570 karma · joined May 1, 2012
Anyone interested in contributing to the work, we’d welcome your help
Where either of these what you were interested in?
Hi Dijit,
Highly appreciate the feedback. Definitely want you to have an amazing experience on Mattermost, and I'm sorry you're having issues.
If you go to "About" can you see which build you're running, whether it's a stable or unstable release?
Odd number releases are stable "Quality Releases", e.g. 5.17, even number releases are unstable "Feature" releases, e.g. 5.16.
Also, we probably need to add more diagnostics into our clients, as some issues come from how people choose to deploy the backend server.
Highly appreciate the feedback,
For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.
We recently raised $50 million in funding from YC to accelerate the project.
You're right that it does take some effort to self manage. We try to make it as easy as we can with a single Linux binary and lots of documentation.
One of the most common scenarios for Mattermost is deploying into a private network, that's invisible to SaaS services.
The software that runs manufacturing plants should never touch the internet. Neither should the backends of financial services companies, and many other industries.
Developers in those companies need to have some way to collaborate, and integrate with their DevOps toolchains and legacy backends, and Mattermost is getting increasingly popular there.
Every open source Mattermost server has all the core features of Slack, including Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, and Slack integrations via webhooks. Every Mattermost server can host hundreds of Slack-compatible teams, and every month over 10,000 servers are downloaded.
Also, if you've installed GitLab already, you just turn on Mattermost as a feature in omnibus. It's really simple to start. When you get to a few hundred users and IT needs to add some more admin and permissions there's some additional setup, but then you can go to hundreds or thousands of users from that setup.
We're working on getting more awareness around Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative.
We just raised another $50M to invest in our product, on top of $20M we announced 4 months ago. Compared to the $1.2B Slack's raised, it's not that much--but we think dollars in open source can do more.
Our market is enterprise, particularly enterprise DevOps, so there's not as much brand marketing going on.
If Slack were Nike, I think Mattermost would be like the manufacturer of business-style shoes people wear into banks, governmental agencies, manufacturing companies, etc. where sneakers don't typically go.
We want to be just as comfortable and functional as Nikes, but our priority is to make our users and customers look good, and make them successful and build their brand, not promote our brand.
Our brand is to serve.
We looked at a lot of different models and ended up with a "buyer-based open core" model.
The first "buyer" in this model is the user of our open source product that doesn't cost any money, because it's open source.
It's typically a developer, or someone very close to a development team and they self-host Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative and get a lot of value out of the product.
At some point the development team doesn't want to host Mattermost themselves any more and asks the IT organization to host it in a data center or on a private cloud.
The IT team is a different "buyer" who wants features that make the lives of IT administration easier--account sync with AD/LDAP, SSO, eDiscovery, high availability, etc.--and we have an enterprise edition for that buyer and offer a fair price.
That's how we've been generating revenue so far.
Thanks for the mention. Increasingly we see mention of "Slack or Mattermost" as part of DevOps stacks. In my mind, the space is growing quickly and there's room for multiple winners.
I'm excited about having more and more functionality people love available in an open source alternative.
Basically I was one of the people that started the open source project and I'm trying to find out what the top issues are so we can fix them.
Just curious:
- Which version of the mobile apps are you using? We've been making significant improvements on Android - Is your use case for E2E more for enterprise or is it more for online communities (what kind of community)?
Trying to understand more,
To me, a Series A investment is about bringing on more supporters for the business. Redpoint led our round and they've also been investors in companies we admire: HashiCorp, Zendesk, and Twilio.
I'm excited to have their help to deliver more value, more quickly to our users and customers.
While I think it's possible to build a great company without significant outside funding (e.g. Valve), I think it's more rare, therefore higher risk.
People care a lot about their communication systems and we're continually listening and working to improve.
The $20M Series A helps us more quickly narrow the gap between open source and proprietary solutions.
We want to continue to invest, grow and raise funding so we can relentlessly improve open source options.
I've found that the customers that choose Mattermost have a long term view. They're joining us on the journey that brings more choice to the market. They share the belief that the world can be made safer and more productive through open source technologies.
A $20M Series A may not seem like a lot compared to the $1.2B Slack has raised to date--But it's four times the size of Slack's $5M Series A in 2010: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/slack-series-a--539...
@h3throw, may I beg you for a favor?
So I can learn more about addressing your comment in 2), could you help share one thing we can improve?
But there are technical challenges. Asking for help from open source community to see if we can work together to find an outstanding solution: https://medium.com/@mattermost/help-with-open-source-hipchat...
It's perhaps a mix of services, migration/import assistance and possibly a discount to our commercial version.
Would such a package be interesting?
For anyone who'd like to discuss outside of HN, please feel free to mail us at info at mattermost.com
Mail us at info at mattermost.com? // and this is an open invite to any HipChat users who want to keep data under IT control.
Regarding importing from HipChat, while it is tricky as the data is within HipChat's VMs and not documented, we can potentially work with you to move over smoothly.
The good news is if you switch to Mattermost we run as a single Linux binary with MySQL or PostgreSQL, so using us you have 100% access to your data as well as the source code to understand everything we do with the data.
We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.
a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear?
b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."?
If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...
Here's a page to learn about all the ways the community can contribute: https://about.mattermost.com/contribute/
Yeah, a lot of enterprises are using Mattermost these days. Uber left Slack and HipChat to use Mattermost for company-wide deployment: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to...
Yes, we do have people wanting connectivity via XMPP, IRC, Discord, Slack, etc. There's "matterbridge" that offers those options for Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)
Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).
Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/
Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.
That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.
Yes, we needed better mobile apps, and new ones are here (React Native in iOS and Android with full source code): http://bit.ly/2w33V3D
Huge thanks to over 2000 beta testers that helped vet the apps along with all the community contributors.
We've also recently added a directory for making it easier to find integrations: https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/
Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.