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Comment by flappyeagle | Hacker News Reader

At some point it will make sense to start a new slack/teams replacement. We’re close.

A lot of people are replying with suggestions of discord, mattermost etc.

Those are not very different than slack in terms of UX and much less capable in many ways that matter (integrations etc)

It’s almost time for something actually new

Something that makes remote work better than in person by existing. It has to be so good that people stop talking to each other at the office once they have this tool.

> It has to be so good that people stop talking to each other at the office once they have this tool.

Slack itself did this in my experience.

Anything missing from Matrix (and clients) from your POV?

It’s not better than slack in any way that matters to a corporate user

Can I send a scheduled message even if my client is down, with Matrix?

we’re working on scheduled msgs currently (it’s hard because you don’t know what devices will be i the room by the time the msg sends, and so who to encrypt for)

I agree, perhaps they can call it something like HipChat. Has a nice ring to it.

We use Discord as a Slack alternative, and have for a couple years. It's perfect for a remote company, especially if you also run chat/messaging for customers and users.

I know the upsides, but what do you lose if you switch from Slack to Discord?

Your sanity. Discord is insanely cluttered. It's made for people who aren't trying to get any work done.

How do you deal with security?

- No SSO

- No way to enforce MFA, restrict logins to trusted devices and IPs, etc...

- No message / audit logs

I like discord for personal use, no way I would use it professionally

There's no way to enforce MFA? How do you figure?

Give new users a very short window, or not able to use until their hardware key, phone enclave, etc is registered for MFA.

You could even go as far as to send pre-registered hardware keys by mail, or have them picked up from HQ upon hire.

Certainly would have solved some of the recent "who actually works in infra at Twitter" debacle, now that I'm thinking about it.

That's how you get people to use MFA, but AFAIK there's no feature in Discord to a) federate with a directory like AD or b) force users on a server to only be able to sign in with a hw key

How do you know folks are using their hw keys to log in discord?

Discord UI is so complicated, I feel old, im always clicking the wrong buttons. Im sure you get used to it soon, and probably more powerful once you do.

Discord lacks a lot of work specific features

I think Mattermost might fit the bill?

It does not. It’s basically worse slack.

its free-as-in-beer which is all 99% of orgs want

it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs actually care about

You’ve clearly never run an org. Cost is one of many factors that matters. MS teams is also free as in beer when I’m already buying office.

I've run mattermost for a moderate sized team while doing my dev duties, it was never a bother...what specific problems did you have?

I maybe spent fifteen minutes a month on upgrades

I do not want to have a piece of undifferentiated infrastructure at my org to be tied to the employment, enthusiasm and attention of a particular engineer.

What does it need to become a product better than Slack?

It needs to have better features and better support.

What features are you looking for? I'm sure I've seen the Mattermost/Gitlab team browse here in the past and having something actionable would help them get there

I don’t know. As someone making IT decisions, I can really only look at the options on the market and compare them. Mattermost isn’t clearly better than Slack along dimensions that matter to most teams. Its product management strategy seems to be “we have the same features as slack but you can self host”.

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