Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration
github.com
github.com
https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
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.
??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted instance?
[EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.
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.
For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
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.
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.
Zulip should try that if they haven't already.
I find that I really like it for work. But for informal interactions (gaming etc) I like Discord better because of the voice channels. In Cliq they're "calls" and feel much more formal.
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.
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?
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.
People get their head around MS Teams very easily and fundamentally the only difference between Zulip and Teams is that you are required to put a title/subject on your thread in Zulip as supposed to Teams where it's optional.
In Teams the value of this is clear whereas in Zulip you need to understand the goal. I've always thought that with a bit of a step back UI adjustment to Zulip things could be clearer.
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.
So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds eventually. :-)
Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
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.
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.
If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.
Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.
> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.
We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome.
Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible.
Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).
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.
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...
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.
Out of curiosity, where would you have looked for such updates? GitHub issues?
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
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/
out of the box you get free `jitsi` but you can attach your own instance as well
> Channels: Voice calls and screen share (beta)
[0] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available...
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[0] https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler...
Do you have any wishes for improving Mattermost for your team?
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
Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quirks:
* it is hard to set up any kind of integration with a TUI: `matterircd` is quite buggy and also eats the CPU like there is no tomorrow, `matterbridge` doesn't sync correctly, or at least we couldn't make it work, and `matterhorn` is a standalone product (which would be much nicer as an e.g. weechat module) trying too hard to look like a web UI;
* web UI is still being polished, e.g. if you connection is unstable, web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7;
* what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D
* somewhere around v.6 update the Focalboard push was a bit jarring, thankfully after disabling the plugin it disappeared for good.
Keep up the good work! Once our org is larger and requires Enterprise features, I'm pretty sure we stick with Mattermost.
That shouldn't be the case with 7.0. We recently released a feature called "reliable websockets" that makes a connection reliable across websocket disconnects. If you have any repro steps, please feel free to create an issue and we will take a look.
> what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D
With 7.0, our Collapsed Reply Threads feature is now in GA: https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generall.... Feel free to enable it to get a better threading experience.
Do you have any wishes around Mattermost? We're always looking for ways to improve the product experience.
I would like the ability to create a group, add channels etc. in pretty much the same manner as github and have those show up to other users.
Element and Matrix are better, no joke. Plus you get E2E and federation.
I've gotten it working correctly with nginx
Not to mention, when it loses the connection it doesn't re-establish it the same moment automatically.
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).
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?
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.
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/
> 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)
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).
Are you open to sharing more about the challenges you saw with notifications? We're always looking for feedback to improve the product experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(I'm aware there is a plugin but E2EE is definitely not built-in)