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Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also
by realityfactchex 1y ago
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
[0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS)
[1] https://zulip.com
- novatea 1y agoI'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things though.
- mobilemidget 1y agoDoes give you more things to 'hack' for the club. Not all bad I guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some 'new projects'.
- _zoltan_ 1y agomattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
- Freak_NL 1y agoIs it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a sensible manner). Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made with regards to our tools.
- wltr 1y agoWhat about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?
- Freak_NL 1y agoNot much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the newest versions?
- wltr 1y agoFirst time I tested a self-hosted instance was a couple of weeks back. It was their official testing docker container. So perhaps there are versions without that, I don’t know. I assume you should be able to compile this without them, or at least fork the original project. Hence, I’m asking what’s about those banners in real world scenario.
- adastra22 1y agoI've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost. Where do you see it?
- wltr 1y agoI afraid I nuked my installation already. There were insignificant features, like for their Playbook (or what the name is), where you are offered some extra feature, that goes with the enterprise plan. If I chose my self-hosted instance for some reason, I don’t really need that advertising in my interface all the time. I can understand the reason it’s there, but I don’t like it still.
- Simran-B 1y agoFunny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky, especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality and the search just works for about everything.
- fransje26 1y ago> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..
- _zoltan_ 1y agoyawn it's very, very old to tell people "do it better else shut up", which is exactly what you did. people can have an opinion you know. this is my opinion.
- gregoriol 1y agoMatrix would be a better alternative
- devoutsalsa 1y agoI've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
- ForHackernews 1y agoMattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoWhat's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally being usable under Apache 2 terms
- ForHackernews 1y agoThat's how they describe themselves: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost > Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
- pcthrowaway 1y agoInteresting. Notably, they also call themselves "open source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit that gives no explanation: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private. Notably, they do have some "source-available" code that goes into the enterprise release, at https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/server/enterprise https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/server/... This mainly seems to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a relatively recent development). Until recently they also had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search) So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and almost all features, are currently still open source.
- shaky-carrousel 1y agoI personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
- renewiltord 1y agoThe post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.
- realityfactchex 1y agoYeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence, which is buried at the very end, after all the images. If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.
- renewiltord 1y agoThey are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
- ioulian 1y ago> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.
- mihaaly 1y ago> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally. Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
- criley2 1y agoIt's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally. So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date? Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message. The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.
- wellthisisgreat 1y agoZulip is great
- dizhn 1y agoZulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives exist.
- wltr 1y agoStill, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
- detaro 1y agoThe problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair. If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.
- subscribed 1y agoSelf-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me. ¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/ https://docs.ntfy.sh/
- ckok 1y agoCuriously if you ask if they would consider properly supporting notifications from the mobile web version then the answer is always no. Pwa would be perfectly fine but its crippled on Zulip
- hliyan 1y agoI think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
- GrinningFool 1y agoUnfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?
- NetMageSCW 1y agoPerpetual licenses aren’t a panacea given that old software doesn’t have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of support is lacking.
- otherme123 1y agoI'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.
- p-t 1y ago> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)
- BeefySwain 1y agoCampfire is definitely not FOSS: https://once.com/license https://once.com/license
- hardwaresofton 1y agoInteresting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository. https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- realityfactchex 1y agoThat's an outdated license web page dated 2024, see "Copyright © 2024" at the bottom. The code was made free in 2025 per X post dated Sep 12, 2025 by Jason Fried [0], screenshot available [1]. A quote from Fried's tweet: Campfire...it's now 100% free...and open source. Here's a quote from https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICENSE https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICE... Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction... [0] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560 https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560 [1] https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png
- maxloh 1y agoWhy not Element/Matrix? It seems to be a more popular and mature choice, and it is open source too.
- dzogchen 1y agoThere's really nothing like Slack in my uninformed opinion.