13 ms·

Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

264 points by punnerud 4y ago

caracustard 4y ago
While competition is always welcome, i wonder how many more collaboration services we're gonna get before someone finally makes "the service" to use.
- TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
  It will happen a few days after somebody invents "the" programming language to use, "the" hiring process to use, "the" IDE to use, "the" development process to use, etc. There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't make sense. Look at what your situation needs and see which tool is the best for you. You don't need to use a certain brand of tool just because everybody else is.
  - caracustard 4y ago
    "There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't make sense." That's very true, however i view those services the same way i view communication services like Slack. Eventually most users are just going to flock to what everyone uses by default and that's it. But i sure do wait for the day that special somebody makes "the IDE" to use!
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Another awesome related project that the folks behind mattermost put together is FocalBoard, their Kanban solution: https://www.focalboard.com https://www.focalboard.com
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Mattermost PM here, thanks for using Focalboard! Love to hear it :)
- RedShift1 4y ago
  Hmm from the docs I'm deriving this doesn't work for multiple users unless you install it as a Mattermost plugin?
  - jasonblais 4y ago
    That's right, the stand-alone personal desktop is an option for single users. If you're looking to use Focalboard for multiple users, you can use it in Mattermost where it's integrated as Boards: https://mattermost.com/boards/ https://mattermost.com/boards/
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      What am I missing? The server version works great with multiple users as long as you invite the second one with a link...
      - gkhartman 4y ago
        Yep, our self hosted Focalboard server works with multiple users. I had a bit of trouble figuring out that the share link is used to trigger the set up of additional users. I was initially looking for a link labeled "create account" or similar. I've been really happy with it and love its simplicity.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    Where did you see that? > The first user registration will always be permitted, but subsequent registrations will require an invite link which includes a code. You can invite additional users by clicking on your username in the top left, then selecting “Invite users”. https://www.focalboard.com/guide/server-setup/ https://www.focalboard.com/guide/server-setup/ You can use it with multiple users without being a mattermost plugin (try it out yourself -- docker run -p 8000:8000 mattermost/focalboard)
khanan 4y ago
Yeah, thanks for nailing it to me that I picked Mattermost as our chat-server 3 years ago, now we have to migrate away from it since it's way too expensive. They also do some seriosuly dubious decisions when it comes to the gimped opensource-variant, so. Thanks, but no thanks.
Shadonototra 4y ago
How can it be secure if they are able to track you this far? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852914
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > To answer some of the other questions on this thread, no customer logs nor PII get submitted to the 3rd party service that we use, which is called Descartes [...] We pass name and billing address only.
  - bradwood 4y ago
    and name and address is not PII?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Name and address of the company purchasing the license, which (in most countries at least) is already published in various business and tax records.
- Aachen 4y ago
  Security isn't the same as privacy. Using Facebook you don't have privacy, but the platform containing your data isn't likely to be compromised (your account's password being guessed is the most likely method of compromise, and that's in your own hands). Though I wonder if this distinction will go the way of the dodo / hacker / crypto, since a lot of people seem to not understand this in recent years (mostly since privacy became a bigger topic, first with Snowden but even more since GDPR enforced it). If the words privacy and security are both used to mean privacy in common language then we need a new word to communicate the previous meaning of "security". Kind of annoying when a language changes and existing words are redefined, but it's not as if an evolving language a new phenomenon.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  It appears the actual problem was that they weren’t able to track things that far and mistakenly sent out notices to the wrong customers.
temp 4y ago
They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.
- unixhero 4y ago
  You self host their enterprise solution? I think you're missing the point, migrate to the community edition. We pay 0 (but contribute with donations).
  - temp 4y ago
    I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
    - Blahah 4y ago
      you can also just host your own push proxy service using their open source code... https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-your-own-push-proxy-service https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
      - solar-ice 4y ago
        Then you also need to build and distribute Android and iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a server and update it occasionally".
        danielheath 4y ago
        I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted (friends chat) servers. Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
w4ffl35 4y ago
I love mattermost and host it from a a server in my closet (used for internal communication only, not accessible outside of my network)
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! Love to hear it :) Do you have any wishes around Mattermost? We're always looking for ways to improve the product experience.
  - w4ffl35 4y ago
    Hi,i don't know if I've just missed a feature setting, but the creation process of channels and groups doesn't seem as intuitive as Discord. I would like the ability to create a group, add channels etc. in pretty much the same manner as github and have those show up to other users.
dx034 4y ago
I've been using the self hosted version with a 10-person team for a year now and so far we like it. It's not as good as Slack (yet), but if you need to self-host, I can absolutely recommend it.
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! :) Do you have any wishes for improving Mattermost for your team?
  - nitin-pai 4y ago
    Integration with Google Meet
    - RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
      +1 Integration with Google Meet, Zoom would really help. I see plugins for both but could never get them to work (teams edition though) The expectation is that, just like on slack, I should be able to do a slash command and have a Google Meet or Zoom meeting ready to join
  - dx034 4y ago
    Calls in the browser would be great!
- hedgehog 4y ago
  For self hosting do you hand-manage accounts in Mattermost or use some form of SSO?
  - dx034 4y ago
    SSO with our AD. Works well, but I'm not the one who set it up.
kosolam 4y ago
Mattermost is amazing! We used it with multiple teams over a period of a few years. Self hosted. Cheap of resources. All of the necessary features are there and very well thought out.
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Mattermost PM here :)
  - ratww 4y ago
    Thanks for doing a great job. I really hate most of the software I have to use these days, but Mattermost is one of the few exceptions. It is fast, it isn't intrusive, it respects me and my time, all while doing what it promises. To me it is better than the competition, since their products affect my computer speed, even though I just got an update. I'd much rather have the productivity not taken away by Mattermost than features (although Mattermost has 100% I need).
    - jasonblais 4y ago
      You just made my day, @ratww!
  - njsubedi 4y ago
    The only thing that prevented us from using MatterMost when switching away from Rocket.Chat was video/voice calls that would actually ring the mobile/desktop devices on the call. We had to settle with MS Teams and eventually got the MS365 bundle only because of the reliable calls in Ms Teams. Although chat is a pita in teams after using Rocket.Chat for years, we’re making more calls and writing fewer chat messages.
number6 4y ago
I wished my Organization would adopt Mattermost. Using it for years as a Chat to stay in touch with my friends. My Org uses MS Teams (because it is already bundled with MS 365). What Mattermost is missing is a Videochat / Videoconferencing option - there is a plugin but I didn´t tried it yet: https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/ https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/
- thejteam 4y ago
  When I was on a project that used Mattermost we had BigBlueButton integrated. It worked adequate. As a user, at first I didn’t even realize that BBB was a separate thing.
- qunabu 4y ago
  we use `jitsi` plugin and works like charm out of the box you get free `jitsi` but you can attach your own instance as well
- codefined 4y ago
  Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video conferencing functionality! [0] > Channels: Voice calls and screen share (beta) [0] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available...
  - number6 4y ago
    Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I will try it despite ReadOnlyFriday :)
  - RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
    > Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video conferencing functionality have you tried running it using Mattermost team (the OSS) instance? I also use their cloud instance to stay updated on new features but voice is a paid only plan, so couldn't check it out
- messutied 4y ago
akvadrako 4y ago
This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported. I could run a server for a group instead of using a hosted service, but it would never fly if the administrator (me) could read their messages. I see there is a plugin for it¹, but not having something so core in the main product makes me sure there will be friction and user support issues. [1] https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee
- HiItsMeYo 4y ago
  You should check out Element.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Matrix and XMPP are excellent options worth considering for your use case. XMPP is more mature but modern clients implementing all the right RFCs are a bit scarce, Matrix clients are coming along relatively quickly but there's the occasional quirk. Both have optional support for features like federation and bridging other chat clients as well, though the results are often not exactly perfect. Personally, I'm quite happy using Matrix+Element/Cinny/Fluffychat to gather several chat services into one place. Experiments with native group chats have also gone down as of a year or so ago when encryption finally got most of its quirks worked out.
- RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
  > This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth paying extra for it. It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that info. … and those really serious about E2EE are using their custom stack anyways.
fiatjaf 4y ago
It's good that this exists, but Mattermost's threads are very suboptimal. If Alice posts a message and Bob replies, then _that is_ the thread. If that thread goes into a certain path you can't branch off of it, you can't reply to Alice's original message if you're talking about a different thing. I don't know if this makes sense, but hopefully you got my point.
- Avamander 4y ago
  You can't also move messages into a thread as admin. Which is a bit annoying.
  - itao 4y ago
    FYI you can with this plugin [0] and it's actually how we do it ourselves here at Mattermost. [0] https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler#wrangler-attach-message https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler...
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Mattermost PM here, thanks for the feedback! Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?
  - RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
    > Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads? Not the OP but this would really help Happy to create an issue if this is a new request or upvote if there's an existing request
Avamander 4y ago
It does work, but doesn't shine in any aspect. Android app can't keep a connection alive, media embeds are wonky, unicode filename support is wonky, it stutters in many places. Element and Matrix are better, no joke. Plus you get E2E and federation.
- etc-hosts 4y ago
  "Android app can't keep a connection alive" is a websockets problem with what ever you are using to proxy connections to your Mattermost server I've gotten it working correctly with nginx
  - RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
    I prefer Caddy proxy and with Caddy it's just a single reverse proxy line (it handles the websockets transport seamlessly)
  - Avamander 4y ago
    Nope, it works with other clients, WebSockets work with other software and Mattermost's worked before one of the recent updates. Not to mention, when it loses the connection it doesn't re-establish it the same moment automatically.
ajaimk 4y ago
Is a piece of horse shit! Notifications are a hot mess. Doesn’t sync between mobile and desktop. Can’t find active conversations.
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Sorry to hear about your experience, Mattermost PM here. Are you open to sharing more about the challenges you saw with notifications? We're always looking for feedback to improve the product experience.
Labo333 4y ago
How can collaboration without E2EE be considered "secure"? (I'm aware there is a plugin but E2EE is definitely not built-in)
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- FWIW: Interviewed here about a year ago - interview process was by far one of the better ones - their community guy Jason was super super kind & their CEO seems to also be a really good human --
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Glad you had a lovely interview experience! :)
- it33 4y ago
  Mattermost CEO here, thank you so much, you are very nice!
TavsiE9s 4y ago
Almost four years ago someone raised the issue of multiple mattermost servers in the mobile applications (https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067). Two years ago someone on the mattermost team promised the new mobile application would be there by the end of 2021. Yet in June 2022... you get the gist. Not a fan.
- jasonblais 4y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! Mattermost PM here, We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program. The community feedback on the Beta version has thus far being excellent, and helps us improve the user experience before we ship multi-server support as a stable release to everyone :) [1] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-program/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-progr...
  - TavsiE9s 4y ago
    Thank you for the feedback but I’m going to wait until it’s published in the respective App Stores. One piece of feedback for you and your org: the whole mobile v2 process was not very transparent from the outside. I tracked the ticket from time to time but gave up after a year as no visible progress was being made. Maybe that happened in some Atlassian forum, which to be blunt I’m not going to create an account for simply to read a thread.
    - jasonblais 4y ago
      Thank you! Appreciate the feedback, agree we probably could have provided more transparent feedback for the community. Out of curiosity, where would you have looked for such updates? GitHub issues?
      - TavsiE9s 4y ago
        Personally? Something similar to the Dolphin project's monthly status posts.
sneak 4y ago
Reminder that Mattermost's f/oss self-hosted version embeds segment.io phone-home spyware on by default which must be disabled with a barely-documented env var (called "diagnostics").
- agnivade 4y ago
  Reminder that there is a whole page which mentions _exactly_ what items are tracked and how to disable the feature: https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html Every config setting has an equivalent env var option. You can either use an env var, or change the setting via system console, or directly change your config.json file - LogSettings.EnableDiagnostics = false.
karaterobot 4y ago
I've run a Mattermost installation off the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet for about 4 years. Moved away from Slack due to the 10k message limit and the fact that I could self-host it. Unfortunately, while it does keep your history, the search is pretty lousy (there is a better search available for paying customers) and you can't export private conversations (unless you pay them). They gotta make money, and I'm not paying them, so I understand withholding features. That said, I keep looking at the Matrix ecosystem, and I think the only thing keeping me at MM is the switching cost at this point (not being able to export messages is an effective lock-in feature, though rather user-unfriendly if you ask me).
- yu-carm-kror 4y ago
  You can export all message types and none of them require any special licensing or payment: https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    That document shows how you can export private channels, but not private conversations. For example, if you and a friend have a DM conversation with each other, that is not exportable using that tool.
- agnivade 4y ago
  Search in SQL databases is a tough beast to get it right. And given that we support MySQL and Postgres both, it gets even harder to support quirks of both of them. In enterprise editions, the only addition is Elasticsearch. But in our open-source version, we do have support for https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve. Although, it's in beta, we have a lot of customers using it. I am wondering if you have tried using it and didn't like it?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I have been trying over several versions to get bleve to work, using MM installation guides and forums, but it's never successfully indexed anything.
movover 4y ago
We've been testing out both Mattermost and Zulip over the past few months at work, and we recently decided to go with Zulip. Mattermost is nice in that communication and project management is all in one tool, but doing anything within Mattermost is very sluggish (even on a very overspecced server with only 1 Mattermost user online). Using their Focalboard plugin resulted in multiple seconds of wait time between various actions like modifying a task. On the other hand, Zulip has been consistently snappy even as we've onboarded users onto our instance. Seeing it in use at large organizations such as Rust's Zulip instance instilled confidence that it'll continue to perform well even well beyond our scale. Also Zulip's threading model is really nice to use once you and your team gets the hang of topic separation. We've managed to completely eliminate 'talking over one another' as we would in Slack/Discord style text channels, and it's much easier to keep track of various conversations. While Zulip's UI and UX isn't as polished and certainly has areas for improvement, the threading model alone makes it worthwhile to use. On top of that, Mattermost's pricing doesn't work well for small businesses, especially when you factor in that something 'simple' like Elasticsearch support, or, performance monitoring tools to figure out why your 1 user installation on a 88 thread server with hundreds of GBs of memory is sluggish, or even just creating a second admin user is locked behind their enterprise plan. I get that money needs to be made, but blocking some features behind an enterprise plan (that asks you to contact them for pricing, no less - their $10/user for the Professional plan is not only steep, but still doesn't include these features) doesn't feel great. Zulip is completely free, and offers Zulip Cloud alongside a support plan, but does not block any features behind a paywall. There's no limitations on what Zulip will let you do either - no 10,000 message history limit, no file storage limit, user role restrictions, or anything of that nature. Oh, and Zulip is 100% open source software. In my eyes, it's hard to compete with that when it comes to communication tools.
goda90 4y ago
My team piloted using Mattermost for a bit. It was great. People were always quick to respond. Lots of fun was mixed in with work topics. Then my company went MS Teams everywhere. And it's just not as fun or useful. Something about the UI just makes people interact less.
SubiculumCode 4y ago
I run a personal Mattermost server for family communication; its been great. If there was one complaint, and this is a nitpick, it is that the notification icon in Windows does not have enough contrast with the icon when no new messages are available.
mgbmtl 4y ago
Our FOSS community uses it, and we're quite happy. We were on IRC before, maybe 20 users, and now we have hundreds of active users on Mattermost. Our biggest struggle is with support within our community. Helping someone is nice, but odds are that someone else has the same question and losing their mind with Google. Mattermost does not provide a good way to archive topics. We push people to use our Gitlab or Stack Exchange for support, but both are hostile in their own way (not newbie-frienfly). Anyways, something there might do wonders. Maybe some kind of tool that lists popular threads on a public page? Another wishlist would be to be able to hide or block people. While we do our best to be friendly, there are just some people that I get really annoyed when they PM me, and some others that I just don't want to see their comments in public channels (kind of like hidden tweets that you have to click to show them).
mstaoru 4y ago
Slack was fine for our team of ~10, but frequently blocked by Chinese great firewall, and overall experience was slow. We moved to a free self-hosted Mattermost instance and been using it for a better part of a year. Conversations are fast, we own our data, and there is no looming 10000 messages limit all the time. Bleve search is working just fine for us as well. Win! Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quirks: * it is hard to set up any kind of integration with a TUI: `matterircd` is quite buggy and also eats the CPU like there is no tomorrow, `matterbridge` doesn't sync correctly, or at least we couldn't make it work, and `matterhorn` is a standalone product (which would be much nicer as an e.g. weechat module) trying too hard to look like a web UI; * web UI is still being polished, e.g. if you connection is unstable, web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7; * what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D * somewhere around v.6 update the Focalboard push was a bit jarring, thankfully after disabling the plugin it disappeared for good. Keep up the good work! Once our org is larger and requires Enterprise features, I'm pretty sure we stick with Mattermost.
- agnivade 4y ago
  > web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7; That shouldn't be the case with 7.0. We recently released a feature called "reliable websockets" that makes a connection reliable across websocket disconnects. If you have any repro steps, please feel free to create an issue and we will take a look. > what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D With 7.0, our Collapsed Reply Threads feature is now in GA: https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generally-available https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generall.... Feel free to enable it to get a better threading experience.
  - 4y ago

264 points by punnerud 4y ago

While competition is always welcome, i wonder how many more collaboration services we're gonna get before someone finally makes "the service" to use.

TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
It will happen a few days after somebody invents "the" programming language to use, "the" hiring process to use, "the" IDE to use, "the" development process to use, etc. There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't make sense. Look at what your situation needs and see which tool is the best for you. You don't need to use a certain brand of tool just because everybody else is.
- caracustard 4y ago
  "There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't make sense." That's very true, however i view those services the same way i view communication services like Slack. Eventually most users are just going to flock to what everyone uses by default and that's it. But i sure do wait for the day that special somebody makes "the IDE" to use!

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Another awesome related project that the folks behind mattermost put together is FocalBoard, their Kanban solution: https://www.focalboard.com https://www.focalboard.com

jasonblais 4y ago
Mattermost PM here, thanks for using Focalboard! Love to hear it :)
RedShift1 4y ago
Hmm from the docs I'm deriving this doesn't work for multiple users unless you install it as a Mattermost plugin?
- jasonblais 4y ago
  That's right, the stand-alone personal desktop is an option for single users. If you're looking to use Focalboard for multiple users, you can use it in Mattermost where it's integrated as Boards: https://mattermost.com/boards/ https://mattermost.com/boards/
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    What am I missing? The server version works great with multiple users as long as you invite the second one with a link...
    - gkhartman 4y ago
      Yep, our self hosted Focalboard server works with multiple users. I had a bit of trouble figuring out that the share link is used to trigger the set up of additional users. I was initially looking for a link labeled "create account" or similar. I've been really happy with it and love its simplicity.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Where did you see that? > The first user registration will always be permitted, but subsequent registrations will require an invite link which includes a code. You can invite additional users by clicking on your username in the top left, then selecting “Invite users”. https://www.focalboard.com/guide/server-setup/ https://www.focalboard.com/guide/server-setup/ You can use it with multiple users without being a mattermost plugin (try it out yourself -- docker run -p 8000:8000 mattermost/focalboard)

khanan 4y ago

Yeah, thanks for nailing it to me that I picked Mattermost as our chat-server 3 years ago, now we have to migrate away from it since it's way too expensive. They also do some seriosuly dubious decisions when it comes to the gimped opensource-variant, so. Thanks, but no thanks.

Shadonototra 4y ago

How can it be secure if they are able to track you this far? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852914

Nextgrid 4y ago
> To answer some of the other questions on this thread, no customer logs nor PII get submitted to the 3rd party service that we use, which is called Descartes [...] We pass name and billing address only.
- bradwood 4y ago
  and name and address is not PII?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Name and address of the company purchasing the license, which (in most countries at least) is already published in various business and tax records.
Aachen 4y ago
Security isn't the same as privacy. Using Facebook you don't have privacy, but the platform containing your data isn't likely to be compromised (your account's password being guessed is the most likely method of compromise, and that's in your own hands). Though I wonder if this distinction will go the way of the dodo / hacker / crypto, since a lot of people seem to not understand this in recent years (mostly since privacy became a bigger topic, first with Snowden but even more since GDPR enforced it). If the words privacy and security are both used to mean privacy in common language then we need a new word to communicate the previous meaning of "security". Kind of annoying when a language changes and existing words are redefined, but it's not as if an evolving language a new phenomenon.
tinus_hn 4y ago
It appears the actual problem was that they weren’t able to track things that far and mistakenly sent out notices to the wrong customers.

temp 4y ago

They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.

unixhero 4y ago
You self host their enterprise solution? I think you're missing the point, migrate to the community edition. We pay 0 (but contribute with donations).
- temp 4y ago
  I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
  - Blahah 4y ago
    you can also just host your own push proxy service using their open source code... https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-your-own-push-proxy-service https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
    - solar-ice 4y ago
      Then you also need to build and distribute Android and iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a server and update it occasionally".
      - danielheath 4y ago
        I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted (friends chat) servers. Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.

w4ffl35 4y ago

I love mattermost and host it from a a server in my closet (used for internal communication only, not accessible outside of my network)

jasonblais 4y ago
Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! Love to hear it :) Do you have any wishes around Mattermost? We're always looking for ways to improve the product experience.
- w4ffl35 4y ago
  Hi,i don't know if I've just missed a feature setting, but the creation process of channels and groups doesn't seem as intuitive as Discord. I would like the ability to create a group, add channels etc. in pretty much the same manner as github and have those show up to other users.

dx034 4y ago

I've been using the self hosted version with a 10-person team for a year now and so far we like it. It's not as good as Slack (yet), but if you need to self-host, I can absolutely recommend it.

jasonblais 4y ago
Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! :) Do you have any wishes for improving Mattermost for your team?
- nitin-pai 4y ago
  Integration with Google Meet
  - RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
    +1 Integration with Google Meet, Zoom would really help. I see plugins for both but could never get them to work (teams edition though) The expectation is that, just like on slack, I should be able to do a slash command and have a Google Meet or Zoom meeting ready to join
- dx034 4y ago
  Calls in the browser would be great!
hedgehog 4y ago
For self hosting do you hand-manage accounts in Mattermost or use some form of SSO?
- dx034 4y ago
  SSO with our AD. Works well, but I'm not the one who set it up.

kosolam 4y ago

Mattermost is amazing! We used it with multiple teams over a period of a few years. Self hosted. Cheap of resources. All of the necessary features are there and very well thought out.

jasonblais 4y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Mattermost PM here :)
- ratww 4y ago
  Thanks for doing a great job. I really hate most of the software I have to use these days, but Mattermost is one of the few exceptions. It is fast, it isn't intrusive, it respects me and my time, all while doing what it promises. To me it is better than the competition, since their products affect my computer speed, even though I just got an update. I'd much rather have the productivity not taken away by Mattermost than features (although Mattermost has 100% I need).
  - jasonblais 4y ago
    You just made my day, @ratww!
- njsubedi 4y ago
  The only thing that prevented us from using MatterMost when switching away from Rocket.Chat was video/voice calls that would actually ring the mobile/desktop devices on the call. We had to settle with MS Teams and eventually got the MS365 bundle only because of the reliable calls in Ms Teams. Although chat is a pita in teams after using Rocket.Chat for years, we’re making more calls and writing fewer chat messages.

number6 4y ago

I wished my Organization would adopt Mattermost. Using it for years as a Chat to stay in touch with my friends. My Org uses MS Teams (because it is already bundled with MS 365). What Mattermost is missing is a Videochat / Videoconferencing option - there is a plugin but I didn´t tried it yet: https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/ https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/

thejteam 4y ago
When I was on a project that used Mattermost we had BigBlueButton integrated. It worked adequate. As a user, at first I didn’t even realize that BBB was a separate thing.
qunabu 4y ago
we use `jitsi` plugin and works like charm out of the box you get free `jitsi` but you can attach your own instance as well
codefined 4y ago
Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video conferencing functionality! [0] > Channels: Voice calls and screen share (beta) [0] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available...
- number6 4y ago
  Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I will try it despite ReadOnlyFriday :)
- RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
  > Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video conferencing functionality have you tried running it using Mattermost team (the OSS) instance? I also use their cloud instance to stay updated on new features but voice is a paid only plan, so couldn't check it out
messutied 4y ago

akvadrako 4y ago

This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported. I could run a server for a group instead of using a hosted service, but it would never fly if the administrator (me) could read their messages. I see there is a plugin for it¹, but not having something so core in the main product makes me sure there will be friction and user support issues. [1] https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee

HiItsMeYo 4y ago
You should check out Element.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Matrix and XMPP are excellent options worth considering for your use case. XMPP is more mature but modern clients implementing all the right RFCs are a bit scarce, Matrix clients are coming along relatively quickly but there's the occasional quirk. Both have optional support for features like federation and bridging other chat clients as well, though the results are often not exactly perfect. Personally, I'm quite happy using Matrix+Element/Cinny/Fluffychat to gather several chat services into one place. Experiments with native group chats have also gone down as of a year or so ago when encryption finally got most of its quirks worked out.
RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
> This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth paying extra for it. It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that info. … and those really serious about E2EE are using their custom stack anyways.

fiatjaf 4y ago

It's good that this exists, but Mattermost's threads are very suboptimal. If Alice posts a message and Bob replies, then _that is_ the thread. If that thread goes into a certain path you can't branch off of it, you can't reply to Alice's original message if you're talking about a different thing. I don't know if this makes sense, but hopefully you got my point.

Avamander 4y ago
You can't also move messages into a thread as admin. Which is a bit annoying.
- itao 4y ago
  FYI you can with this plugin [0] and it's actually how we do it ourselves here at Mattermost. [0] https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler#wrangler-attach-message https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler...
jasonblais 4y ago
Mattermost PM here, thanks for the feedback! Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?
- RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
  > Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads? Not the OP but this would really help Happy to create an issue if this is a new request or upvote if there's an existing request

Avamander 4y ago

It does work, but doesn't shine in any aspect. Android app can't keep a connection alive, media embeds are wonky, unicode filename support is wonky, it stutters in many places. Element and Matrix are better, no joke. Plus you get E2E and federation.

etc-hosts 4y ago
"Android app can't keep a connection alive" is a websockets problem with what ever you are using to proxy connections to your Mattermost server I've gotten it working correctly with nginx
- RemoteIsHeaven 4y ago
  I prefer Caddy proxy and with Caddy it's just a single reverse proxy line (it handles the websockets transport seamlessly)
- Avamander 4y ago
  Nope, it works with other clients, WebSockets work with other software and Mattermost's worked before one of the recent updates. Not to mention, when it loses the connection it doesn't re-establish it the same moment automatically.

ajaimk 4y ago

Is a piece of horse shit! Notifications are a hot mess. Doesn’t sync between mobile and desktop. Can’t find active conversations.

jasonblais 4y ago
Sorry to hear about your experience, Mattermost PM here. Are you open to sharing more about the challenges you saw with notifications? We're always looking for feedback to improve the product experience.

Labo333 4y ago

How can collaboration without E2EE be considered "secure"? (I'm aware there is a plugin but E2EE is definitely not built-in)

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- FWIW: Interviewed here about a year ago - interview process was by far one of the better ones - their community guy Jason was super super kind & their CEO seems to also be a really good human --

jasonblais 4y ago
Glad you had a lovely interview experience! :)
it33 4y ago
Mattermost CEO here, thank you so much, you are very nice!

TavsiE9s 4y ago

Almost four years ago someone raised the issue of multiple mattermost servers in the mobile applications (https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067). Two years ago someone on the mattermost team promised the new mobile application would be there by the end of 2021. Yet in June 2022... you get the gist. Not a fan.

jasonblais 4y ago
Thanks for your feedback! Mattermost PM here, We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program. The community feedback on the Beta version has thus far being excellent, and helps us improve the user experience before we ship multi-server support as a stable release to everyone :) [1] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-program/ https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-progr...
- TavsiE9s 4y ago
  Thank you for the feedback but I’m going to wait until it’s published in the respective App Stores. One piece of feedback for you and your org: the whole mobile v2 process was not very transparent from the outside. I tracked the ticket from time to time but gave up after a year as no visible progress was being made. Maybe that happened in some Atlassian forum, which to be blunt I’m not going to create an account for simply to read a thread.
  - jasonblais 4y ago
    Thank you! Appreciate the feedback, agree we probably could have provided more transparent feedback for the community. Out of curiosity, where would you have looked for such updates? GitHub issues?
    - TavsiE9s 4y ago
      Personally? Something similar to the Dolphin project's monthly status posts.

sneak 4y ago

Reminder that Mattermost's f/oss self-hosted version embeds segment.io phone-home spyware on by default which must be disabled with a barely-documented env var (called "diagnostics").

agnivade 4y ago
Reminder that there is a whole page which mentions _exactly_ what items are tracked and how to disable the feature: https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html Every config setting has an equivalent env var option. You can either use an env var, or change the setting via system console, or directly change your config.json file - LogSettings.EnableDiagnostics = false.

karaterobot 4y ago

I've run a Mattermost installation off the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet for about 4 years. Moved away from Slack due to the 10k message limit and the fact that I could self-host it. Unfortunately, while it does keep your history, the search is pretty lousy (there is a better search available for paying customers) and you can't export private conversations (unless you pay them). They gotta make money, and I'm not paying them, so I understand withholding features. That said, I keep looking at the Matrix ecosystem, and I think the only thing keeping me at MM is the switching cost at this point (not being able to export messages is an effective lock-in feature, though rather user-unfriendly if you ask me).

yu-carm-kror 4y ago
You can export all message types and none of them require any special licensing or payment: https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  That document shows how you can export private channels, but not private conversations. For example, if you and a friend have a DM conversation with each other, that is not exportable using that tool.
agnivade 4y ago
Search in SQL databases is a tough beast to get it right. And given that we support MySQL and Postgres both, it gets even harder to support quirks of both of them. In enterprise editions, the only addition is Elasticsearch. But in our open-source version, we do have support for https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve. Although, it's in beta, we have a lot of customers using it. I am wondering if you have tried using it and didn't like it?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I have been trying over several versions to get bleve to work, using MM installation guides and forums, but it's never successfully indexed anything.

movover 4y ago

We've been testing out both Mattermost and Zulip over the past few months at work, and we recently decided to go with Zulip. Mattermost is nice in that communication and project management is all in one tool, but doing anything within Mattermost is very sluggish (even on a very overspecced server with only 1 Mattermost user online). Using their Focalboard plugin resulted in multiple seconds of wait time between various actions like modifying a task. On the other hand, Zulip has been consistently snappy even as we've onboarded users onto our instance. Seeing it in use at large organizations such as Rust's Zulip instance instilled confidence that it'll continue to perform well even well beyond our scale. Also Zulip's threading model is really nice to use once you and your team gets the hang of topic separation. We've managed to completely eliminate 'talking over one another' as we would in Slack/Discord style text channels, and it's much easier to keep track of various conversations. While Zulip's UI and UX isn't as polished and certainly has areas for improvement, the threading model alone makes it worthwhile to use. On top of that, Mattermost's pricing doesn't work well for small businesses, especially when you factor in that something 'simple' like Elasticsearch support, or, performance monitoring tools to figure out why your 1 user installation on a 88 thread server with hundreds of GBs of memory is sluggish, or even just creating a second admin user is locked behind their enterprise plan. I get that money needs to be made, but blocking some features behind an enterprise plan (that asks you to contact them for pricing, no less - their $10/user for the Professional plan is not only steep, but still doesn't include these features) doesn't feel great. Zulip is completely free, and offers Zulip Cloud alongside a support plan, but does not block any features behind a paywall. There's no limitations on what Zulip will let you do either - no 10,000 message history limit, no file storage limit, user role restrictions, or anything of that nature. Oh, and Zulip is 100% open source software. In my eyes, it's hard to compete with that when it comes to communication tools.

goda90 4y ago

My team piloted using Mattermost for a bit. It was great. People were always quick to respond. Lots of fun was mixed in with work topics. Then my company went MS Teams everywhere. And it's just not as fun or useful. Something about the UI just makes people interact less.

SubiculumCode 4y ago

I run a personal Mattermost server for family communication; its been great. If there was one complaint, and this is a nitpick, it is that the notification icon in Windows does not have enough contrast with the icon when no new messages are available.

mgbmtl 4y ago

Our FOSS community uses it, and we're quite happy. We were on IRC before, maybe 20 users, and now we have hundreds of active users on Mattermost. Our biggest struggle is with support within our community. Helping someone is nice, but odds are that someone else has the same question and losing their mind with Google. Mattermost does not provide a good way to archive topics. We push people to use our Gitlab or Stack Exchange for support, but both are hostile in their own way (not newbie-frienfly). Anyways, something there might do wonders. Maybe some kind of tool that lists popular threads on a public page? Another wishlist would be to be able to hide or block people. While we do our best to be friendly, there are just some people that I get really annoyed when they PM me, and some others that I just don't want to see their comments in public channels (kind of like hidden tweets that you have to click to show them).

mstaoru 4y ago

Slack was fine for our team of ~10, but frequently blocked by Chinese great firewall, and overall experience was slow. We moved to a free self-hosted Mattermost instance and been using it for a better part of a year. Conversations are fast, we own our data, and there is no looming 10000 messages limit all the time. Bleve search is working just fine for us as well. Win! Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quirks: * it is hard to set up any kind of integration with a TUI: `matterircd` is quite buggy and also eats the CPU like there is no tomorrow, `matterbridge` doesn't sync correctly, or at least we couldn't make it work, and `matterhorn` is a standalone product (which would be much nicer as an e.g. weechat module) trying too hard to look like a web UI; * web UI is still being polished, e.g. if you connection is unstable, web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7; * what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D * somewhere around v.6 update the Focalboard push was a bit jarring, thankfully after disabling the plugin it disappeared for good. Keep up the good work! Once our org is larger and requires Enterprise features, I'm pretty sure we stick with Mattermost.

agnivade 4y ago
> web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7; That shouldn't be the case with 7.0. We recently released a feature called "reliable websockets" that makes a connection reliable across websocket disconnects. If you have any repro steps, please feel free to create an issue and we will take a look. > what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D With 7.0, our Collapsed Reply Threads feature is now in GA: https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generally-available https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generall.... Feel free to enable it to get a better threading experience.
- 4y ago