10 ms·

Mattermost restricted access to old messages after 10000 limit is reached

385 points by xvilka 10mo ago

bramhaag 10mo ago
Mattermost is MIT licensed. What is stopping anyone from removing this restriction?
- jstummbillig 10mo ago
  I don't know, but that seems somewhat beside the point. The restriction obviously was not added to test peoples ability to remove it.
- Y_Y 10mo ago
  https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec... Wanting to use Mattermost's binaries rather than building from source? Re licensing see: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/ https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/
- LudwigNagasena 10mo ago
  It’s not open source, it’s “open core” SaaS.
- bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
  The time and energy that it takes to do it and build it, and then make it easy for current users to move their automatic updates to the fork, then maintaining it etc.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- J-Kuhn 10mo ago
  The compiled binary is. The source code is... AGPL licensed? But not the admin tools. They seem to be licensed under the Apache License 2.0. -------- Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer.
  - bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
    Explain please. This interests me and I'm extremely curious about what you mean.
    - J-Kuhn 10mo ago
      Combining source code under different licenses into one product is a nightmare. You have to follow the AGPL "no additional restrictions" clause while also following the Apache License, and the Apache License might have require you to follow additional restrictions.
      - pastage 10mo ago
        Honestly this has never been an issue for me, sure I have had to explain the limits of the licenses and check that I understand them. I guess it depends on your use case, so I am still uncertain when this has become a problem for you.
  - true_religion 10mo ago
    AGPL and Apache are both open source licenses. So I’m not getting what the confusion would be as an end user, who won’t be modifying the software or packaging it for sale.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
      They're both FREE software licenses, which is more. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
  - dns_snek 10mo ago
    > Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer. Why? The intent seems pretty clear and they're legally allowed to do this because all contributors signed a CLA.
- csomar 10mo ago
  Nothing. Open Source is dying. The model to finance open source work (well-off suburban american dads or as a portfolio show off) no longer apply. The old generation that believed in this model is retiring and for the new generation it pays better to "network", leet code, or spam your resume to thousands of employers. Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years will be interesting.
  - Zacharias030 10mo ago
    almost seems like there is now too much money in software. the old times felt like computer science was mostly a science.
  - Ekaros 10mo ago
    There never was a model to fund open source. At least outside largest and most wide spread codebases. I think it is that reality is finally hitting. Free money has run out and now software must stand as either community efforts, wide enough used foundations or forced support.
  - IshKebab 10mo ago
    I don't think anything has changed really. Open source never really had a good funding option.
- mort96 10mo ago
  Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's just routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own upgrade infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from trivial. The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.
  - derefr 10mo ago
    I don't think the implication is that anyone as an individual would fork it. I think the implication is that some other interested org could very easily step in and assume the role that the Mattermost org was in, and everyone would very eagerly switch and leave Mattermost itself speaking to an empty room.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - whatevaa 10mo ago
      Still need someone to do unthankful work, in which many are not interested, naturally.
      - nlitened 10mo ago
        You actually don't have to maintain the fork and/or update to latest version if you don't need new features.
        regularfry 10mo ago
        Or patched vulnerabilities.
        mort96 10mo ago
        You don't have to maintain the fork and/or update to the latest version if you don't need new features or security fixes. Most people want security fixes.
  - integralid 10mo ago
- compsciphd 10mo ago
  glancing through the code, it doesn't seem like it be that hard to remove limitations such as this. PostHistoryLimit/postHistoryLimit interpreted from License Limits. a little poke here and there and I'd guess the limitations would disappear.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  No. The binaries they prepackage for you are MIT. If you want the source it is AGPL or you pay for a proprietary license.
_lvbh 10mo ago
It's another level of insane to put hard limits for self hosted open source software. I'm surprised so few people in the thread have just changed the source code and build it themselves.
- dotancohen 10mo ago
  They probably found performance problems at certain limits and "resolved" the problem with a hard coded limit.
  - danielheath 10mo ago
    ... a hard coded limit... for self-hosted software... which is removed for paying users?
  - hk__2 10mo ago
    It’s not hardcoded; self-hosted version call their server to ask what is the limit, which is 10k if you don’t pay or unlimited if you do. There is absolutely no performance problem with >10k messages.
gmerc 10mo ago
Did they take VC money?
- shafyy 10mo ago
  Yes. They are a YC company, too: https://mattermost.com/blog/yc-leads-50m-series-b-in-mattermost-as-open-source-slack-alternative/ https://mattermost.com/blog/yc-leads-50m-series-b-in-matterm...
  - wltr 10mo ago
    Waiting for the thread to be marked as [flagged] and then [dead] then, I assume.
    - GaryBluto 10mo ago
      Has HN ever showed bias in this way? I can't think of any occasions.
      - wltr 10mo ago
        Isn’t that obvious? Look at the domain name.
- bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
  I think that the photos they have on their front page should be enough to tell you who is their target market. I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
  - dotancohen 10mo ago
    Black businesswomen? Firefighters? White servicemen? White software developers? I really don't get what you're implying. I don't see any problem with the photos on the mattermost front page. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
What's mattermost? People in the GitHub comments say "I just need messages" but there's lots of self hosted messaging apps/servers, no? XMPP comes to mind immediately.
- figmert 10mo ago
  It's an open source alternative to Slack
  - hk__2 10mo ago
    Well, it was this at the beginning. Now it’s an open-core competitor to Slack, with higher pricing(!) but you can use the free version that has fewer features.
- firesteelrain 10mo ago
  It’s an IRC-like, group chat for Corporate that works in airgap. When HipChat was obsoleted, then Mattermost took over.
- loeg 10mo ago
  My employer migrated to it from IRC, for example.
gus_massa 10mo ago
From the readme.md > A new compiled version is released under an MIT license every month on the 16th. What does than even mean? Is it equivalent to what we use to call "freeware". Is it legal to modify the binaries?
- dotancohen 10mo ago
  I'm not sure about MIT, but the GNU license specifically requires the application licensed to be available in source code (human readable and editable form or similar verbiage).
  - tom_ 10mo ago
    The MIT licence does not require this.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
      I'm not an expert, but I very much doubt this. The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think they would if they didn't make the source code available. Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for Free software, see [2] > Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software EDIT Oh sorry, you mean for the LICENSE to be available. Never mind then.
      - adastra22 10mo ago
        You can compile MIT software and distribute the binary while saying “fuck you” to anyone who asks for the source. You are thinking of copyleft (e.g. GPL)
        ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
gjsman-1000 10mo ago
> “Mattermost only got where it is today because of the open-source community.” Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a daily basis. Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored… in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  It's because you misunderstood the reason - they OSS part got them some free advertising and users that gave it a try and got on the subscription. Now VC's want their money so gotta make people that can't be bothered to get off it to migrate to paid plan
  - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
    … by adding a check to builds that anyone, using the source code, can easily patch out? FOSS never came with any guarantee of “builds must arrive in format most convenient for users.” That’s not in the license. Also not in the license, “FOSS companies can’t charge money for their builds.” Also not in the license, “FOSS companies must provide builds at all.” If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all.
    - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      Yes by adding friction to any existing user so they have to fuck with it every single time they update instead of just downloading a blob. Now Go being easy to get builds running makes it less painful, but still, the entire reason it is in codebase is to add friction. > If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all. I don't consider "OSS license with CLA forcing code rights assignment" to be FOSS. It being closed source would be better for everyone (but them) because less people would get baited into bait and switch and maybe support less insidiously managed projects.
cantalopes 10mo ago
Thank god i didn't convince my team to selfhost mattermost instead of using slack
- adastra22 10mo ago
  … slack is exactly the same, except without even the ability to self-host?
  - krick 10mo ago
    I this this is the irony: mattermost probably is the right choice anyway, but you wouldn't want to be the guy who convinced others they should switch, because after something like this, it's him who will be blamed by everyone who he managed to convince.
  - cantalopes 10mo ago
    But then we pay anyways plus the maintenance costs dedicated on our team
jamescontrol 10mo ago
I looked at it for company chat and data, but those weird limits in functionality making in unusable was just too much, so them doing this too is not really surprising. Are they low on money?
shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
You can switch to https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter which doesn't have the user limit crap.
- codefined 10mo ago
  We use Docker to deploy, do you know of any public forks that do Docker builds?
  - dlkckvll 10mo ago
    You don’t need Docker desktop to build a docker image. In linux, which everyone should use in their ci/cd, just run ”docker build .”
- jonnycomputer 10mo ago
  wish the compile instructions in MOSTLY_MATTER_HOWTO were a little more intelligible to me.
- hk__2 10mo ago
  it also has no maintenance; the last commit is from May 2024.
  - EricRiese 10mo ago
    There are newer release branches. They just have gitlab set to show an unmaintained branch by default.
carolosf 10mo ago
I used to use Mattermost. Highly recommend looking at Zulip as an alternative. (It’s my favourite slack alternative and even better than Slack because it’s the best at managing distractions IMO. It also has an interesting history was acquired by Dropbox and then back from Dropbox I believe)
- paper2d 10mo ago
  Zulip too has similar restrictions even on their self hosted plans. SAML/LDAP is behind paywall too.
  - gtech1 10mo ago
    What restrictions have you hit ?
    - paper2d 10mo ago
      Seeing their pricing page, mobile notifications for upto 10 users is too less.
      - gtech1 10mo ago
        But you mentioned similar...this is a discussion about message limits (and saml ?). Those are free for self hosted. Push uses _their_ services. That's why it costs $$$. But you can build your own apns endpoint and plug into that at that volume
        emptysongglass 10mo ago
        Push costs pennies. It's an arbitrary restriction.
        gtech1 10mo ago
        Then you pay for it. Nothing stops you
constantius 10mo ago
They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process. Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries. https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ https://wekan.github.io/ https://wekan.github.io/
- firesteelrain 10mo ago
  mIRC was used during GWOT for military. They just didn’t openly advertise it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321
  - huhtenberg 10mo ago
    What's GWOT?
    - firesteelrain 10mo ago
      Global War on Terror
      - OutOfHere 10mo ago
        Global War on Tankers
  - constantius 10mo ago
    Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools. Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
    - firesteelrain 10mo ago
Zephilinox 10mo ago
so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit, they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake? very nice
- protimewaster 10mo ago
  In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
  - creshal 10mo ago
    That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset users is the worst way to handle it. Even just closing the issue would've been less damaging at this point.
  - cwmoore 10mo ago
    The distinction isn’t non-discriminating, but if it is then, what it is, I believe.
  - g947o 10mo ago
    aka "it's a good idea to turn our productivity software into ransomware" plan
    - pixl97 10mo ago
      Isn't that just the Oracle method?
      - BuildTheRobots 10mo ago
        It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to pay through the nose to access any history.
q3k 10mo ago
diff --git a/server/channels/app/limits.go b/server/channels/app/limits.go index b13103898a..a8be8dd908 100644 --- a/server/channels/app/limits.go +++ b/server/channels/app/limits.go @@ -36,17 +36,6 @@ func (a *App) GetServerLimits() (*model.ServerLimits, *model.AppError) { limits.MaxUsersHardLimit = licenseUserLimit + int64(extraUsers) } - // Check if license has post history limits and get the calculated timestamp - if license != nil && license.Limits != nil && license.Limits.PostHistory > 0 { - limits.PostHistoryLimit = license.Limits.PostHistory - // Get the calculated timestamp of the last accessible post - lastAccessibleTime, appErr := a.GetLastAccessiblePostTime() - if appErr != nil { - return nil, appErr - } - limits.LastAccessiblePostTime = lastAccessibleTime - } - activeUserCount, appErr := a.Srv().Store().User().Count(model.UserCountOptions{}) if appErr != nil { return nil, model.NewAppError("GetServerLimits", "app.limits.get_app_limits.user_count.store_error", nil, "", http.StatusInternalServerError).Wrap(appErr)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- donohoe 10mo ago
  Or just this: $ sed -i -E '/maxUsers(Hard)?Limit.*0$/s/$/_000/' channels/app/limits.go Source: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
  - q3k 10mo ago
    This is a different limit.
  - dlkckvll 10mo ago
    Would also be nice to remove the phone-home telemetry.
- compsciphd 10mo ago
p2detar 10mo ago
This seems to be only for the Enterprise edition. The "free" Team edition should not have this limit: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3534777330 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec... Also one of the comments: > Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It would save recompile efforts. edit: link edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-linux.html#itab--Ubuntu--0_1-Ubuntu https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-l...
- mort96 10mo ago
  It seems like the Team edition has a bunch of other limitations, but it's hard to tell from how convoluted and incomplete Mattermost's various comparison pages are.
- bmacho 10mo ago
  Is it legal to "patch" (remove a restriction) the binary?
  - gsich 10mo ago
    yes
  - mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
    As with many things in adult life, the question is not really "is it legal" but "could I get in trouble for doing this". And we all know the answer.
  - xorcist 10mo ago
    How could it be illegal? It's not aviation software and doesn't need to be certified to allow it to be used.
    - deleted 10mo ago
petcat 10mo ago
Am I understanding this right that the main complainant in that issue thread is an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted that they are not actually a school, but rather a consulting company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source software.
- sergiotapia 10mo ago
  No, you are not understanding this right. It's about rug pulling your users and cutting them off at the knees. I don't use mattermost but read the github thread in it's entirety.
  - toxik 10mo ago
    The good brand of open-source software is basically being abused to do basic rug pull schemes. Sad.
- lexicality 10mo ago
  > an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning. Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
  - petcat 10mo ago
    I'm aware of what open source software is. And there are 3 things that you can do when in this situation: 1) Pay the fee, if that is what is required for it to continue to be easy for you to re-sell the software. 2) Fork the project, remove the restrictions, and maintain it yourself. 3) Stop using the software. All of those are perfectly within the spirit of FOSS.
- 10mo ago
yard2010 10mo ago
So, they limit the access to data on self hosted instances after upgrade? Sounds like a ransomware with extra steps. Enshitification ensues.
lousken 10mo ago
For all the bad press element/matrix has been getting, I am happy that at least I don't have to deal with this as well.
- anotherevan 10mo ago
  We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se. We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.) We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about. The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since. If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
- jonnycomputer 10mo ago
  what bad press is that?
  - lousken 10mo ago
    well e.g. those HN articles and comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106132
garganzol 10mo ago
Bait contributors by a FOSS-like model, then switch the mode to sell the results of their contributions without paying them back. What a classic.
cletus 10mo ago
Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story. I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier. Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have. So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards. So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query. Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed. You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone. This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used. Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.
- Zacharias030 10mo ago
  Merry Christmas! This is why I like hackernews.
micromacrofoot 10mo ago
This seems like a poorly hashed out plan, but I do have some sympathy... in the face of competitors with many more employees and seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead? Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same cliff? Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute enough to ensure development keeps pace)? Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  It's not really open source project. They always gated a bunch of features, require CLA (so even if someone does contribute, boom, your code is theirs and they will probably close it down behind enterprise license if it is useful enough), and have pretty complex licensing scheme https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-source-available-license.html https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-... > Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product. They had niche when their lite enterprise license (just basic LDAP and some other small features) was $2.5 per user. Now they are basically on slack pricing, why would anyone bother...
  - micromacrofoot 10mo ago
    yeah they certainly can't beat slack with slack pricing - low pricing is the biggest moat vc funding gets you (and you can just fill it in after you outlast the competition)
liviux 10mo ago
Another project bites the dust. They will return after a fork will get way popular. In time
october8140 10mo ago
GitHub needs a better flag for license stuff like this. Open Source doesn’t mean what it used to.
- xandrius 10mo ago
  Open source doesn't imply no limitations.
  - nfkkfkkc 10mo ago
    Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Even if the case is laughed out of court. Btw I hope you didn’t forget to pay the Linux license fee to SCO.
- pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
  Why would GitHub step in (or even care)? GitHub isn't open source.
throw-the-towel 10mo ago
Years ago I used to work at a company that used Mattermost for internal chats. Being laid off from there was sad, but at least I didn't have to use Mattermost anymore.
- shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
  An ex-coworker used to call it "matterworst".
sapphirebreeze 10mo ago
[dead]
Zacharias030 10mo ago
can someone clarify the situation that self-hosted free (as in beer) community mattermosts are/will be in?
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  They have been slowly removing features from it and this is another one removed
  - Zacharias030 10mo ago
    I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity. I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the 10k message history is the limit correctly. And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over project channels, family related things etc. that was as reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public internet" and I am willing to manage that it does. Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has better future proofing.
ptman 10mo ago
Use matrix instead. Or zulip. Or xmpp. Or IRC
DrStartup 10mo ago
The good ole VC OS Rug Pull. Classic. It’d be nice if Mozilla (or a similar foundation) could create a baseline OS platform for a business communications suite.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  I'd be nice for anyone but Mozilla to do it. They can barely keep FF competitive
  - Certhas 10mo ago
    FF is plenty competitive on the technical and feature front. It's market share is not a reflection of technical merit. What's more, next to Linux itself it is maybe the only case I can see where a major piece of user facing software is kept competitive with the Apple/Google/MS tools. LibreOffice or Nextcloud are technically far further behind Office and Google's online offerings. Which therefore begs the question: Who else is in a position to do this? At first glance, Moz with Firefox + a suite of self-hosted team and productivity stuff that works well in Firefox would make a ton of sense...
    - gettingoverit 10mo ago
      It isn't competitive. They are paid by Google. Worse, it's ridden with spyware, and is merely a honeypot for security-aware people that are not sufficiently paranoid to check any of the claims. Like, those VPNs from YT ads that use your IP to give AI companies residential proxies, the same kind of scam. Spin up Wireshark and take a look at activity of Firefox. Try to shut the browser up. It won't work. Even if they weren't a Google's proxy company, they would lose to standards commitees being infested by Google, and would have to play the "best luck catching up" game by constantly supporting new versions of JS, APIs and CSS features that nobody needs (except Google's YouTube will use them to stop you from using an adblocker). FF is governed by ex-Oracle managers at the moment, singing the Google's song. Don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower.
- jonnycomputer 10mo ago
wltr 10mo ago
I was about to propose to deploy this as a company chat to my current boss, the self-hosted edition. So, is this still the best option (considering this can be reverted back, I assume), or should I just seek elsewhere now?
- xvilka 10mo ago
  Zulip is recommended by many here. Their mobile app is atrocious though...
  - wltr 10mo ago
    10 users for mobile notifications is a non-starter for me. I’d rather host XMPP then, I guess. Or a Matrix server, it seems like it allows the mobile notifications.
    - fittingopposite 10mo ago
      Have you worked with both Matrix and Zulip? Looking at both for a small team and wondering which way to go with. Matrix seems more complex to set up and less tailored to function as a Slack alternative. What has been your experience?
      - wltr 10mo ago
        Unfortunately, not yet. I tried all of them locally earlier this year, but very briefly, like 15 minutes each. We use Matrix as our family messenger, which is not self-hosted. It’s mainly for occasional and brief text communication, so I’m not too motivated to go self-hosted, yet I had my plans.
        fittingopposite 10mo ago
        Thank you for sharing your experience!
        10mo ago
yunohn 10mo ago
Y’know I’m starting to think that every single migration from paid to free software, will end up in the same cycle of becoming feature-locked. People time and again fail to understand that you need to financially support projects you use for sustainable futures. But alas, here we are…
steanne 10mo ago
this is not the only such recent change. can't make voice calls in public channels anymore either, only pms.
pmdr 10mo ago
IRC, email and XAMPP solved messaging a long time ago. Derivative products built on these protocols should have solved the chat problem for most orgs, but we got complacent and thus vulnerable to nickle and diming by the likes of Saleforce and Microsoft. Now rug pulls by faux-opensource projects that basically want free labor for their commercial project so they can sell it to bigger fish. It's not people wanting to make more money that I despise. Fine, make your commercial version ten times better, I don't care. But the practice of crippling your opensource offering by removing features or adding limits is evil and shameful.
- davisr 10mo ago
  "Fauxpensource", if you will.
xinayder 10mo ago
Another option is the open source Rocket.Chat.
- wltr 10mo ago
  Last time I checked they were worse.
renewiltord 10mo ago
As is usual, HN’s favourite “underdog” alternative to mainstream software is just a worse version of the mainstream software. I’ll just use Slack instead of some garbage clone that has the same restrictions.
cue_the_strings 10mo ago
I thoroughly investigated every open-source (mostly open-core) self-hostable Slack alternative, and the conclusion was clear: only a self-hosted Matrix is a viable option. There are no arbitrary limits for 'community editions', no risk of relicensing, no risk of being held hostage for features (like Gitlab did at some point). You can work around all the missing features easily with self-built webhooks and other tools. Starting with Mattermost or Zulip or similar is just way too risky.
- wltr 10mo ago
  What about their mobile push notifications? I don’t understand whether that’s something one can self-host. I have just read Zulip’s https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus... and they give me the impression only they can do this, so ‘pay us money or else’ I wonder whether this is something any other provider can rug pull in the figure and to be worried about.
  - cue_the_strings 10mo ago
    IME it "just works" on Android: https://docs.element.io/latest/element-server-suite-classic/advanced-configuration/notifications-mdm-push-gateway/ https://docs.element.io/latest/element-server-suite-classic/...
aligundogdu 9mo ago
That 10k limit was the breaking point for me too. I decided to move our stack to Matrix/Synapse but didn't want to lose years of context. Since I couldn't find a straightforward migration path, I built a CLI tool to handle the transition (users, channels, and history). It’s open-source if you want to give it a try or contribute: https://github.com/aligundogdu/matrixmigrate https://github.com/aligundogdu/matrixmigrate
Combs7th 9mo ago
Quick clarification in case it helps folks here: the message limit applies to the Entry edition. The Team Edition (TE) does not have this limit and remains free/self-hosted. If you’re currently on Entry and want to move to TE, there’s a migration guide here with step-by-step instructions: https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/migrating-to-mattermost.html#move-mattermost-to-a-new-server https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig... Hope that helps clear things up.

385 points by xvilka 10mo ago

bramhaag 10mo ago

Mattermost is MIT licensed. What is stopping anyone from removing this restriction?

jstummbillig 10mo ago
I don't know, but that seems somewhat beside the point. The restriction obviously was not added to test peoples ability to remove it.
Y_Y 10mo ago
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec... Wanting to use Mattermost's binaries rather than building from source? Re licensing see: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/ https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/
LudwigNagasena 10mo ago
It’s not open source, it’s “open core” SaaS.
bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
The time and energy that it takes to do it and build it, and then make it easy for current users to move their automatic updates to the fork, then maintaining it etc.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
J-Kuhn 10mo ago
The compiled binary is. The source code is... AGPL licensed? But not the admin tools. They seem to be licensed under the Apache License 2.0. -------- Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer.
- bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
  Explain please. This interests me and I'm extremely curious about what you mean.
  - J-Kuhn 10mo ago
    Combining source code under different licenses into one product is a nightmare. You have to follow the AGPL "no additional restrictions" clause while also following the Apache License, and the Apache License might have require you to follow additional restrictions.
    - pastage 10mo ago
      Honestly this has never been an issue for me, sure I have had to explain the limits of the licenses and check that I understand them. I guess it depends on your use case, so I am still uncertain when this has become a problem for you.
- true_religion 10mo ago
  AGPL and Apache are both open source licenses. So I’m not getting what the confusion would be as an end user, who won’t be modifying the software or packaging it for sale.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
    They're both FREE software licenses, which is more. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
- dns_snek 10mo ago
  > Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer. Why? The intent seems pretty clear and they're legally allowed to do this because all contributors signed a CLA.
csomar 10mo ago
Nothing. Open Source is dying. The model to finance open source work (well-off suburban american dads or as a portfolio show off) no longer apply. The old generation that believed in this model is retiring and for the new generation it pays better to "network", leet code, or spam your resume to thousands of employers. Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years will be interesting.
- Zacharias030 10mo ago
  almost seems like there is now too much money in software. the old times felt like computer science was mostly a science.
- Ekaros 10mo ago
  There never was a model to fund open source. At least outside largest and most wide spread codebases. I think it is that reality is finally hitting. Free money has run out and now software must stand as either community efforts, wide enough used foundations or forced support.
- IshKebab 10mo ago
  I don't think anything has changed really. Open source never really had a good funding option.
mort96 10mo ago
Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's just routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own upgrade infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from trivial. The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.
- derefr 10mo ago
  I don't think the implication is that anyone as an individual would fork it. I think the implication is that some other interested org could very easily step in and assume the role that the Mattermost org was in, and everyone would very eagerly switch and leave Mattermost itself speaking to an empty room.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - whatevaa 10mo ago
    Still need someone to do unthankful work, in which many are not interested, naturally.
    - nlitened 10mo ago
      You actually don't have to maintain the fork and/or update to latest version if you don't need new features.
      - regularfry 10mo ago
        Or patched vulnerabilities.
      - mort96 10mo ago
        You don't have to maintain the fork and/or update to the latest version if you don't need new features or security fixes. Most people want security fixes.
- integralid 10mo ago
compsciphd 10mo ago
glancing through the code, it doesn't seem like it be that hard to remove limitations such as this. PostHistoryLimit/postHistoryLimit interpreted from License Limits. a little poke here and there and I'd guess the limitations would disappear.
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
No. The binaries they prepackage for you are MIT. If you want the source it is AGPL or you pay for a proprietary license.

_lvbh 10mo ago

It's another level of insane to put hard limits for self hosted open source software. I'm surprised so few people in the thread have just changed the source code and build it themselves.

dotancohen 10mo ago
They probably found performance problems at certain limits and "resolved" the problem with a hard coded limit.
- danielheath 10mo ago
  ... a hard coded limit... for self-hosted software... which is removed for paying users?
- hk__2 10mo ago
  It’s not hardcoded; self-hosted version call their server to ask what is the limit, which is 10k if you don’t pay or unlimited if you do. There is absolutely no performance problem with >10k messages.

gmerc 10mo ago

Did they take VC money?

shafyy 10mo ago
Yes. They are a YC company, too: https://mattermost.com/blog/yc-leads-50m-series-b-in-mattermost-as-open-source-slack-alternative/ https://mattermost.com/blog/yc-leads-50m-series-b-in-matterm...
- wltr 10mo ago
  Waiting for the thread to be marked as [flagged] and then [dead] then, I assume.
  - GaryBluto 10mo ago
    Has HN ever showed bias in this way? I can't think of any occasions.
    - wltr 10mo ago
      Isn’t that obvious? Look at the domain name.
bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago
I think that the photos they have on their front page should be enough to tell you who is their target market. I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
- dotancohen 10mo ago
  Black businesswomen? Firefighters? White servicemen? White software developers? I really don't get what you're implying. I don't see any problem with the photos on the mattermost front page. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

bfkwlfkjf 10mo ago

What's mattermost? People in the GitHub comments say "I just need messages" but there's lots of self hosted messaging apps/servers, no? XMPP comes to mind immediately.

figmert 10mo ago
It's an open source alternative to Slack
- hk__2 10mo ago
  Well, it was this at the beginning. Now it’s an open-core competitor to Slack, with higher pricing(!) but you can use the free version that has fewer features.
firesteelrain 10mo ago
It’s an IRC-like, group chat for Corporate that works in airgap. When HipChat was obsoleted, then Mattermost took over.
loeg 10mo ago
My employer migrated to it from IRC, for example.

gus_massa 10mo ago

From the readme.md > A new compiled version is released under an MIT license every month on the 16th. What does than even mean? Is it equivalent to what we use to call "freeware". Is it legal to modify the binaries?

dotancohen 10mo ago
I'm not sure about MIT, but the GNU license specifically requires the application licensed to be available in source code (human readable and editable form or similar verbiage).
- tom_ 10mo ago
  The MIT licence does not require this.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
    I'm not an expert, but I very much doubt this. The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think they would if they didn't make the source code available. Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for Free software, see [2] > Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software EDIT Oh sorry, you mean for the LICENSE to be available. Never mind then.
    - adastra22 10mo ago
      You can compile MIT software and distribute the binary while saying “fuck you” to anyone who asks for the source. You are thinking of copyleft (e.g. GPL)
      - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago

gjsman-1000 10mo ago

> “Mattermost only got where it is today because of the open-source community.” Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a daily basis. Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored… in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
It's because you misunderstood the reason - they OSS part got them some free advertising and users that gave it a try and got on the subscription. Now VC's want their money so gotta make people that can't be bothered to get off it to migrate to paid plan
- gjsman-1000 10mo ago
  … by adding a check to builds that anyone, using the source code, can easily patch out? FOSS never came with any guarantee of “builds must arrive in format most convenient for users.” That’s not in the license. Also not in the license, “FOSS companies can’t charge money for their builds.” Also not in the license, “FOSS companies must provide builds at all.” If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all.
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    Yes by adding friction to any existing user so they have to fuck with it every single time they update instead of just downloading a blob. Now Go being easy to get builds running makes it less painful, but still, the entire reason it is in codebase is to add friction. > If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all. I don't consider "OSS license with CLA forcing code rights assignment" to be FOSS. It being closed source would be better for everyone (but them) because less people would get baited into bait and switch and maybe support less insidiously managed projects.

cantalopes 10mo ago

Thank god i didn't convince my team to selfhost mattermost instead of using slack

adastra22 10mo ago
… slack is exactly the same, except without even the ability to self-host?
- krick 10mo ago
  I this this is the irony: mattermost probably is the right choice anyway, but you wouldn't want to be the guy who convinced others they should switch, because after something like this, it's him who will be blamed by everyone who he managed to convince.
- cantalopes 10mo ago
  But then we pay anyways plus the maintenance costs dedicated on our team

jamescontrol 10mo ago

I looked at it for company chat and data, but those weird limits in functionality making in unusable was just too much, so them doing this too is not really surprising. Are they low on money?

shaky-carrousel 10mo ago

You can switch to https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter which doesn't have the user limit crap.

codefined 10mo ago
We use Docker to deploy, do you know of any public forks that do Docker builds?
- dlkckvll 10mo ago
  You don’t need Docker desktop to build a docker image. In linux, which everyone should use in their ci/cd, just run ”docker build .”
jonnycomputer 10mo ago
wish the compile instructions in MOSTLY_MATTER_HOWTO were a little more intelligible to me.
hk__2 10mo ago
it also has no maintenance; the last commit is from May 2024.
- EricRiese 10mo ago
  There are newer release branches. They just have gitlab set to show an unmaintained branch by default.

carolosf 10mo ago

I used to use Mattermost. Highly recommend looking at Zulip as an alternative. (It’s my favourite slack alternative and even better than Slack because it’s the best at managing distractions IMO. It also has an interesting history was acquired by Dropbox and then back from Dropbox I believe)

paper2d 10mo ago
Zulip too has similar restrictions even on their self hosted plans. SAML/LDAP is behind paywall too.
- gtech1 10mo ago
  What restrictions have you hit ?
  - paper2d 10mo ago
    Seeing their pricing page, mobile notifications for upto 10 users is too less.
    - gtech1 10mo ago
      But you mentioned similar...this is a discussion about message limits (and saml ?). Those are free for self hosted. Push uses _their_ services. That's why it costs $$$. But you can build your own apns endpoint and plug into that at that volume
      - emptysongglass 10mo ago
        Push costs pennies. It's an arbitrary restriction.
        gtech1 10mo ago
        Then you pay for it. Nothing stops you

constantius 10mo ago

They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process. Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries. https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ https://wekan.github.io/ https://wekan.github.io/

firesteelrain 10mo ago
mIRC was used during GWOT for military. They just didn’t openly advertise it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321
- huhtenberg 10mo ago
  What's GWOT?
  - firesteelrain 10mo ago
    Global War on Terror
    - OutOfHere 10mo ago
      Global War on Tankers
- constantius 10mo ago
  Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools. Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
  - firesteelrain 10mo ago

Zephilinox 10mo ago

so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit, they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake? very nice

protimewaster 10mo ago
In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
- creshal 10mo ago
  That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset users is the worst way to handle it. Even just closing the issue would've been less damaging at this point.
- cwmoore 10mo ago
  The distinction isn’t non-discriminating, but if it is then, what it is, I believe.
- g947o 10mo ago
  aka "it's a good idea to turn our productivity software into ransomware" plan
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    Isn't that just the Oracle method?
    - BuildTheRobots 10mo ago
      It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to pay through the nose to access any history.

q3k 10mo ago

diff --git a/server/channels/app/limits.go b/server/channels/app/limits.go index b13103898a..a8be8dd908 100644 --- a/server/channels/app/limits.go +++ b/server/channels/app/limits.go @@ -36,17 +36,6 @@ func (a *App) GetServerLimits() (*model.ServerLimits, *model.AppError) { limits.MaxUsersHardLimit = licenseUserLimit + int64(extraUsers) } - // Check if license has post history limits and get the calculated timestamp - if license != nil && license.Limits != nil && license.Limits.PostHistory > 0 { - limits.PostHistoryLimit = license.Limits.PostHistory - // Get the calculated timestamp of the last accessible post - lastAccessibleTime, appErr := a.GetLastAccessiblePostTime() - if appErr != nil { - return nil, appErr - } - limits.LastAccessiblePostTime = lastAccessibleTime - } - activeUserCount, appErr := a.Srv().Store().User().Count(model.UserCountOptions{}) if appErr != nil { return nil, model.NewAppError("GetServerLimits", "app.limits.get_app_limits.user_count.store_error", nil, "", http.StatusInternalServerError).Wrap(appErr)

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
donohoe 10mo ago
Or just this: $ sed -i -E '/maxUsers(Hard)?Limit.*0$/s/$/_000/' channels/app/limits.go Source: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3601919951 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
- q3k 10mo ago
  This is a different limit.
- dlkckvll 10mo ago
  Would also be nice to remove the phone-home telemetry.
compsciphd 10mo ago

p2detar 10mo ago

This seems to be only for the Enterprise edition. The "free" Team edition should not have this limit: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3534777330 https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec... Also one of the comments: > Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It would save recompile efforts. edit: link edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-linux.html#itab--Ubuntu--0_1-Ubuntu https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-l...

mort96 10mo ago
It seems like the Team edition has a bunch of other limitations, but it's hard to tell from how convoluted and incomplete Mattermost's various comparison pages are.
bmacho 10mo ago
Is it legal to "patch" (remove a restriction) the binary?
- gsich 10mo ago
  yes
- mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
  As with many things in adult life, the question is not really "is it legal" but "could I get in trouble for doing this". And we all know the answer.
- xorcist 10mo ago
  How could it be illegal? It's not aviation software and doesn't need to be certified to allow it to be used.
  - deleted 10mo ago

petcat 10mo ago

Am I understanding this right that the main complainant in that issue thread is an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted that they are not actually a school, but rather a consulting company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source software.

sergiotapia 10mo ago
No, you are not understanding this right. It's about rug pulling your users and cutting them off at the knees. I don't use mattermost but read the github thread in it's entirety.
- toxik 10mo ago
  The good brand of open-source software is basically being abused to do basic rug pull schemes. Sad.
lexicality 10mo ago
> an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning. Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
- petcat 10mo ago
  I'm aware of what open source software is. And there are 3 things that you can do when in this situation: 1) Pay the fee, if that is what is required for it to continue to be easy for you to re-sell the software. 2) Fork the project, remove the restrictions, and maintain it yourself. 3) Stop using the software. All of those are perfectly within the spirit of FOSS.
10mo ago

yard2010 10mo ago

So, they limit the access to data on self hosted instances after upgrade? Sounds like a ransomware with extra steps. Enshitification ensues.

lousken 10mo ago

For all the bad press element/matrix has been getting, I am happy that at least I don't have to deal with this as well.

anotherevan 10mo ago
We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se. We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.) We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about. The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since. If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
jonnycomputer 10mo ago
what bad press is that?
- lousken 10mo ago
  well e.g. those HN articles and comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106132

garganzol 10mo ago

Bait contributors by a FOSS-like model, then switch the mode to sell the results of their contributions without paying them back. What a classic.

cletus 10mo ago

Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story. I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier. Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have. So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards. So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query. Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed. You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone. This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used. Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.

Zacharias030 10mo ago
Merry Christmas! This is why I like hackernews.

micromacrofoot 10mo ago

This seems like a poorly hashed out plan, but I do have some sympathy... in the face of competitors with many more employees and seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead? Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same cliff? Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute enough to ensure development keeps pace)? Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
It's not really open source project. They always gated a bunch of features, require CLA (so even if someone does contribute, boom, your code is theirs and they will probably close it down behind enterprise license if it is useful enough), and have pretty complex licensing scheme https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-source-available-license.html https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-... > Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product. They had niche when their lite enterprise license (just basic LDAP and some other small features) was $2.5 per user. Now they are basically on slack pricing, why would anyone bother...
- micromacrofoot 10mo ago
  yeah they certainly can't beat slack with slack pricing - low pricing is the biggest moat vc funding gets you (and you can just fill it in after you outlast the competition)

liviux 10mo ago

Another project bites the dust. They will return after a fork will get way popular. In time

october8140 10mo ago

GitHub needs a better flag for license stuff like this. Open Source doesn’t mean what it used to.

xandrius 10mo ago
Open source doesn't imply no limitations.
- nfkkfkkc 10mo ago
  Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Even if the case is laughed out of court. Btw I hope you didn’t forget to pay the Linux license fee to SCO.
pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
Why would GitHub step in (or even care)? GitHub isn't open source.

throw-the-towel 10mo ago

Years ago I used to work at a company that used Mattermost for internal chats. Being laid off from there was sad, but at least I didn't have to use Mattermost anymore.

shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
An ex-coworker used to call it "matterworst".

sapphirebreeze 10mo ago

[dead]

Zacharias030 10mo ago

can someone clarify the situation that self-hosted free (as in beer) community mattermosts are/will be in?

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
They have been slowly removing features from it and this is another one removed
- Zacharias030 10mo ago
  I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity. I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the 10k message history is the limit correctly. And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over project channels, family related things etc. that was as reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public internet" and I am willing to manage that it does. Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has better future proofing.

ptman 10mo ago

Use matrix instead. Or zulip. Or xmpp. Or IRC

DrStartup 10mo ago

The good ole VC OS Rug Pull. Classic. It’d be nice if Mozilla (or a similar foundation) could create a baseline OS platform for a business communications suite.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
I'd be nice for anyone but Mozilla to do it. They can barely keep FF competitive
- Certhas 10mo ago
  FF is plenty competitive on the technical and feature front. It's market share is not a reflection of technical merit. What's more, next to Linux itself it is maybe the only case I can see where a major piece of user facing software is kept competitive with the Apple/Google/MS tools. LibreOffice or Nextcloud are technically far further behind Office and Google's online offerings. Which therefore begs the question: Who else is in a position to do this? At first glance, Moz with Firefox + a suite of self-hosted team and productivity stuff that works well in Firefox would make a ton of sense...
  - gettingoverit 10mo ago
    It isn't competitive. They are paid by Google. Worse, it's ridden with spyware, and is merely a honeypot for security-aware people that are not sufficiently paranoid to check any of the claims. Like, those VPNs from YT ads that use your IP to give AI companies residential proxies, the same kind of scam. Spin up Wireshark and take a look at activity of Firefox. Try to shut the browser up. It won't work. Even if they weren't a Google's proxy company, they would lose to standards commitees being infested by Google, and would have to play the "best luck catching up" game by constantly supporting new versions of JS, APIs and CSS features that nobody needs (except Google's YouTube will use them to stop you from using an adblocker). FF is governed by ex-Oracle managers at the moment, singing the Google's song. Don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower.
jonnycomputer 10mo ago

wltr 10mo ago

I was about to propose to deploy this as a company chat to my current boss, the self-hosted edition. So, is this still the best option (considering this can be reverted back, I assume), or should I just seek elsewhere now?

xvilka 10mo ago
Zulip is recommended by many here. Their mobile app is atrocious though...
- wltr 10mo ago
  10 users for mobile notifications is a non-starter for me. I’d rather host XMPP then, I guess. Or a Matrix server, it seems like it allows the mobile notifications.
  - fittingopposite 10mo ago
    Have you worked with both Matrix and Zulip? Looking at both for a small team and wondering which way to go with. Matrix seems more complex to set up and less tailored to function as a Slack alternative. What has been your experience?
    - wltr 10mo ago
      Unfortunately, not yet. I tried all of them locally earlier this year, but very briefly, like 15 minutes each. We use Matrix as our family messenger, which is not self-hosted. It’s mainly for occasional and brief text communication, so I’m not too motivated to go self-hosted, yet I had my plans.
      - fittingopposite 10mo ago
        Thank you for sharing your experience!
        10mo ago

yunohn 10mo ago

Y’know I’m starting to think that every single migration from paid to free software, will end up in the same cycle of becoming feature-locked. People time and again fail to understand that you need to financially support projects you use for sustainable futures. But alas, here we are…

steanne 10mo ago

this is not the only such recent change. can't make voice calls in public channels anymore either, only pms.

pmdr 10mo ago

IRC, email and XAMPP solved messaging a long time ago. Derivative products built on these protocols should have solved the chat problem for most orgs, but we got complacent and thus vulnerable to nickle and diming by the likes of Saleforce and Microsoft. Now rug pulls by faux-opensource projects that basically want free labor for their commercial project so they can sell it to bigger fish. It's not people wanting to make more money that I despise. Fine, make your commercial version ten times better, I don't care. But the practice of crippling your opensource offering by removing features or adding limits is evil and shameful.

davisr 10mo ago
"Fauxpensource", if you will.

xinayder 10mo ago

Another option is the open source Rocket.Chat.

wltr 10mo ago
Last time I checked they were worse.

renewiltord 10mo ago

As is usual, HN’s favourite “underdog” alternative to mainstream software is just a worse version of the mainstream software. I’ll just use Slack instead of some garbage clone that has the same restrictions.

cue_the_strings 10mo ago

I thoroughly investigated every open-source (mostly open-core) self-hostable Slack alternative, and the conclusion was clear: only a self-hosted Matrix is a viable option. There are no arbitrary limits for 'community editions', no risk of relicensing, no risk of being held hostage for features (like Gitlab did at some point). You can work around all the missing features easily with self-built webhooks and other tools. Starting with Mattermost or Zulip or similar is just way too risky.

wltr 10mo ago
What about their mobile push notifications? I don’t understand whether that’s something one can self-host. I have just read Zulip’s https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus... and they give me the impression only they can do this, so ‘pay us money or else’ I wonder whether this is something any other provider can rug pull in the figure and to be worried about.
- cue_the_strings 10mo ago
  IME it "just works" on Android: https://docs.element.io/latest/element-server-suite-classic/advanced-configuration/notifications-mdm-push-gateway/ https://docs.element.io/latest/element-server-suite-classic/...

aligundogdu 9mo ago

That 10k limit was the breaking point for me too. I decided to move our stack to Matrix/Synapse but didn't want to lose years of context. Since I couldn't find a straightforward migration path, I built a CLI tool to handle the transition (users, channels, and history). It’s open-source if you want to give it a try or contribute: https://github.com/aligundogdu/matrixmigrate https://github.com/aligundogdu/matrixmigrate

Combs7th 9mo ago

Quick clarification in case it helps folks here: the message limit applies to the Entry edition. The Team Edition (TE) does not have this limit and remains free/self-hosted. If you’re currently on Entry and want to move to TE, there’s a migration guide here with step-by-step instructions: https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/migrating-to-mattermost.html#move-mattermost-to-a-new-server https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig... Hope that helps clear things up.