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Comment by o- | Hacker News Reader

Great, I feel like an idiot. I advocated slack, because it granted the freedom to choose a client. Now I helped lock-in others.

Suggestions for alternatives, that I could migrate to? The requirements are: mid sized teams, desktop and mobile, all major os. People used web based client, native clients, irc gw, and bots. We need search and archive. Self-hosting is an option.

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Take a look at Matrix. https://matrix.org/

Hey, I just wanted to say that it is brave of you to admit to making this mistake. I would have been one of those protesting your advocating, imploring, perhaps loudly, to consider the consequences :)

Anyway, yeah, a lot of us are now looking for practical solutions to this very unfortunate and serious problem.

IRC, with web clients like IRCCloud, TheLounge, or IRCAnywhere.

Everyone needs to have their trust betrayed once to understand what it means to trust.

Zulip. Open source with IRC gateway and bots. Most importantly a threading model that lets you tame the firehose making it far superior.

Prosody+Kaiwa

Prosody is an XMPP server Kaiwa is a web frontend that works really well with it. For a quick "try it out" Kaiwa makes a docker image that bundles prosody.

There are lots of bot options. Conversations is the android client to use. There are no great iOS clients though.

https://wire.com/

rocket.chat is the best alternative

On paper I like matrix, or prosody (xmpp/jabber) with extensions (ditto irc + logging bots etc).

But after looking a bit at rocket.chat along with the api - it's hard to recommend something else as a self-hosted, open slack alternative.

I'm not enthusiastic about the stack/mongodb dep - but boy is the api nice and documented, and their docker-compose a joy to get started with:

https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/docker-containers/dock...

https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/rest-api/

[ed: oh, and there's a hosted option and you can pay if you want. I think that's also a big plus]

Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mattermost? How does it compare? About three years ago when open source Slack alternatives were starting to hit, Mattermost and Rocket.Chat were the top options. GitLab even ended up bundling Mattermost with their Omnibus installer (and were going to bundle Rocket.Chat as well, had they made it possible to support Postgres, but I don't think that's the plan any longer).

Not really. I'd prefer matrix (open protocol, federated) - but I seem to recall after reluctantly accepting that rc is a great product, I had a look.

And that bundling code inside a mysql container felt like it fell well short of the simple rc setup of db+app via docker compose...

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker-preview/blob...

To be frank, you should feel like an idiot. This was entirely foreseeable and people have been warning you not only about Slack, but about proprietary software and vendor lock-in for _literally decades_. Try not to make this mistake again. Advocate for free and open source.

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