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Comment by danwee | Hacker News Reader

We've migrated from Slack to Mattermost some time ago. Best decision ever. Not sure why companies keep using Slack nowadays. It's like those companies many years ago using HipChat instead of Slack. Slack's is the HipChat of today.

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Could you expand? I think that's incredibly unfair... Slack changed how almost every business communicates. Mattermost is almost a 1:1 open source copy, and is missing most of the ecosystem (which is Slack's real value).

Sure, for some companies, it's really important to own their data completely. I get that (although I personally trust Salesforce more than most one-off companies when it comes to security). But I don't think it's fair to say that Slack is the HipChat of today at all... it's like iOS vs Android, both are just different flavors of a really good product.

I think part of the problem is that there are a lot of integrations from Slack that aren't available on Mattermost. You can certainly make the argument that those integrations won't be developed until more users abandon Slack for Mattermost, but for some it's not worth the loss of functionality.

Self-hosted Mattermost and Gitlab can be done reliably at very low cost, had better uptime than their cloud services for us and would've likely prevented leaks like these. At least you can add some layers of security for self-hosted services so that stolen tokens aren't enough to steal code or messages.

Do you have write up or guide somewhere on how to specifically set this up, configure and add security?

We run it in our VPN with SSO for authentication. You'd need a company device, user credentials and a location that's whitelisted to access.

For smaller companies something like Cloudflare Teams and/or Tailscale would probably also add a good layer of extra security. I guess it's important to have some device whitelisting in addition to credentails, so that stolen credentials alone are not enough to access code or chat.

What does Mattermost offer which Slack doesn't?

Open source, can be self hosted, you can secure it yourself and how you want (for better or worse)

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