
Ask HN: Which self-hosted tool for team-based communication with topics/threads - martin_a
Hey!
Looking into establishing a new communication tool for our company.<p>While Slack and Mattermost are great for chats in small teams, it&#x27;s hard to keep up with things, when you&#x27;re a larger team or been out of house for some days or several ideas are discussed in parallel and so on. People just feel overwhelmed or have the feeling of not knowing everything they should.<p>So I found twist.com which integrates &quot;topics&quot; and thread-like display of those topics and I think this is an interesting addition to what Slack&#x2F;Mattermost do.<p>As this tool would hold internal information, it needs to be self-hosted. On the other hand, it also should be similar to twist in terms of topics and threads, so Mattermost does not really fulfill what we need.<p>I already thought about setting up a phpBB or something like that, but maybe anyone of you got a good idea what I should look at.<p>Thanks!
======
LinuxBender
This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but if you want threading /
topics, self hosted, searchable, then consider looking into NNTP (what usenet
runs on). It is the oldest threaded messaging system. It scales really well.
Most importantly, it is not a chat system. In other words, distractionless!
The downside is, the number of daemons that support TLS are few. For a while,
AD supported NNTP and used AD authentication. I think they may have recently
dropped support for it.

phpBB is great. You can delegate control of boards to different teams and
there are addons for just about everything.

Slack and other chat systems are very distracting and have become highly
complex vendor lock-in to API integrations that essentially relay command &
control between companies. Being a 3rd party, there are legal limitations
about what data may flow through those systems and I predict that will be a
major source of contention in the future.

~~~
martin_a
NNTP seems to be a bit low-tech these days with dwindling support by new
clients. But I might be wrong on that, will have a second look.

You totally got my point: E-Mail is distracting and people feel stressed by
the amount of mail they receive, while on the other hand they feel not
informed enough about various topics. And you also give sensitive data into
external hands and hope it will not get leaked or breached.

I think self-hosted "board software" (in whatever shape it comes) might reduce
distraction, you can read and write when you want and people from other
departments can keep up with current developments and also chime in if they
have something to contribute.

And with something like phpBB you also have full and easy control of the data.
I think that's an important point, especially for companies.

Might be worth the discussion and a try with a small team.

------
alx_m
Check out [https://zulipchat.com](https://zulipchat.com) \- it's a cool mix
between instant messaging and a forum.

~~~
martin_a
This looks great, thanks for the hint!

------
jon-wood
I'm worried this is going to come off as snarky, but when someone says "tool
to keep track of topics, with threading" the first thing that comes to mind is
email. If you use something like Google Groups then you get searchable
archives of everything, and there's no shortage of clients whatever the
platform.

~~~
martin_a
I want to get away from email. While everybody is used to it, information
tends to get lost in the 14th partial quote of an email which went to only
three of five people and two more which are not responsible for the project...
You get the hang of it.

And Google Groups would not fulfill the need for a self-hosted solution, so
it's a bit out of focus. But I get your point and would like to thank you for
it.

------
mrsareen
Try Riot.im, been using it in self hosted mode for about an year now.

~~~
martin_a
Looks good. Seems to have a concept for rooms (= teams) but not for topics, or
am I wrong on this?

~~~
Arathorn
yup, we don’t have threads yet (despite planning it for 2016, e2e encryption
and working decentralisation got in the way).

~~~
martin_a
Important things first, I'm cool with that. Any idea when threads might be
integrated?

Will take at least a quarter or half year before we get to actively work on
this, but I wouldn't want to switch systems once it's up and running so people
can accept one new system...

~~~
Arathorn
probably second half of this year, but there is a lot of stuff on the todo
list

~~~
martin_a
Any timeline I can check? :-D

~~~
Arathorn
the bug to subscribe to and upvote is [https://github.com/vector-im/riot-
web/issues/2349](https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349)

