[HN Gopher] Mattermost - open-source platform for secure collabo...
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       Mattermost - open-source platform for secure collaboration
        
       Author : punnerud
       Score  : 251 points
       Date   : 2022-06-24 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | akvadrako wrote:
       | This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported. I
       | could run a server for a group instead of using a hosted service,
       | but it would never fly if the administrator (me) could read their
       | messages.
       | 
       | I see there is a plugin for it1, but not having something so core
       | in the main product makes me sure there will be friction and user
       | support issues.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee
        
         | HiItsMeYo wrote:
         | You should check out Element.
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | Matrix and XMPP are excellent options worth considering for
         | your use case. XMPP is more mature but modern clients
         | implementing all the right RFCs are a bit scarce, Matrix
         | clients are coming along relatively quickly but there's the
         | occasional quirk.
         | 
         | Both have optional support for features like federation and
         | bridging other chat clients as well, though the results are
         | often not exactly perfect.
         | 
         | Personally, I'm quite happy using
         | Matrix+Element/Cinny/Fluffychat to gather several chat services
         | into one place. Experiments with native group chats have also
         | gone down as of a year or so ago when encryption finally got
         | most of its quirks worked out.
        
         | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
         | > This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported
         | 
         | The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth
         | paying extra for it.
         | 
         | It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate
         | companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and
         | then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address
         | and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that
         | info.
         | 
         | ... and those _really_ serious about E2EE are using their
         | custom stack anyways.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | I've run a Mattermost installation off the cheapest Digital Ocean
       | droplet for about 4 years. Moved away from Slack due to the 10k
       | message limit and the fact that I could self-host it.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, while it does keep your history, the search is
       | pretty lousy (there is a better search available for paying
       | customers) and you can't export private conversations (unless you
       | pay them).
       | 
       | They gotta make money, and I'm not paying them, so I understand
       | withholding features. That said, I keep looking at the Matrix
       | ecosystem, and I think the only thing keeping me at MM is the
       | switching cost at this point (not being able to export messages
       | is an effective lock-in feature, though rather user-unfriendly if
       | you ask me).
        
         | agnivade wrote:
         | Search in SQL databases is a tough beast to get it right. And
         | given that we support MySQL and Postgres both, it gets even
         | harder to support quirks of both of them.
         | 
         | In enterprise editions, the only addition is Elasticsearch. But
         | in our open-source version, we do have support for
         | https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve. Although, it's in beta,
         | we have a lot of customers using it.
         | 
         | I am wondering if you have tried using it and didn't like it?
        
           | karaterobot wrote:
           | I have been trying over several versions to get bleve to
           | work, using MM installation guides and forums, but it's never
           | successfully indexed anything.
        
         | yu-carm-kror wrote:
         | You can export all message types and none of them require any
         | special licensing or payment:
         | https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html.
        
           | karaterobot wrote:
           | That document shows how you can export private _channels_ ,
           | but not private conversations. For example, if you and a
           | friend have a DM conversation with each other, that is not
           | exportable using that tool.
        
       | sneak wrote:
       | Reminder that Mattermost's f/oss self-hosted version embeds
       | segment.io phone-home spyware on by default which must be
       | disabled with a barely-documented env var (called "diagnostics").
        
         | agnivade wrote:
         | Reminder that there is a whole page which mentions _exactly_
         | what items are tracked and how to disable the feature:
         | https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html
         | 
         | Every config setting has an equivalent env var option.
         | 
         | You can either use an env var, or change the setting via system
         | console, or directly change your config.json file -
         | LogSettings.EnableDiagnostics = false.
        
       | khanan wrote:
       | Yeah, thanks for nailing it to me that I picked Mattermost as our
       | chat-server 3 years ago, now we have to migrate away from it
       | since it's way too expensive. They also do some seriosuly dubious
       | decisions when it comes to the gimped opensource-variant, so.
       | Thanks, but no thanks.
        
       | movover wrote:
       | We've been testing out both Mattermost and Zulip over the past
       | few months at work, and we recently decided to go with Zulip.
       | 
       | Mattermost is nice in that communication and project management
       | is all in one tool, but doing _anything_ within Mattermost is
       | very sluggish (even on a very overspecced server with only 1
       | Mattermost user online). Using their Focalboard plugin resulted
       | in _multiple seconds_ of wait time between various actions like
       | modifying a task. On the other hand, Zulip has been consistently
       | snappy even as we 've onboarded users onto our instance. Seeing
       | it in use at large organizations such as Rust's Zulip instance
       | instilled confidence that it'll continue to perform well even
       | well beyond our scale.
       | 
       | Also Zulip's threading model is _really_ nice to use once you and
       | your team gets the hang of topic separation. We 've managed to
       | completely eliminate 'talking over one another' as we would in
       | Slack/Discord style text channels, and it's _much_ easier to keep
       | track of various conversations. While Zulip 's UI and UX isn't as
       | polished and certainly has areas for improvement, the threading
       | model alone makes it worthwhile to use.
       | 
       | On top of that, Mattermost's pricing doesn't work well for small
       | businesses, especially when you factor in that something 'simple'
       | like Elasticsearch support, or, performance monitoring tools to
       | figure out why your 1 user installation on a 88 thread server
       | with hundreds of GBs of memory is sluggish, or even just creating
       | a second admin user is locked behind their enterprise plan.
       | 
       | I get that money needs to be made, but blocking some features
       | behind an enterprise plan (that asks you to contact them for
       | pricing, no less - their $10/user for the Professional plan is
       | not only steep, but still doesn't include these features) doesn't
       | feel great. Zulip is completely free, and offers Zulip Cloud
       | alongside a support plan, but does not block any features behind
       | a paywall. There's no limitations on what Zulip will let you do
       | either - no 10,000 message history limit, no file storage limit,
       | user role restrictions, or anything of that nature.
       | 
       | Oh, and Zulip is 100% open source software. In my eyes, it's hard
       | to compete with that when it comes to communication tools.
        
       | temp wrote:
       | They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount
       | not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more
       | expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished
       | product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they
       | do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to
       | Zulip.
        
         | jillesvangurp wrote:
         | We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost
         | us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats.
         | That's not what it is for.
         | 
         | Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up
         | paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would
         | use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and
         | usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost.
         | Especially doing it properly can eat into development time
         | quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to
         | do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even
         | half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a
         | day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like
         | that out of the equation.
         | 
         | You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts
         | for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and
         | google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are
         | also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we
         | started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
        
           | mekster wrote:
           | > Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd
           | end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever
           | you would use for this. People think devops is free, it
           | rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of
           | cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development
           | time quickly.
           | 
           | Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching
           | an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires
           | a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time
           | operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a
           | premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some
           | salesperson?)
           | 
           | Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive
           | thinking it is expensive.
        
           | BenLloydPearson wrote:
           | We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is
           | competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project
           | and task management and a few other bells and whistles for
           | software developers. You should give us another look!
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | I thought Self-Hosted was free to you? What does self-hosted
         | even mean otherwise
        
           | Godel_unicode wrote:
           | Self-hosted is entirely orthogonal to price. Microsoft
           | Exchange and Oracle 21c are both self-hosted, for instance.
        
             | Shared404 wrote:
             | For further elaboration, self-hosted just means that you
             | get a license to install the code on a server you control -
             | whether that license is FL/OSS, something proprietary, or
             | some middle ground (open core etc).
        
           | danielheath wrote:
           | If you want SAML support you need to pay (or hack out the
           | licence checks from the open source edition, but they're
           | sprinkled everywhere)
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | and Zulip has a "public access" view, which I wish more open
         | source projects would adopt (:eyes: kubernetes.slack.com) since
         | it allows search engines to index into the threads:
         | https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option
        
         | samatman wrote:
         | We tried Zulip a couple times and ended up setting up a Matrix
         | server when Slack became unbearable. The advantages of being
         | able to federate with other channels is high, like almost
         | everyone I have severe channel overload and I want an
         | application which will be open all the time to reach as many
         | people as possible.
         | 
         | It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became
         | 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to
         | _move_ to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions.
         | I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as
         | much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use
         | Matrix for as much as possible.
        
           | mxuribe wrote:
           | I don't have a better link/reference, but the following shows
           | that threading is a desired feature within the Matrix network
           | and ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/posts#a-thread-for-
           | next-time
           | 
           | So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds
           | eventually. :-)
        
             | Arathorn wrote:
             | https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta (not as
             | good as zulip's threads yet tho)
        
               | mxuribe wrote:
               | Ah-ha! I knew that i was not crazy! And, the link is from
               | a pretty reliable source! ;-) Thanks @Arathorn!
        
         | unixhero wrote:
         | You self host their enterprise solution? I think you're missing
         | the point, migrate to the community edition. We pay 0 (but
         | contribute with donations).
        
           | temp wrote:
           | I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a
           | Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give
           | you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not
           | having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have
           | simply downgraded.
        
             | Blahah wrote:
             | you can also just host your own push proxy service using
             | their open source code...
             | 
             | https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-
             | you...
        
               | solar-ice wrote:
               | Then you also need to build and distribute Android and
               | iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a
               | significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a
               | server and update it occasionally".
        
               | etc-hosts wrote:
               | Self hosting Mattermost community edition with the
               | Mattermost apps in Google play and apple app store works
               | fine.
        
               | danielheath wrote:
               | I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted
               | (friends chat) servers.
               | 
               | Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's
               | already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they
               | have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
        
             | savy91 wrote:
             | We've been using the free (Team plan) self hosted edition
             | with push notification for free. Am I missing something?
             | 
             | https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html
        
         | hardwaresofton wrote:
         | > self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than
         | Slack
         | 
         | ??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted
         | instance?
         | 
         | [EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.
        
         | BiteCode_dev wrote:
         | Zulip is really underrated.
         | 
         | It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides
         | the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to
         | interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to
         | everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and
         | doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine.
         | 
         | It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for
         | finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or
         | stealing attention from me. It should be the default.
         | 
         | Zulip is just that: the vlc of team chat.
        
           | danielvaughn wrote:
           | My former company adopted Zulip because we were in the
           | cybersecurity space and needed an on-prem solution. When I
           | first saw it I thought "oh god this is going to be awful" -
           | very ugly UI compared to Slack and others. But after getting
           | used to it, I found that the UX is excellent.
           | 
           | For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of
           | "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
        
           | igortg wrote:
           | When everyone on the team learn to use Topics, it's life
           | changer.
        
         | darkteflon wrote:
         | We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we
         | loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the
         | learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the
         | mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet
         | integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at
         | Quill, which had a similar threading model but ... was bought
         | and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a
         | total car crash. Can't find anything.
         | 
         | It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to
         | being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take
         | another look and see if it's there yet. It's a really great
         | community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
        
           | NineStarPoint wrote:
           | What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members
           | on Zulip than it was on Slack? It's been a few years since I
           | used Zulip, but I don't feel like it had a particularly
           | different level of complexity.
        
             | georgyo wrote:
             | I think the fact that you must give a thread topic to send
             | a message.
             | 
             | It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from
             | every other chat app. And for a large user base being
             | confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a
             | message" is frustrating.
        
               | TuringTest wrote:
               | _> And for a large user base being confronted with this
               | demand  "when they just want to send a message" is
               | frustrating._
               | 
               | Isn't it a conceptual framework thing, though?
               | 
               | People have no problem putting a topic when sending
               | emails, and they are perfectly capable of following
               | grouped conversations, as for example in Outlook.
               | 
               | Maybe it would be enough to present it as "a mail
               | application where you can also do chat on a reply
               | thread", to create the right expectations?
        
               | darkteflon wrote:
               | Yeah that's consistent with what we found. The threading
               | model is so powerful, because even large teams that are
               | mainly async can actually find stuff they need, _in
               | context_. That's really difficult or impossible in
               | something like Slack, Discord, etc, and the value of that
               | can't really be overstated.
               | 
               | On the other hand, you're asking people to buy into what
               | is essentially a completely different paradigm than what
               | they're used to. Maybe it's more like a loosely-
               | structured wiki than a chat app.
               | 
               | I really like it, though. I feel like it deserves a lot
               | more attention than it seems to get.
        
               | ctxc wrote:
               | Zoho Cliq solves this by using ML to parse the message
               | and give a suitable name. It's suitable 7/10 times, and
               | the remaining 3 - it either doesn't matter that much or
               | is trivial to rename.
               | 
               | Zulip should try that if they haven't already.
        
               | darkteflon wrote:
               | I hadn't heard of Cliq. Do you have lots of experience
               | with it? What do you think of it?
        
           | alya wrote:
           | Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to
           | understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they
           | are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the
           | product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for
           | a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in
           | the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community
           | (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!
        
             | darkteflon wrote:
             | Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated
             | and wholly characteristic of the Zulip community as a
             | whole.
             | 
             | I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and
             | actively participated in the development Zulip instance on
             | the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the
             | community to be very receptive.
             | 
             | I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this
             | thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic
             | product and open source project. The main uphill battle for
             | us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm
             | of effectively "filing" their messages up front. That's not
             | some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a
             | product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender
             | needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if
             | they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.
             | 
             | "Why do I have to do this?"
             | 
             | "Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along
             | later and get the whole picture."
             | 
             | "Okay, that's worth a bit of friction up-front."
             | 
             | It's really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.
             | 
             | Just 2c from our little team.
             | 
             | Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We'll
             | definitely be checking it out again soon.
        
         | ensignavenger wrote:
         | And not only that, Zulip is 100% FOSS, wherea Mattermost is
         | Open Core, so the Open Source portion is missing key features.
        
       | fiatjaf wrote:
       | It's good that this exists, but Mattermost's threads are very
       | suboptimal.
       | 
       | If Alice posts a message and Bob replies, then _that is_ the
       | thread. If that thread goes into a certain path you can't branch
       | off of it, you can't reply to Alice's original message if you're
       | talking about a different thing.
       | 
       | I don't know if this makes sense, but hopefully you got my point.
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Mattermost PM here, thanks for the feedback!
         | 
         | Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?
        
           | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
           | > Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?
           | 
           | Not the OP but this would _really_ help
           | 
           | Happy to create an issue if this is a new request or upvote
           | if there's an existing request
        
         | Avamander wrote:
         | You can't also move messages into a thread as admin. Which is a
         | bit annoying.
        
           | itao wrote:
           | FYI you can with this plugin [0] and it's actually how we do
           | it ourselves here at Mattermost.
           | 
           | [0] https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-
           | wrangler...
        
       | caracustard wrote:
       | While competition is always welcome, i wonder how many more
       | collaboration services we're gonna get before someone finally
       | makes "the service" to use.
        
         | TheMaskedCoder wrote:
         | It will happen a few days after somebody invents "the"
         | programming language to use, "the" hiring process to use, "the"
         | IDE to use, "the" development process to use, etc.
         | 
         | There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't
         | make sense. Look at what your situation needs and see which
         | tool is the best for you. You don't need to use a certain brand
         | of tool just because everybody else is.
        
           | caracustard wrote:
           | "There are a variety of needs and use-cases, so "the" doesn't
           | make sense." That's very true, however i view those services
           | the same way i view communication services like Slack.
           | Eventually most users are just going to flock to what
           | everyone uses by default and that's it. But i sure do wait
           | for the day that special somebody makes "the IDE" to use!
        
       | w4ffl35 wrote:
       | I love mattermost and host it from a a server in my closet (used
       | for internal communication only, not accessible outside of my
       | network)
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! Love to hear
         | it :)
         | 
         | Do you have any wishes around Mattermost? We're always looking
         | for ways to improve the product experience.
        
       | dx034 wrote:
       | I've been using the self hosted version with a 10-person team for
       | a year now and so far we like it. It's not as good as Slack
       | (yet), but if you need to self-host, I can absolutely recommend
       | it.
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Mattermost PM here, thanks for using the product! :)
         | 
         | Do you have any wishes for improving Mattermost for your team?
        
           | nitin-pai wrote:
           | Integration with Google Meet
        
             | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
             | +1
             | 
             | Integration with Google Meet, Zoom would really help.
             | 
             | I see plugins for both but could never get them to work
             | (teams edition though)
             | 
             | The expectation is that, just like on slack, I should be
             | able to do a slash command and have a Google Meet or Zoom
             | meeting ready to join
        
         | hedgehog wrote:
         | For self hosting do you hand-manage accounts in Mattermost or
         | use some form of SSO?
        
       | Labo333 wrote:
       | How can collaboration without E2EE be considered "secure"?
       | 
       | (I'm aware there is a plugin but E2EE is definitely not built-in)
        
       | goda90 wrote:
       | My team piloted using Mattermost for a bit. It was great. People
       | were always quick to respond. Lots of fun was mixed in with work
       | topics. Then my company went MS Teams everywhere. And it's just
       | not as fun or useful. Something about the UI just makes people
       | interact less.
        
       | Avamander wrote:
       | It does work, but doesn't shine in any aspect. Android app can't
       | keep a connection alive, media embeds are wonky, unicode filename
       | support is wonky, it stutters in many places.
       | 
       | Element and Matrix are better, no joke. Plus you get E2E and
       | federation.
        
         | etc-hosts wrote:
         | "Android app can't keep a connection alive" is a websockets
         | problem with what ever you are using to proxy connections to
         | your Mattermost server
         | 
         | I've gotten it working correctly with nginx
        
           | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
           | I prefer Caddy proxy and with Caddy it's just a single
           | reverse proxy line (it handles the websockets transport
           | seamlessly)
        
           | Avamander wrote:
           | Nope, it works with other clients, WebSockets work with other
           | software and Mattermost's worked before one of the recent
           | updates.
           | 
           | Not to mention, when it loses the connection it doesn't re-
           | establish it the same moment automatically.
        
       | hardwaresofton wrote:
       | Another awesome related project that the folks behind mattermost
       | put together is FocalBoard, their Kanban solution:
       | 
       | https://www.focalboard.com
        
         | RedShift1 wrote:
         | Hmm from the docs I'm deriving this doesn't work for multiple
         | users unless you install it as a Mattermost plugin?
        
           | jasonblais wrote:
           | That's right, the stand-alone personal desktop is an option
           | for single users.
           | 
           | If you're looking to use Focalboard for multiple users, you
           | can use it in Mattermost where it's integrated as Boards:
           | https://mattermost.com/boards/
        
             | hardwaresofton wrote:
             | What am I missing? The server version works great with
             | multiple users as long as you invite the second one with a
             | link...
        
               | gkhartman wrote:
               | Yep, our self hosted Focalboard server works with
               | multiple users. I had a bit of trouble figuring out that
               | the share link is used to trigger the set up of
               | additional users. I was initially looking for a link
               | labeled "create account" or similar. I've been really
               | happy with it and love its simplicity.
        
           | hardwaresofton wrote:
           | Where did you see that?
           | 
           | > The first user registration will always be permitted, but
           | subsequent registrations will require an invite link which
           | includes a code. You can invite additional users by clicking
           | on your username in the top left, then selecting "Invite
           | users".
           | 
           | https://www.focalboard.com/guide/server-setup/
           | 
           | You can use it with multiple users without being a mattermost
           | plugin
           | 
           | (try it out yourself -- docker run -p 8000:8000
           | mattermost/focalboard)
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Mattermost PM here, thanks for using Focalboard! Love to hear
         | it :)
        
       | ajaimk wrote:
       | Is a piece of horse shit! Notifications are a hot mess. Doesn't
       | sync between mobile and desktop. Can't find active conversations.
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Sorry to hear about your experience, Mattermost PM here.
         | 
         | Are you open to sharing more about the challenges you saw with
         | notifications? We're always looking for feedback to improve the
         | product experience.
        
       | TavsiE9s wrote:
       | Almost four years ago someone raised the issue of multiple
       | mattermost servers in the mobile applications
       | (https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067).
       | 
       | Two years ago someone on the mattermost team promised the new
       | mobile application would be there by the end of 2021.
       | 
       | Yet in June 2022... you get the gist. Not a fan.
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Thanks for your feedback! Mattermost PM here,
         | 
         | We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile
         | apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how
         | you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program.
         | 
         | The community feedback on the Beta version has thus far being
         | excellent, and helps us improve the user experience before we
         | ship multi-server support as a stable release to everyone :)
         | 
         | [1] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-
         | progr...
        
           | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
           | > We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the
           | mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out,
           | here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta
           | program.
           | 
           | This is fantastic news!
           | 
           | It is/was a problem having to choose which server to connect
           | to, when I had multiple Mattermost servers.
           | 
           | This new feature will fix that quandary
           | 
           | Different Question: can I point `mmctl` to your managed cloud
           | instance (are the "free tiers" exempt from this ability but
           | paid tiers allow this?), have it create a backup and restore
           | that backup to a local Mattermost team (the OSS) instance?
           | This is just to be able to migrate old team chats off the
           | Mattermost cloud instance but retain the ability to quickly
           | read them now and then if needed
        
           | TavsiE9s wrote:
           | Thank you for the feedback but I'm going to wait until it's
           | published in the respective App Stores.
           | 
           | One piece of feedback for you and your org: the whole mobile
           | v2 process was not very transparent from the outside. I
           | tracked the ticket from time to time but gave up after a year
           | as no visible progress was being made. Maybe that happened in
           | some Atlassian forum, which to be blunt I'm not going to
           | create an account for simply to read a thread.
        
             | jasonblais wrote:
             | Thank you! Appreciate the feedback, agree we probably could
             | have provided more transparent feedback for the community.
             | 
             | Out of curiosity, where would you have looked for such
             | updates? GitHub issues?
        
               | TavsiE9s wrote:
               | Personally? Something similar to the Dolphin project's
               | monthly status posts.
        
       | Shadonototra wrote:
       | How can it be secure if they are able to track you this far?
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852914
        
         | tinus_hn wrote:
         | It appears the actual problem was that they weren't able to
         | track things that far and mistakenly sent out notices to the
         | wrong customers.
        
         | msh wrote:
         | See the update here:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31853107
         | 
         | It was a problem sending the email to wrong accounts. The CEO
         | states later in the thread that they don't track that kind of
         | info from selfhosted instances.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | Security isn't the same as privacy. Using Facebook you don't
         | have privacy, but the platform containing your data isn't
         | likely to be compromised (your account's password being guessed
         | is the most likely method of compromise, and that's in your own
         | hands).
         | 
         | Though I wonder if this distinction will go the way of the dodo
         | / hacker / crypto, since a lot of people seem to not understand
         | this in recent years (mostly since privacy became a bigger
         | topic, first with Snowden but even more since GDPR enforced
         | it). If the words privacy and security are both used to mean
         | privacy in common language then we need a new word to
         | communicate the previous meaning of "security". Kind of
         | annoying when a language changes and existing words are
         | redefined, but it's not as if an evolving language a new
         | phenomenon.
        
         | Nextgrid wrote:
         | > To answer some of the other questions on this thread, no
         | customer logs nor PII get submitted to the 3rd party service
         | that we use, which is called Descartes [...] We pass name and
         | billing address only.
        
           | bradwood wrote:
           | and name and address is not PII?
        
             | Nextgrid wrote:
             | Name and address of the company purchasing the license,
             | which (in most countries at least) is already published in
             | various business and tax records.
        
       | mgbmtl wrote:
       | Our FOSS community uses it, and we're quite happy. We were on IRC
       | before, maybe 20 users, and now we have hundreds of active users
       | on Mattermost.
       | 
       | Our biggest struggle is with support within our community.
       | Helping someone is nice, but odds are that someone else has the
       | same question and losing their mind with Google. Mattermost does
       | not provide a good way to archive topics. We push people to use
       | our Gitlab or Stack Exchange for support, but both are hostile in
       | their own way (not newbie-frienfly). Anyways, something there
       | might do wonders. Maybe some kind of tool that lists popular
       | threads on a public page?
       | 
       | Another wishlist would be to be able to hide or block people.
       | While we do our best to be friendly, there are just some people
       | that I get really annoyed when they PM me, and some others that I
       | just don't want to see their comments in public channels (kind of
       | like hidden tweets that you have to click to show them).
        
       | kosolam wrote:
       | Mattermost is amazing! We used it with multiple teams over a
       | period of a few years. Self hosted. Cheap of resources. All of
       | the necessary features are there and very well thought out.
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Thanks for the kind words! Mattermost PM here :)
        
           | ratww wrote:
           | Thanks for doing a great job. I really hate most of the
           | software I have to use these days, but Mattermost is one of
           | the few exceptions. It is fast, it isn't intrusive, it
           | respects me and my time, all while doing what it promises.
           | 
           | To me it is better than the competition, since their products
           | affect my computer speed, even though I just got an update.
           | I'd much rather have the productivity not taken away by
           | Mattermost than features (although Mattermost has 100% I
           | need).
        
             | jasonblais wrote:
             | You just made my day, @ratww!
        
       | SubiculumCode wrote:
       | I run a personal Mattermost server for family communication; its
       | been great. If there was one complaint, and this is a nitpick, it
       | is that the notification icon in Windows does not have enough
       | contrast with the icon when no new messages are available.
        
       | pigtailgirl wrote:
       | -- FWIW: Interviewed here about a year ago - interview process
       | was by far one of the better ones - their community guy Jason was
       | super super kind & their CEO seems to also be a really good human
       | --
        
         | jasonblais wrote:
         | Glad you had a lovely interview experience! :)
        
         | it33 wrote:
         | Mattermost CEO here, thank you so much, you are very nice!
        
       | number6 wrote:
       | I wished my Organization would adopt Mattermost. Using it for
       | years as a Chat to stay in touch with my friends.
       | 
       | My Org uses MS Teams (because it is already bundled with MS 365).
       | What Mattermost is missing is a Videochat / Videoconferencing
       | option - there is a plugin but I didn't tried it yet:
       | https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/
        
         | qunabu wrote:
         | we use `jitsi` plugin and works like charm
         | 
         | out of the box you get free `jitsi` but you can attach your own
         | instance as well
        
         | thejteam wrote:
         | When I was on a project that used Mattermost we had
         | BigBlueButton integrated. It worked adequate. As a user, at
         | first I didn't even realize that BBB was a separate thing.
        
         | codefined wrote:
         | Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video
         | conferencing functionality! [0]
         | 
         | > Channels: Voice calls and screen share (beta)
         | 
         | [0] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-
         | available...
        
           | RemoteIsHeaven wrote:
           | > Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video
           | conferencing functionality
           | 
           | have you tried running it using Mattermost team (the OSS)
           | instance?
           | 
           | I also use their cloud instance to stay updated on new
           | features but voice is a paid only plan, so couldn't check it
           | out
        
           | number6 wrote:
           | Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I will try it
           | despite ReadOnlyFriday :)
        
         | messutied wrote:
         | What do you like about Mattermost that's missing in MS Teams?
        
           | number6 wrote:
           | I like that Mattermost treads Channels as Groupchats, and you
           | can reply to a Chatmessage or just add to the Conversation
           | where in Teams you have Conversations where you can reply to
           | or start a new one, this leads to people replying via new
           | conversation or replying while it's a new conversation.
           | 
           | I also dislike the notion of Teams with Subchannels in Teams
           | and the hard cut between Chat and Teams - I like the way
           | Mattermost does it more: a <hr> Element between Channels and
           | Chats.
        
           | chalst wrote:
           | Teams is widely hated by many here because of its spyware
           | capabilities.
        
             | mbesto wrote:
             | I think it's widely hated because its absolute hot garbage
             | from a UI/UX. Slack is bad enough from a UX perspective
             | (not necessarily Slack itself, since the UI is nice, but
             | from an overall experience of "interrupt anyone anytime"),
             | but Teams took the concept of direct messaging and
             | instantaneous communication and then arguably made it more
             | frustrating.
        
         | hiidrew wrote:
         | mine uses teams and mattermost :/ love the splintered comms
         | stack!
        
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