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Comment by _joel | Hacker News Reader

And it's a close-walled garden, not anything like what the internet elders envisaged. IRC is a protocol. Slack is a product. AFAIK, you can't spin up your own slack service and run your own private slack (happy to be corrected)

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You're right. We were looking for an internal chat solution for our company. Currently we use IRC, but it would be nice to have an offline mechanism so we don't need to run IRC bouncers or CLI clients on our servers to receive messages when we're not in the office. We considered Slack, but decided it was too risky to host our internal communications on someone else's service. I'm waiting for the day Slack has a huge data breach.

We're currently considering adding some sort of backscroll support to IRC (maybe automatically setting up proxies for users), or installing Rocket Chat or HipChat on a local server.

Mattermost might fit the bill. I haven't used it, personally.

https://www.mattermost.org/features/

One issue we had with Mattermost is that some authentication modules (e.g. OAuth) are not part of the free core. Rocket Chat does not have this issue, though the mobile app is a bit less polished.

Hi, we agree, and that's why we are about to launch brand new native apps for iOS and Android. Let me know if you'd like to join the beta testers.

Yes, with pleasure!

For those who haven't tried it, here's a video of how Eclipse Foundation uses Mattermost as an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfeNFJnCfcg

While there's not yet C64 support, Mattermost connects to IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord, Telegram and HipChat using Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge).

In terms of features, the Mattermost community has added quite a few that aren't available in Slack--markdown support, multi-team accounts, threaded messaging, etc.: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...

Mattermost deploys as a single Linux binary with MySQL or Postgres and you control everything.

I haven't setup a matrix.org server (yet), but it's looking like a good next gen IRC with good bridges into IRC and other chat services.

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