6 ms·

If I'm an organization choosing a chat platform, why would I want to use Linen versus Mattermost, which is also self-hostable and open-source, and much more mat

If I'm an organization choosing a chat platform, why would I want to use Linen versus Mattermost, which is also self-hostable and open-source, and much more mature? Or Matrix and Element (or any other Matrix client)? This space is getting pretty crowded, and I'm not sure why I'd want to use Linen rather than one of the many alternatives.

cheeseblubber 4y ago
Sure thing. Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable. They can offer public communities but unless they are rendering static version of the site it is really not SEO friendly. They are very enterprise/security focused so if you want something secure and private Mattermost is fantastic. We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app. Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.
- dizhn 4y ago
  What are your thoughts on Zulip? Their priorities and yours seem to align. I see you have threads but they look more like Discord threads rather than how Zulip does them.
  - cheeseblubber 4y ago
    I'm not an expert on Zulip by any means but I'm always a fan of other open source projects. Beyond what we have right now, we want to design Linen to be a thread-first tool (hence the name). We wanted an experience familiar to users of chat communities but encourages thread usage natively. We want to do things like letting you move messages between threads and threads between channel. Which I think Zulip has that functionality. We just haven't had the chance yet because the scope is so big and we wanted to ship something quick and get early feedback. Would also love to hear about what you really enjoy about Zulip.
    - ghostpepper 4y ago
      Threading is the killer feature of Zulip I think
      - dizhn 4y ago
        Yes and conversation histories can be published too.
    - v3ss0n 4y ago
      Zulip have publicweb channels support which is totally google indexable. Check rust community
    - cheeseblubber 4y ago
      I've also mentioned this in a separate comment in the post but reposting here for visibility: To clarify Zulip let's you export their conversations and then render it by generating a static HTMl similar to https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ You'd have to use https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive to achieve. You can see it in the Caveats sections in their documentation https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats They are working on it here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 Zulip lets you browse conversations of public conversations but that is very different than the app being natively search engine friendly and indexable. The difference between Zulip's implementation and Linen is that you don't need a separate UI when someone finds a link in Google. If you find a link through Google you get a dynamic real time experience instead of a static page. If you google site:rust-lang.zulipchat.com you won't see any results. If you do the same with site:slack-chats.kotlinlang.org you'll see at least 20,000 results
- jakecopp 4y ago
  > Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable. This seems like a good idea for a bot built with https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk (which is very easy, I've used it for a few small projects). The SDK has a callback for each new message - you could just put it into a DB and then render to static text.
- ogarten 4y ago
  Having these communities google searchable is actually a really cool feature. I don't understand why companies create "open" communities (that are mostly dead anyway) and everything talked about in there is not indexed at all. That is horrible for the actual users, even more so if you go with the free Slack option which only gives you access to 90 days of messaging history. How can you find discussions about specific topics if it's not really searchable. Managing conversation at large scale has been done. Remember "old" forums/bulletin boards that were really popular in the early 2000's? They actually were communities, even though some were rather toxic. They were searchable. Discussions happened naturally. Anyway, wish you the best for your project!
  - phanis 4y ago
    Perhaps you can try https://bip.so https://bip.so to convert your Slack threads to documents for future reference. Checkout https://youtu.be/Unco3aCZbLs https://youtu.be/Unco3aCZbLs
openthc 4y ago
We love Mattermost for our organization; it feels nicer to use it over Slack/Discord because we're also FOSS. Our next iteration is to be moving to a more protocol oriented method - which means Matrix or ActivityPub even. We don't care if our chat is search-indexed; it's mostly internal; there are client channels, specific topic channels. At least for our case being OUT OF SEARCH is better. However, we do use the conversation as seeds for our help-docs, blog post, etc, etc. Perhaps Linen could be the winner by putting Slack+Discord+Mattermost+Matrix+ActivityPub in to a better search-index. Anyone remember MARC? -- https://marc.info/ https://marc.info/
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  My team is an OSS project using Discord and have setup bots to connect to Element/matrix to test bridging and moving if it makes sense. But I second this call.. the goals for Linen of searchability and better UX are great. I'd be inclined to try it out if it could replace Element for us, but yeah, would have to be connected to Matrix. Orr, Element if you're listening, maybe collaborate with Linen and/or copy their features around search.
  - grepfru_it 4y ago
    We did that with rocketchat/slackbridge before we just made a full switch to mattermost. The slackbridge was a wonderful tool and I wish that functionality existed for mattermost..
sneak 4y ago
One reason you may not wish to use Mattermost is because they embed spyware into the server that phones home without consent. Additionally, their feature gap between their paid enterprise proprietary version and their free software version is really telling: they don’t believe in free software as a philosophy and are just using free software licenses as marketing bait.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Source for said spyware? Was not aware of this.
  - sneak 4y ago
    It’s the segment.io client library. I started binary patching mattermost installs and also using NextDNS on my servers too to monitor/block dns traffic to ad/spyware domains.
    - phantomathkg 4y ago
      I would imagine there are different between analytics and spyware.
      - sneak 4y ago
        Analytics systems that ask for informed user consent before transmitting are fine. There is no semantic difference whatsoever between silent analytics that assume consent (i.e. "opt out") and spyware. Both invisibly transmit user data off the system without the consent (and usually without the knowledge) of the user, exfiltrating stolen information. Tellingly, the variable used for configuring this in Mattermost calls it "diagnostics", further obscuring its functionality. If privacy is a human right, then this software by default violates the human rights of its users.
sneak 4y ago
I think it's misleading to call Mattermost "open source". Mattermost the for-profit company makes two products, one of which is open source, and a much larger one (which is approximately feature complete wrt modern Slack-likes) which is absolutely not. The open source product they make does not work like a normal open source project: submitted improvements to it will presumably be denied if they add functionality that exists in the proprietary and closed source second product, also called Mattermost, or if they serve users (like removing the silent and nonconsensual phone-home spyware from segment.io that they embed in the released binaries). It's a normal and expected thing in the open source world for user communities to be able to participate in the software project. That's one of the defined goals of the idea of open source: you can fix and improve it, and share your fixes and improvements. Mattermost the company is not really an "open source company", as they build and sell proprietary software as their main source of revenue. Their goal is increasing the use of proprietary software, and every user of the open source Mattermost is a target for them to convince to stop using open source and start using proprietary software. This is presumably why they make their open source version phone home to tell them about your usage of it, so that they can try to get you to pay them to start using the proprietary one if you get big/rich enough. Furthermore, to even contribute to the "open source" project of Mattermost, you are required to sign a CLA, because they want to be able to resell your work commercially under nonfree licenses. You'll note there is no CLA required for most real open source work, because they don't care if you retain copyright - the open source license is all they need. There is no CLA required to contribute to Linux or gcc. Mattermost the software is not really an "open source project" because you can't meaningfully improve the software as the maintainer has a vested financial interest in keeping basic features (like message expiry/retention periods/SSO) out of it to direct the community to become paid customers of their proprietary software. Mattermost wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub. It's open source in name only. The real Mattermost product is proprietary and the open source version only exists as a fake open source project to serve as an onramp for selling their closed source proprietary one.
- westurner 4y ago
  > [Open-core Software Firm X] wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub. Source-available software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software Open-core model > Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model#Examples Who can merge which pull requests to the most-tested and most-maintained branch of a fork? CLAs are advisable regardless of software license. Re: Free and Open Source governance models: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1308465144863903744 https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1308465144863903744

cheeseblubber 4y ago

Sure thing. Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable. They can offer public communities but unless they are rendering static version of the site it is really not SEO friendly. They are very enterprise/security focused so if you want something secure and private Mattermost is fantastic. We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app. Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.

dizhn 4y ago
What are your thoughts on Zulip? Their priorities and yours seem to align. I see you have threads but they look more like Discord threads rather than how Zulip does them.
- cheeseblubber 4y ago
  I'm not an expert on Zulip by any means but I'm always a fan of other open source projects. Beyond what we have right now, we want to design Linen to be a thread-first tool (hence the name). We wanted an experience familiar to users of chat communities but encourages thread usage natively. We want to do things like letting you move messages between threads and threads between channel. Which I think Zulip has that functionality. We just haven't had the chance yet because the scope is so big and we wanted to ship something quick and get early feedback. Would also love to hear about what you really enjoy about Zulip.
  - ghostpepper 4y ago
    Threading is the killer feature of Zulip I think
    - dizhn 4y ago
      Yes and conversation histories can be published too.
  - v3ss0n 4y ago
    Zulip have publicweb channels support which is totally google indexable. Check rust community
  - cheeseblubber 4y ago
    I've also mentioned this in a separate comment in the post but reposting here for visibility: To clarify Zulip let's you export their conversations and then render it by generating a static HTMl similar to https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ You'd have to use https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive to achieve. You can see it in the Caveats sections in their documentation https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats They are working on it here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 Zulip lets you browse conversations of public conversations but that is very different than the app being natively search engine friendly and indexable. The difference between Zulip's implementation and Linen is that you don't need a separate UI when someone finds a link in Google. If you find a link through Google you get a dynamic real time experience instead of a static page. If you google site:rust-lang.zulipchat.com you won't see any results. If you do the same with site:slack-chats.kotlinlang.org you'll see at least 20,000 results
jakecopp 4y ago
> Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable. This seems like a good idea for a bot built with https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk (which is very easy, I've used it for a few small projects). The SDK has a callback for each new message - you could just put it into a DB and then render to static text.
ogarten 4y ago
Having these communities google searchable is actually a really cool feature. I don't understand why companies create "open" communities (that are mostly dead anyway) and everything talked about in there is not indexed at all. That is horrible for the actual users, even more so if you go with the free Slack option which only gives you access to 90 days of messaging history. How can you find discussions about specific topics if it's not really searchable. Managing conversation at large scale has been done. Remember "old" forums/bulletin boards that were really popular in the early 2000's? They actually were communities, even though some were rather toxic. They were searchable. Discussions happened naturally. Anyway, wish you the best for your project!
- phanis 4y ago
  Perhaps you can try https://bip.so https://bip.so to convert your Slack threads to documents for future reference. Checkout https://youtu.be/Unco3aCZbLs https://youtu.be/Unco3aCZbLs

openthc 4y ago

We love Mattermost for our organization; it feels nicer to use it over Slack/Discord because we're also FOSS. Our next iteration is to be moving to a more protocol oriented method - which means Matrix or ActivityPub even. We don't care if our chat is search-indexed; it's mostly internal; there are client channels, specific topic channels. At least for our case being OUT OF SEARCH is better. However, we do use the conversation as seeds for our help-docs, blog post, etc, etc. Perhaps Linen could be the winner by putting Slack+Discord+Mattermost+Matrix+ActivityPub in to a better search-index. Anyone remember MARC? -- https://marc.info/ https://marc.info/

pmayrgundter 4y ago
My team is an OSS project using Discord and have setup bots to connect to Element/matrix to test bridging and moving if it makes sense. But I second this call.. the goals for Linen of searchability and better UX are great. I'd be inclined to try it out if it could replace Element for us, but yeah, would have to be connected to Matrix. Orr, Element if you're listening, maybe collaborate with Linen and/or copy their features around search.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  We did that with rocketchat/slackbridge before we just made a full switch to mattermost. The slackbridge was a wonderful tool and I wish that functionality existed for mattermost..

sneak 4y ago

One reason you may not wish to use Mattermost is because they embed spyware into the server that phones home without consent. Additionally, their feature gap between their paid enterprise proprietary version and their free software version is really telling: they don’t believe in free software as a philosophy and are just using free software licenses as marketing bait.

lrvick 4y ago
Source for said spyware? Was not aware of this.
- sneak 4y ago
  It’s the segment.io client library. I started binary patching mattermost installs and also using NextDNS on my servers too to monitor/block dns traffic to ad/spyware domains.
  - phantomathkg 4y ago
    I would imagine there are different between analytics and spyware.
    - sneak 4y ago
      Analytics systems that ask for informed user consent before transmitting are fine. There is no semantic difference whatsoever between silent analytics that assume consent (i.e. "opt out") and spyware. Both invisibly transmit user data off the system without the consent (and usually without the knowledge) of the user, exfiltrating stolen information. Tellingly, the variable used for configuring this in Mattermost calls it "diagnostics", further obscuring its functionality. If privacy is a human right, then this software by default violates the human rights of its users.

sneak 4y ago

I think it's misleading to call Mattermost "open source". Mattermost the for-profit company makes two products, one of which is open source, and a much larger one (which is approximately feature complete wrt modern Slack-likes) which is absolutely not. The open source product they make does not work like a normal open source project: submitted improvements to it will presumably be denied if they add functionality that exists in the proprietary and closed source second product, also called Mattermost, or if they serve users (like removing the silent and nonconsensual phone-home spyware from segment.io that they embed in the released binaries). It's a normal and expected thing in the open source world for user communities to be able to participate in the software project. That's one of the defined goals of the idea of open source: you can fix and improve it, and share your fixes and improvements. Mattermost the company is not really an "open source company", as they build and sell proprietary software as their main source of revenue. Their goal is increasing the use of proprietary software, and every user of the open source Mattermost is a target for them to convince to stop using open source and start using proprietary software. This is presumably why they make their open source version phone home to tell them about your usage of it, so that they can try to get you to pay them to start using the proprietary one if you get big/rich enough. Furthermore, to even contribute to the "open source" project of Mattermost, you are required to sign a CLA, because they want to be able to resell your work commercially under nonfree licenses. You'll note there is no CLA required for most real open source work, because they don't care if you retain copyright - the open source license is all they need. There is no CLA required to contribute to Linux or gcc. Mattermost the software is not really an "open source project" because you can't meaningfully improve the software as the maintainer has a vested financial interest in keeping basic features (like message expiry/retention periods/SSO) out of it to direct the community to become paid customers of their proprietary software. Mattermost wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub. It's open source in name only. The real Mattermost product is proprietary and the open source version only exists as a fake open source project to serve as an onramp for selling their closed source proprietary one.

westurner 4y ago
> [Open-core Software Firm X] wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub. Source-available software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software Open-core model > Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model#Examples Who can merge which pull requests to the most-tested and most-maintained branch of a fork? CLAs are advisable regardless of software license. Re: Free and Open Source governance models: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1308465144863903744 https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1308465144863903744