a reddit-like interface). But this is just UI candy, could be implemented in an IRC client too. From a protocol standpoint, what IRC really lacks is the consistent handling of chat history. I can imagine IRC handling this too; every registered user could always be "online" on the server, and therefore receiving all messages, and when their client actually connects, they would see the messages similarly how the IMAP works for email. But this is really reaching now, isn't it? Why not just use something that's similar in spirit, but actually updated to the moders internet, like the Matrix protocol?
goodpoint 5y ago
I miss the practicality of IRC for quick async conversations. Instead Slack & co add server side search and effectively turn company chat into a eternal meeting with random participants.

greengrom 5y ago

Good https://ru.wikipedia.org/ https://ru.wikipedia.org/

Bellamy 5y ago

I have experience from Slack and Rocket.chat, and I prefer Rocket.chat. Is Mattermost somehow a better choice?

sgt 5y ago
We're on Slack and gave Rocket.chat a chance, but the UI is cumbersome and wasn't very well received. Slack is not only free (we use it for hundreds of employees and we don't even pay a dime), and Rocket.chat is self hosted. Easy choice, for the time being.

mlang23 5y ago

Wild guess, do they have seraph in their logo? "I protect that which matters most" :-)

majkinetor 5y ago

I have used local FOSS mattermost with my entire team and it was much better experience then alternatives. Much better. The only thing I missed is FOSS LDAP connector, I am strong believer that at least in some basic form it should come in such products - after all, you don't use such tools if you are not in enterprise and not having at least login is seriously problematic. We finished using Gitlab auth instead of it but I don't like that we are coupled to it.

cyberpunk 5y ago

Having used essentially all of these kinds of software (life as a freelancer, I think I had 8 different chat apps on my laptop at one point :/) I can genuinely say that Zulip combined with Jitsi Meet is the happy path (at least for me). I found MM quite clunky (although it's been about 2 years since I saw it in the wild) and Slack intolerable. Weirdly, I actually didn't mind Teams too much, after you stop creating new conversations instead of replying (which took me WEEKS), it was reasonably stable and it just sort of worked for me. Although I hear a lot of people gripe about it.

ptman 5y ago

When looking for a slack alternative, please primarily look at matrix. It's open source (not open core or source available) and based on open federation. And it keeps improving at a nice rate.

garmaine 5y ago
So is Mattermost. https://github.com/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost
- gefhfff 5y ago
  In what ways? Are they going to implement federation or E2EE?
  - garmaine 5y ago
    > It's open source (not open core or source available) Mattermost is fully open source. I pointed to the GitHub repos which contain the entire client and server systems.
    - ptman 5y ago
      Mattermost is open core. There are features that aren't available in the open source version and which you have to pay for https://mattermost.com/pricing-self-managed/ https://mattermost.com/pricing-self-managed/
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        Can I make OpenSSL also disqualified for the open source title, requiring everyone to call it "open core", if I sell paid features on top of OpenSSL? I really don't see the difference between open core and open source if the "core" is a fully functional standalone product.
        vetinari 5y ago

thih9 5y ago

Could someone explain what is zero trust in this context? In what way using Slack differs from the zero trust approach? (Is this about being able to self host?)

gz5 5y ago
Zero trust means this solution does not depend on ('trust') hosts or networks (VPNs, firewalls, SD-WAN,etc) to communicate between the Mattermost client and the Mattermost server. This means: 1. You limit your attack surfaces. Threats on your LAN, WAN or Internet can't communicate with the user computer or the server, e.g. they can't be landing points (attack surfaces) for malware or ransomware. 2. You isolate any damage In a full zero trust architecture, if one app is compromised, then there is no network for the virus to leverage to spread. For example, a ransomware loader can't call home to acquire more robust functionality, and can't find other data on your network to infiltrate and encrypt. This is because the loader is not on a 'trust' network in which it has access simply because it found its way into a network. Other solutions are open to networks (large attack surfaces) and are susceptible to spreading attacks (as they spread through the 'trusted' network).

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I’ll have to give MM a try. I’m fairly unhappy with the basic quality of Slack, but it hasn’t been a showstopper for me. I’m definitely not a Slack “power user.” In fact, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using it (I don’t like IM communication, in general), because everyone else uses it. That “everyone else uses it” is the biggest hurdle for MM.

theshrike79 5y ago
We (well I) managed to get Mattermost pretty much standardised as a chat platform in a previous job. It was easy to just whip up a Docker container with it with the help of our IT folks and then it's go time. We managed to get the on-site license approved by appealing to the corp's high focus on security (the head of security was ex-military, so he was _strict_ about security). Slack would've been WAY too expensive to get approved. All this before the penny-pinchers figured out that Teams would've been free. At that point Mattermost was integrated into dev processes everywhere and it was too late to move out.

jwillmer 5y ago

We used MM in the past and switched to Zulip. The docker upgrade path of MM is a pain and lacks support. (They switched to a new postgres version without providing any upgrade tutorial.) But honestly if you like to use a team chat to get work done Zulip works the best. The thread tagging inside a group and the keyboard support makes it easy to follow different conversations in a stream.

janvdberg 5y ago

We've been using MM for about a year now as a company group chat, and it's pretty great! The only gripe I have now (besides collapsed threads looking awful: which seems to be fixed in the latest beta!) is that the data (i.e. chats) is stored unencrypted in our MySQL database. Being a tech company lots of ours engineer 'theoretically' have access to this database. I believe MM suggests to some higher level db encryption to solve this, but this is not ideal.

goda90 5y ago

My team at work piloted using Mattermost before my company finally settled on Microsoft Teams company-wide. Something about Mattermost was just so much more engaging than Teams. People chimed in with answers and opinions on things way more. There was team bonding in the form of custom reactions and plenty of "off-topic" banter in the appropriate places. Teams just feels so dead in comparison. Maybe it's the way channels and notifications work. Maybe it's the lack of custom reactions. Maybe my team just had too much turnover. I don't know.

tkambler 5y ago

> "Considering moving to Mattermost, or any other alternative, caused many folks to shiver." Oh yeah? Try being forced to move to MS Teams.