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Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

RocketChat works pretty well for simple team comms. I have no idea if it can do XMPP and/or Matrix.

I suggested RocketChat when the outage was announced and HN community downvoted it quite heavily. I'm not sure why. [0]

We ended making the switch and committed to Discord. We're now looking at Rocket.chat as a backup in case Discord goes down. But Slack is now completely out of the picture for our team.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633047

Just curious - why not use Matternost as a backup? (disclosure: I work at Mattermost, but really just want to know what you think)

I’ve advocated for an idea where Mattermost is to be used as a “bunker” where it is hosted on a raspberry Pi (or somewhere else) and acts as a digital bunker if your critical infrastructure (slack, teams, exchange?) is compromised somehow.

Not OP. Good idea. I thought it's integrated into GitLab (on premise omnibus), but I still haven't fiddled with it, but enabled something in the config file, but nothing happened.

I know it's a tough spot, but if it were usable from GitLab with zero config that would be great for fallback.

@pas: Mattermost is indeed integrated with GitLab Omnibus.

To enable Mattermost, you can add the Mattermost external URL in the config file, and run `sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure`. I'm wondering if that's something you've tried? https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/#getting-s...

Thanks for your reply! I gave it another try, and it works now beautifully :o (Possibly last time I tried it, there was no LetsEncrypt integration and the external URL setup was more involved?)

Interesting! I never looked into it, but now I will!

My experience with RocketChat is that it works quite well on the surface, but after using it for some time, some very annoying bugs emerge:

* You get notifications for channels for which you have suppressed those notifications

* Some channels are marked as having new notifications, when they haven't

* Notifications for new messages in threads you are involved in are quite hard to find (horrible UX)

* Some UX choices are very confusing (you get a column of options related to notifications, and for some, the left option is the one leading to more notifications, for some the right option)

* There are some overlapping features that lead to inconsistent usage (channels vs. discussions vs. threads)

* Threads are hard to read, because follow-ups in threads are shown in a smaller font size. You cannot increase the font size at all in the desktop application

.... and so on.

Also, I tried to submit some bugs, but for that I'd need to have some information which only the admins have that run this instance, and in the end it was too much effort to get all that information together, so I didn't even bother.

I agree, it's still got a long way to go. I'm saying it's still a perfectly viable alternative to Slack. Fast, simple, works. (At least this is my perception/impression. I wanted to evaluate Slack alternatives for some time, but haven't got the time for it yet. So I was surprised when I got an invite to one of our client's rocket.chat instance and things worked pretty well.)

I'm in a slack workspace that is constantly notifying me of a thread, but I can't make it read. Maybe it has something to do with the free messages limit. So the message is there, but cannot be accessed. Annoying as hell. I thought about submitting the bug to Slack, but then just let it go, and probably we'll just move to Signal or something.

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