
What Slack might learn from its Open Source alternative - caio1982
https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/
======
sandGorgon
Is this mattermost's hosted offering ?
[https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/](https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/)

they need to fix their feature set for pricing. For example, Google Apps
Signon is pretty basic - but it is only available at the "Enterprise E20"
level... where you have to actually call for pricing.

~~~
it33
Hi @sandGorgon, hi @gizmo

Mattermost team here. Thanks for your feedback,

While pricing is set that way for a purpose, we are always looking for ways to
improve and we're keenly interested in what everyone has to say.

Our focus for Enterprise has been large organizations with sophisticated needs
and it's important for us to have conversations and demonstrations with the
people doing the evaluation so they fully understand what we're offering.

That said, there are people who use our free Team Edition or have read through
our docs that just want a "buy" button for E20.

I'll bring this up and see what we can do.

PS: Regarding the word "fix", my personal view is that it's okay for a
commercial product, because people are buying it as a customer. Enterprise
Edition is a commercial product.

That said, many open source communities are adopting a principle of "kindness"
and having feedback phrased positively where possible. People work hard to
make open source software and give it away, and if conversations started on a
positive note... well, why not?

~~~
sandGorgon
hi, thanks for replying.

So at no point am I implying that you should release it for free. But I do
believe there are some features that should ideally be in the 20$ tier rather
than the "call-us" tier.

Now this may completely be how your demographic falls, but generally speaking
a small company buying 2-10 licenses would usually not have LDAP... but most
likely will have Google Apps. And that's pretty much the gist of my comment.

I'm not very sure why people have caught on to the word "fix" \- but IMHO i
used it in the way that most people talk on these forums ("your website font
needs to be fixed", "the copy needs to be fixed"). So I'm not sure if the word
was offensive, but it was not intended to be.

Also wanted to mention that I was looking at your offering as a customer with
a genuine interest to buy. We use Hipchat and their mobile app needs to be
"fixed".. so I was in the market for alternatives.

P.S. also didnt realize you were YC. That usually doesnt happen.

~~~
it33
Thanks @sandGorgon,

Definitely hear your feedback on the custom tier, we'll try to figure
something out this next week.

~~~
rdl
I also agree about Google apps being a good choice in a self serve tier;
custom LDAP is more a true enterprise feature. You might be able to put some
limits into the self serve Google apps version, too. I'd just like a user with
small numbers of users to be able to sign up directly and use the product.
(I've been a fan of the product for a while and will probably contact you in a
month for enterprise)

------
hlieberman
Zulip is also open source and an alternative. It shares some of the same
features as Mattermost. Mattermost seems to compete more directly with Slack;
Zulip is more like IRC++. (For those from the MIT or CMU world, it's basically
Zephyr with a web interface and a pile of features on top.)

Full disclosure: my company has been using Zulip since before it was F/OSS.

~~~
steveklabnik
IRC die-hard here. Zulip is the only one of these Slack-like services I could
ever see coming close to replacing IRC for me.

------
_up
I would define it more as Source Open than Open Source. Their Source is under
Afero License but they only use the Acronym followed by a printout of the
Apache License trying to trick people into thinkink it's Apache. And their
binary MIT License has the addition that you aren't allowed to hide modify any
Product or Trademark indentifications. That contradicts the MIT License!

~~~
hlieberman
Admittedly, their licensing scheme is a bit strange, but it's very clearly
F/OSS. Even in the most restrictive case, it's still the AGPL with additional
exemptions.

~~~
tzs
I'm not sure that the portion under AGPL _actually_ has exemptions. They say
in their LICENSE.txt file:

    
    
      We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions
      in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application (a) does not
      link to the Mattermost Platform directly, but exclusively
      uses the Mattermost Admin Tools and Configuration Files, and
      (b) you have not modified, added to or adapted the source code
      of Mattermost in a way that results in the creation of a “modified
      version” or “work based on” Mattermost as these terms are defined
      in the AGPL v3.0 license.
    

Note that the two conditions necessary to receive the exemption are connected
by "and", not "or". The second condition is that you not create a modified
work or a work based upon the program as defined in AGPL v3.0.

But by the terms of AGPL itself its copyleft provisions are only applicable to
modified versions, so it doesn't appear that there are any circumstances where
Mattermost's exemption will actually exempt you from anything.

------
newsat13
Well, mattermost is not entirely open source. Last I checked their LDAP
feature was enterprise only and we went with Rocket.Chat which had all
features open source.

~~~
Svenskunganka
The project is open source, what you're complaining about is that the LDAP
feature isn't free. You have to try to understand that they can't pour in
thousands of hours across a development team without making money. How are
their developers gonna get paid?

The golden nugget with these kind of projects, from these kind open source-
minded companies, is that being a paying customer contributes greatly to a
better and healthier product with regular feature additions. Compared to the
more frequently found companies that is closed source, commerical-only and
only provide bugfixes I think that it is perfectly fine that the LDAP-feature
is behind a paywall.

~~~
wott
> these kind open source-minded companies

Let's not fool ourselves, there is no such thing in these companies and
products that appeared during the last few years. There is no free/open-source
spirit, it's open-washing and the model usually get more closed and more
closed year after year (going through an incredible variety of licenses,
market segmentation and other marketing & sales tricks), following the
evolution of the owners' greed.

It's a regular business that is freemium-minded, period.

------
chriscappuccio
Of Slack clones, Mattermost tries to be feature complete but is actually
incredibly buggy. Let's Chat is strong, but is simply lacking important
features. RocketChat is the only one that does a reasonable job being feature
complete and not being full of bugs. It's actually usable...

~~~
it33
Hi @chriscappuccio,

Could you share an example of what you went wrong?

The Mattermost server has around 59% automated test coverage, our community
does over 120 hours of manual testing prior to each monthly release, and we're
constantly striving to improve.

Here's a recent review of Mattermost's quality levels, from someone who left
Mattermost and then returned, concluding Mattermost was the leading solution:
[http://www.akitaonrails.com/2016/08/13/choosing-
mattermost-o...](http://www.akitaonrails.com/2016/08/13/choosing-mattermost-
over-rocket-chat-and-slack)

If your experience is different, we're highly interested in knowing how we can
improve.

------
eps
We've been using a self-hosted version of Mattermost for several months and
the only complaint is that you can't switch off conversion of smileys to
emoji. There are few minor nitpicks around email notifications and peers
status display, but otherwise it's a solid no-nonsense alternative to Slack.
Well done, guys!

~~~
it33
Thanks @eps! Glad to hear!

Did you want to turn off smiley-to-emoji conversion for your own view, or on
how others view your messages, or as an admin feature for the server?

There's an upvote and discussion thread on this, would welcome your input:
[https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...](https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/12419022-way-
to-turn-off-emoticons)

~~~
eps
2nd and 3rd, please.

We are 40+ years olds, coming from the text terminals era, so emojis is really
just some cutesy-girly thing that teenagers use :)

------
akerro
Mattermost is bundled with GitLab. We use both at our company and it works
great.

~~~
Tobold
That's cool. Are they integrated well?

~~~
Freak_NL
Mattermost can use GitLab for authentication, which is nice. Other than that,
you can configure webhooks in GitLab's git repositories to push messages to a
Mattermost channel; for example, push every tag created so colleagues can see
a new version of one of your libraries/products was released.

------
petepete
Full markdown in messages is really useful, we make heavy use of it. Its
integration with GitLab could use some polish though, images in tickets don't
appear in channel notifications for example

------
solipsism
Again, a product that advertises being built on Go as if that's a feature. I
have nothing against Go, but that's weird -- no one cares what Slack is
written in.

~~~
justinsb
Personally I care about the security of the server (is it written in a
language that historically has a good or poor track record), and I care a
great deal about the client.

The Slack client regularly pauses for me while I am typing, randomly
refreshes, and generally feels sluggish. Those aren't things I associate with
Go. That said, I think this particular implementation's client is also written
in Javascript, so I don't know that it will have a particular advantage there.
But an open source implementation at least won't block alternative clients
(e.g. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-
fas...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fast-
beautiful-macos-native-slack-app)), in a way that the Slack Terms of Service
would seem to do.

~~~
addelindh
I audited Mattermost 1.x through 3.x a while back. Had some issues but
everything was fixed smoothly and from 3.x it is actually really good. Slides
from my talk on it here: [https://speakerdeck.com/addelindh/hacking-
mattermost-an-asse...](https://speakerdeck.com/addelindh/hacking-mattermost-
an-assessment-of-an-open-source-messaging-platform-for-hipsters-security-
fest-2016)

~~~
it33
Thanks @addelindh! Really love your work. You helped us a ton, highly
appreciated!

~~~
addelindh
Thanks yourself, you and your team is a pleasure to work with.

------
ThatPlayer
Me and my team are planning to move to mattermost, but their Slack import just
isn't 100% yet, so we've been holding off on it. For example right now it
doesn't import the chat logs of any bot account.

[https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/PLT-48](https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/PLT-48)

While we're not in the biggest rush to move to Mattermost, it does seem to
offer more than Slack right now.

~~~
emdd
I'm concerned about the mobile-friendly options for MM. Slack has pretty good
iOS apps (and others, but I've never tried them). Does MM have quality mobile
apps?

~~~
it33
I use the Mattermost iOS app daily, and it works well on a good connection.

The iOS app is a feature rich experience similar to web and desktop apps, so
when I travel and am on a slow connection it doesn't perform as well.

Here are our current mobile performance benchmarks so you can decide for
yourself: [https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/push.html#mobile-
perf...](https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/push.html#mobile-performance-
benchmarks)

There's work underway to get the mobile apps working better on slow
connections.

~~~
WhitneyLand
You said it's feature rich, therefore has lower performance over slow
connections.

This is not true. Mobile app performance over slow connections is determined
by app/server architecture, payload efficiency, caching strategy, etc.

There are many examples of feature rich apps performing well on slow
connections, and many simple apps performing poorly over a normal connection.

------
coldtea
> _What if Slack had threaded messaging?_

Then it would be a recipe for endless sub-discussions diverting from the
topic, and disaster...

~~~
burke
We had this in flowdock before we switched to slack, on a team of probably 700
or so at the time. It made it far easier to filter out chatter when dealing
with an urgent issue (no need to change rooms or remind people to be quiet for
a while), and I haven't really noticed it encouraging pointless chatter. I
seriously miss this feature in slack.

~~~
educar
What was wrong with flowdock?

~~~
burke
I'm not sure. I think with the benefit of hindsight, I liked it better on
balance, but I wasn't involved in the decision. It was definitely a terrible
resource hog, even more so than Slack, and the iOS client wasn't quite as
polished IIRC.

------
spraak
Wouldn't that it is self hosted defeat the point of single sign in across
teams? I mean I can see if the hosted instance has many teams you subscribe
to, but in the Slack world I already manage sign ons across different
company/project/team domains, so the advertised advantage here doesn't seem to
apply?

~~~
xfkechyk
if you need to connect to a team that is not on your hosted server, you can
still do so via the web or the desktop client either in a separate tab in the
browser, or in a separate tab in the desktop client.

------
unicornporn
I thought they were going to compare it to matrix/vector.im.

~~~
akerro
Mattermost is open-source alternative for slack, matrix is infrastructure for
IoT using websockets.

------
dbg31415
I love that there are some other tools coming up to challenge Slack --
hopefully this will put pressure on Slack to up their game. Slack has been...
very slow to fix bugs / add new features. They're starting to feel like
Microsoft... like they don't move fast, aren't trying to improve anything, and
don't care about customer feedback.

I love Slack, but some of my gripes with Slack:

* I can't spell check from a Post in Slack. Posts would be great for taking notes, but they lack order. It doesn't have to be full-on Confluence / Wiki style, but being able to add some classifications to Posts would be helpful. And in-line spell check... Every other tool everywhere supports this, but not Slack Posts.

* Posts and Chats use different formatting markup. Why not just use Markup for both?

* Channel names being forced into lower case and very short character counts... Why can't I use a longer name for a channel and just wrap the name in the display? Why does it have to be all lower-case without spaces? Why isn't there a folder structure to the channels to keep all my clients / focuses grouped?

* Slack forces me to put Bots and People in the same channel and it gives them both equal visibility. I should be able to add a #bot or something and have those messages be something I can search for, or something that shows up in the sidebar, but not something that talks over people. Their current work-around is to use two channels, one for people and one for bots... but making sure your team is added to every channel... it sucks. FlowDoc does a better job of this, and if it was built the way they do it I wouldn't have to search multiple channels to find the info I could just search one place.

* File storage in Slack is a nightmare. Try finding a file again a month later. If I upload the same file name why can't it just version the file like Box or RedPen does? Nope, it just uploads the same file again... tagging a user or # doesn't actually tag the the file the way you want it to... so I can't even really search by those things.

* When you click "Open" a file you have to log in again? That's so busted. I can download a file, but if I'm on a phone and I click "preview" it prompts me to sign in -- extra tedious for users who enable 2FA. Security doesn't have to be that tedious, just let me open files without a login -- if I can download them but I can't open them directly it's not security, it's just an annoyance.

* The default integrations in Slack kind of suck. I know that's not 100% Slack... but why can't I get updates when someone makes a change to a Google Drive file, or creates files in a Google Drive / Box / Dropbox folder?

* Hashtags are busted. Why don't # work like they do in Twitter where I can search for them after? Having # be rooms isn't good. Nobody gets that to start... I'd so much rather be able to tag a conversation (oh and have a threaded conversation) around a # and then have that # show up in the channel column...

* User management is lame. As the administrator, why can't I go into a user's profile and add them to multiple rooms at once? Or why can't I add a bunch of people to multiple rooms at once? Also why can't I lock down user names -- I don't want my users to change their user names to political statements or stupid handles, if I set it First.Last I want it to stay that way. The last thing I want is for one of my developers to rename himself @ZombieGoatMaster4DonaldTrump and have that be something that is shown to a client.

* Mobile isn't consistent with Desktop. Why don't the channel lists in Slack sort the same way on Desktop and Mobile? Why does the + sign mean join a channel on Mobile, but create a channel on desktop? It's so inconsistent it's like they don't even bother having their different product managers talk or work with the same UX team.

Anyway really glad people are producing alternatives to Slack. Going to check
this out, thanks!

~~~
xfkechyk
> Slack has been... very slow to fix bugs / add new features. They're starting
> to feel like Microsoft... like they don't move fast, aren't trying to
> improve anything, and don't care about customer feedback.

we're looking for a self-hosted alternative. tried hipchat, and it was worse
than slack in the areas you mentioned. mattermost has been a ray of sunshine,
so far, relatively speaking. still testing it out, but they are super
responsive to their users and community, between github, their forum, their
pre-release server ([https://pre-release.mattermost.com/core](https://pre-
release.mattermost.com/core) ), etc... they also seem to be aggressively
adding new features and fixing bugs.

I realize I probably sound like a shill, but it just has been that much of a
positive experience so far.

~~~
dbg31415
I hijacked your post, sorry. Will give Mattermost a look!

EDIT:

Your site doesn't share correctly.

I went to share this on LinkedIn:

* What Slack might learn from its Open Source alternative | Mattermost || [https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...](https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/)

And I see this:

[http://imgur.com/a/evVZF](http://imgur.com/a/evVZF)

You're using WordPress so you can check out:

* Yoast SEO — WordPress Plugins || [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/)

This will add the right meta tags to make the thumbnail and image and
description show up through shares with minimal effort on the part of the
content creator.

~~~
it33
Yeesh, wow, thanks @dbg31415! Have mentioned our Wordpress person to help fix
this, appreciated!

------
griko
How about Discord?

~~~
Svenskunganka
Discord is great, but its primary purpose is for gamers, but can of course be
used for similar purposes as Slack.

The problem with Slack & Discord that Mattermost addresses is the ability to
host it yourself, which means that you're in control of the data. Not everyone
_needs_ that, but there are companies and especially government-owned
institutions/companies that do require that.

------
xfkechyk
comment threading is kind of amazing (in mattermost).

~~~
it33
Thanks!

Yeah, we love using threads to keep discussion on track.

It took a long time to design. We weren't able to find anything like it, and
had to design through a lot of corner cases.

We're still working on making it more discoverable. Once you use it, it's hard
to go back, but it takes a while for people to discover the "Reply" button on
messages.

