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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Note that, while self hosted, Mattermost phones home to both mattermost and segment.io when you run it locally.

You have to set the following undocumented and misleadingly named env vars to disable this:

          "MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS": "false",
          "MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT": "false",

I'm a belt and suspenders guy so I also patch the binary:

          "FROM mattermost/mattermost-team-edition@$$cap_mattermost_version",
          "RUN sed -i 's#api.segment.io#xx.example.com#gI' /mattermost/bin/mattermost",
          "RUN sed -i 's#securityupdatecheck.mattermost.com#xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.example.com#gI' /mattermost/bin/mattermost"

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This is good info, thanks. I really like Mattermost as a Slack alternative and am slowly trying to transition friends to a private server (and away from Slack/Discord).

Have you tried or compared it to Rocket.Chat? I'm not sure how much I trust using a piece of software that have this "undocumented and misleadingly named env vars to disable" telemetry.

Not the same person here, but evaluated on-prem Slack-replacements recently.

They're very similar in most respects. I found Mattermost much simpler on the operations side, and easier to write plugins for. We ended up choosing it and has generally been happy with it.

If you find this kind of telemetry suspect, you are probably better off looking at Matrix. It is a functioning open source project, as opposed to open source-as-entry-level. The functionality is mostly there, the drawback we found was high resource usage.

For friends-and-family type usage the ecosystem around Matrix, and the huge number of clients being worked on, will probably make it the better choice in the long run.

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/11655

I'm hoping for more/better matrix clients before I can make the switch.

Elements is a web client and what use for hosting, so it's not so surprising.

Look at nheko for a cross platform native chat client. There are bunch of others but this one supports video.

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