
Mattermost 1.0 released – open-source Slack alternative - shuoli84
http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/
======
finnn
[http://getkaiwa.com/](http://getkaiwa.com/) is another Slack alternative that
uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far
the only open source Slack clone I've seen that uses an existing standard for
the backend

~~~
yourapostasy
There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very
negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP
because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these
developers?

[1]
[http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

[2] [http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-
box/](http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810)

[4]
[https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp](https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp)

[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302)

For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve
around project governance.

[6]
[http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP
just fine.

To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very
large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle
with it "raw" in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain,
they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol/library that exposes only
that subset to them. It's almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of
the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people
need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.

~~~
finnn
I just like jabber because it's a standard. I have an app on my phone that'll
do Jabber already. There's a lot of server software already out there to host
Jabber, it's pretty robust, all we need is a reasonable frontend for desktop

~~~
elithrar
The counter to that—and no doubt a factor for many like Slack—is that when you
use a custom protocol/API you get to control the whole experience. You don't
have to deal with bugs in third-party clients, wait for clients to get emoji
support, and can control the look-and-feel (many of the Jabber apps I've seen
aren't great).

This is obviously not ideal for everyone, but I suspect that outside of tech
that using a custom client is possibly even a plus.

------
SEJeff
This is great. Also see: [https://zulip.org](https://zulip.org)

And the blog on why Dropbox decided to OSS it:

[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-
zulip-a...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-
dropbox-hack-week-project/)

~~~
dj-wonk
> Every conversation in Zulip has a topic, so it’s easy to keep conversations
> straight.

Threads! Hooray.

~~~
tedmiston
Also my biggest feature request.

I tweeted it at Slack and they seemed surprised actually. (I didn't get the
vibe like they're shipping it anytime soon.)

------
jgrowl
Props for open-sourcing, but I'm putting my money on
[http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)

~~~
calebm
Matrix does look awesome.

~~~
fabrice_d
There's also "friends": [http://moose-team.github.io/friends/](http://moose-
team.github.io/friends/)

------
cdnsteve
It's good to have options.

The takeaway I'm getting from this story, and Mattermost, is: 1\. Export your
critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without
them. 2\. Test that this works before putting years of data into a service.

There's nothing wrong with SaaS services, they just mean users must do their
due diligence in any business partnership. I can't see how a game company can
put their resources into delivering this as an open source project with no
future plans for monetization. Frankly, without monetization, open source
projects generally wither up and disappear. Then you're no further ahead.

[http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-
sou...](http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-
alternative/)

~~~
javajosh
_> Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot
exists without them_

You know, my thinking on this has really changed. Consider how many relatively
successful life-forms cannot exist without a very specific other species of
life. It is _also_ a good strategy to be flexible with your dependencies - but
I think nature proves it's not required to survive and thrive.

Taking the long view, it's interesting to consider the possibility (which I'm
sure has already happened multiple times in tech and elsewhere) when a company
has absorbed it's dependency, and also when a dependency absorbs what was, at
first, it's host, and successfully so.

The one thing that throws a monkey wrench into all of this is centralized
human control, and a single mind is notoriously ephemeral, changing, and
emotional. The CEO of your dependency might wake up one day from a terrible
dream of humiliation and failure, and decide that he can't and won't just
exist to serve his wretched, ungrateful customers in some insignificant and
petty way, and will instead take a completely different path! (This risk is
why greedy sociopaths make excellent corporate leaders: their drives are
stable, predictable and unemotional, which makes them both competent and,
ironically, safe.)

~~~
dfc
> Consider how many relatively successful life-forms cannot exist without a
> very specific other species of life.

Let's ignore how "many relatively successful [extant] life-forms" versus the
ones that had "evolutionary challenges." There is an _enormous_ difference
between a species survival depending on the existence of a prey species and a
species survival depending upon the existence of another species for
uninterrupted, cooperative and coordinated behavior. Your relation to your
SaaS provider is not similar to the blue whale's relationship with krill, it
is more like the goby and the shrimp.

------
ju-st
Why do I have to go to slack.com to learn what this is?

I clicked on this link, no explanation. I checked mattermost.org, no
explanation. I went to slack.com, no explanation. Then I clicked on a
"Product" link on top of the webpage. Finally some information what this
actually is.

Even open source projects could benefit from a little bit of marketing.

~~~
tarr11
It's marketed as an "open source Slack clone". I suspect that if you don't
know what Slack is, you aren't really the target market (at least for this
version)

~~~
tedunangst
Did Apple market the iPhone as "a blackberry with a bigger screen"? No, and by
not limiting themselves to an existing competitor's market, they kind of
crushed them.

------
lorenzhs
If what you really want is a pretty web-based way to access IRC, then you
might want to check out Glowing Bear -- it connects to your WeeChat IRC client
via websockets and works nicely on the Desktop and on mobile. It doesn't have
a voice recorder, but it gives you the infinite possibilities of a mature IRC
client. It's a project I've been contributing to for a while now and I still
absolutely love using it.

[https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear](https://github.com/glowing-
bear/glowing-bear) [https://latest.glowing-bear.org/](https://latest.glowing-
bear.org/)

~~~
Arathorn
It also supports Matrix natively as well as IRC, which almost gives you best
of both worlds :) [http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-
plugin/](http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/)

~~~
lorenzhs
Yep! It can do whatever WeeChat can do. Tor, who made the Matrix script for
WeeChat, is also one of the core developers of Glowing Bear :)

------
pbreit
There was a time when I thought something like this was a good idea. But after
using Slack for about a week, there's no way I would give up all the benefits
of a well-integrated centrally controlled service. All the clients work
together perfectly. We have Slack channels with customers. It just all works
much better than I can imagine any self-hosted, decentralized service would.

~~~
drdaeman
How a self-hosted service prevents you from having channels with customers or
whatever else Slack offers?

The only upside of third-party SaaS is that you don't have to bother yourself
to set things up and maintain them. Otherwise, I really don't see any limits
that Slack can do but a self-hosted system can't.

~~~
Sanddancer
I'm involved in a few communities that have slack setups. One of the other
nice things that Slack offers is that I only need to have one login to all of
them. That's something that none of the self-hosted systems can do right now.

~~~
drdaeman
Not sure I understand.

What prevents you from using a same identity to log in to multiple self-hosted
instances?

I think it's the same. As far as I get it - haven't used Slack much - with
Slack you either have to use different email address to create account for
each team (subdomain), or you have to be explicitly invited. Or maybe I got a
wrong idea. Either way, while I'm not sure all self-hosted alternatives have
options to consume external identities (be it third-party leased ones like
Google account or self-originating ones), at least some have those. Which
means the authentication is fairly transparent.

~~~
Sanddancer
I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very
different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have
Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the
password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if
one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have
to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted
communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up
needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a
bit is an actual benefit.

------
netcraft
I think Slack serves its stated purpose very well (smaller, business oriented
teams), but many groups have started using it for larger communities, mostly
because it has unlimited users for free. But it isn't made for that and there
is no way that most of these groups would ever be able to pay for a premium
subscription due to the per-user costs. 10K messages across all channels is
surprisingly easy to hit, need the ability to ignore users, etc. I think this
project has great potential to fill that niche if it is marketed properly.
Slack is so close to working well in that area but really needs to pivot to be
able to serve it well and make money doing it.

~~~
g4k
Yes, recently Slack even told Reactiflux that they need to move to another
service as more than a few thousand users can not be handled by the Slack
infrastructure.

~~~
silentrob
That isn't true. My office slack has a few thousand users and it works just
fine. I'm not saying it can scale to infinity, but it does handle a few
thousand users without any issues.

~~~
detaro
I have no clue what the exact numbers are, but apparently it _is_ an issue:

[http://www.reactiflux.com/](http://www.reactiflux.com/)

------
kentt
I'm trying to decide if this is better than Zulip. They're both open source,
backed by someone trusted, and I can run it on my own server.

~~~
web007
We tried Mattermost at work, and it was pretty terrible. Things like "show new
messages" didn't work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a chat app. After
that we tried RocketChat, which seems a lot closer to Slack in terms of
features and appearance. From our perspective they were just too rough around
the edges for functionality, with a lot of things almost-working-but-not-
quite. The caveat to all of this is that we wanted something that JustWorks,
so while we did put in some effort to fix configuration and even some bugs in
the software, we didn't commit to them 100% so YMMV.

We started up on Zulip when it came out a few weeks back, and it's been much
better and more consistent. Streams and topics take a while to get used to,
but they make it easier to have public conversations with some semblance of
organization. If you don't like / can't afford Slack, or if you have privacy
needs that make it a non-starter, I would recommend giving Zulip a try.

~~~
sandGorgon
do you know if Zulip exposes an API ? We are currently using Slack as a chat
dashboard for operations .. and we do some funky stuff like create
channels,etc through the API. I wonder if Zulip allows that.

~~~
web007
Channels don't exactly exist, but you can programmatically create topics
within streams. Sometimes it gets to be overwhelming, like out GitHub bot that
posts every PR for every repo under its own topic within the GitHub stream.
It's definitely a new way of thinking about chat, and there's a learning curve
of about a week, but so far it's been fantastic.

I've used Slack and HipChat previously, and AFAIK the integration methods are
all roughly equivalent - post a message to a URL with a token.

------
DannoHung
Interesting that it will be a default feature of Gitlab.

That's a move that seems like it may push Gitlab ahead of GitHub in some ways
(well, to me at least).

------
api
There are many OSS alternatives to Slack. Some are clones and some are
different approaches and many of them are quite good.

The thing these and all other similar efforts miss is the importance of
network effects. Everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack.

The real problem that needs to be tackled is one layer down: providing an
open, distributed alternative for authentication, identity management, and
data interchange that is secure and robust enough to provide a backplane for
things like this and that is easy enough for _anyone_ to use that it can be
pushed out to the mass market. I can't stress the last point enough. It must
be stupid simple easy to use or it will fail. It also must offer a good and
simple _developer experience_ (DX) or it will fail. DX is part of UX. Things
like XMPP are nightmares for devs and sysadmins and fail badly here.

This is a huge missing piece of the web.

------
mugsie
Well.... this is depressing -

Mattermost server is made available under two separate licensing options:

\- Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions
outlined in this policy; or \- Commercial licenses available from Mattermost,
Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com

"To simplify licensing, we’ve responded to community feedback and the
_compiled_ version of Mattermost v1.0 is now under the MIT open source
license" (Emphasis mine)

Why just the compiled version?

~~~
mugsie
They also seem to use a hosted JIRA, but restrict some of the tickets from
being viewed, and you need an account to file Jira's.

There is also no mention of it in the "getting involved" section, just a link
to github issues

This is not how you do open source.

~~~
scott_karana
> This is not how you do open source.

Sure, maybe they should have never released this useful software at all. /S

Mattermost started, and is still developed AFAIK, as an internal app from a
for-profit company, that they've generalized and started releasing to the
community.[1]

Considering that they _only just hit 1.0_ , maybe your tone is a bit harsh
compared to their ever-so-slight mis-steps.

Let's be constructive.

1 [http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-
sou...](http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-
alternative/)

------
giovannibonetti
Since we are talking about open source software, maybe the guys that own the
Mattermost account on Github could create a placeholder repo for Android (I
wonder if this idea would work for iPhone, too) and accept Pull Requests until
there is at least a beta native app.

------
ywecur
Would be happy to move over to an open source alternative, but at the moment
they don't seem to support mobile apps.

It would be very difficult for us to move because of this, we talk a lot on
the move.

------
djmashko2
I wonder how this compares to Rocket.Chat, another open-source alternative:
[https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

------
bachmeier
Doesn't this have some heavy hardware requirements? Three machines with at
least 2 GB of RAM? Is that really necessary if I'm going to chat with five
people?

------
e12e
This looks very nice. Is there any plans for an API/client protocol? Web
client is all well and good, but I'd want to have a solid console client, as
well as some command line tools (eg: "echo "Some message" | xmpp user@host --
where the equivalent for Mattermost would allow to set the topic, or message a
group via a bot etc.)?

~~~
it33
Thanks e12e!

We're working on shipping a high quality set of APIs. We're doing these in
parts so we can design and document them well.

Mattermost v1.1 ships on October 16 and offers incoming webhooks as a start:
[http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/](http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/)

You'll find a link there to an open source sample app for customizing how you
want webhook events from GitLab to appear.

Mattermost incoming webhook support ships with GitLab 8.1 on October 22.

For Mattermost v1.2 (November 16), we're working on outgoing webhooks, which
could offer the ability to fire off console commands.

------
rpedela
Overall I like it because they closely follow Slack's UI. However I question
the choice of fully supporting Markdown. A comment isn't supposed to be
documentation. Supporting things like bold, italic makes sense for emphasis or
making code easier to read. But headings? When would one ever want really
large text in a comment?

~~~
it33
Mattermost team here,

We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we
added it because it made sense.

Now we really love it and can't go back: [http://www.mattermost.org/open-
source-slack-alternative-adop...](http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-
alternative-adopts-markdown/)

Headings have a lot of uses for emphasizing text, and there's fun uses too
like creating different sized emoticons: [http://www.mattermost.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.p...](http://www.mattermost.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.png)

##### :sheep:

#### :sheep:

### :sheep:

## :sheep:

# :sheep:

~~~
rpedela
> We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we
> added it because it made sense.

What made sense? Is there a use case that requires full Markdown support? If
so, what is it?

~~~
codezero
I use Slack's 'Posts' feature which is a full Markdown post that you can embed
in a chat in Slack.

The reasons I use these are: 1\. Rich content, organized & clean lists with
outbound links for status updates about things I'm working on, linking to
Asana/Github 2\. Notes from one on ones, or general progress updates that I
keep in a private channel and save basically as a stream-of-
consciousness/reality log, having them there makes them readily accessible in
product and having them in Markdown makes them very readable when I'm browsing
through.

In short, I treat Slack rooms almost like I would treat a folder in Dropbox,
they just happen to also include some chat between people :P

------
jeffjose
In my past job, I was desperately looking to get an open source Slack
alternative. The ones I tested then (few months back) didnt hold up nicely
against Slack. I'm happy to see that finally there's some good competition.

~~~
oddvar
did you ever come across matrix.org? We are similar to mattermost in that we
are open source and you can host your own server.

------
fsiefken
If it supports SSL XMPP it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of
companies.

------
lucaspottersky
Feature idea: a canvas where people could draw instead of typing a text.

------
BHSPitMonkey
The blog post is dated October 2nd; Is HN just learning of this announcement
late, or is their blog displaying the draft date rather than the publication
date?

------
pionar
So, what does this offer over Slack, besides being open-source? I see no
mention of any actual features, besides basic chat features.

~~~
netcraft
open-source, self-hosting, non-english channels, better markdown support. No
limits on searching and self-hosting I think are the biggest things.

------
ChicagoDave
I've spent a couple of hours trying to get Docker running on my linode Ubuntu
server to no avail.

A non-docker implementation would be nice.

~~~
dopamean
I consider myself to be a person of reasonable competence and I find Docker to
be confounding.

~~~
ChicagoDave
I have 30 years in IT, my friend who is a sysadmin also tried to get Docker
running on my server. He gave up too.

~~~
cpitman
Maybe give CentOS 7 a try? It's literally install the rpm, start the docker
service, then run whatever container you want to run.

------
yannis
Besides being an excellent application, this is a valuable resource for anyone
studying Golang.

~~~
it33
Pull requests from Golang community highly appreciated, you can view our
process and tickets accepting pull requests at:
[https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/devel...](https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/developer/Code-
Contribution-Guidelines.md)

------
artribou
Does anyone know who the old provider was that locked in their data?

------
jhildings
Why not just use IRC ?

~~~
alexandre_m
Why not use horses instead of cars?

Note, I'm not especially praising for this product, but I am for slack vs irc.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Is IRC supposed to be the car or horse in this analogy? I'm convinced of the
former.

~~~
0942v8653
The main issue with IRC is that you have to stay connected all the time to
recieve messages, and you have to leave your IRC client to see and search the
logs (unless you have some intermediate IRC client server that runs all the
time). It's just not as nice.

~~~
falcolas
> intermediate IRC client

A bouncer? Usually pretty straightforward to install, and quite mature in
features.

~~~
steeef
Yet it's not something that IRC provides out of the box.

I've got no issues running my own ZNC bouncer, but when you're choosing a
product that an entire organization will use (including people who have no
idea what "ZNC" means other than 3 letters), IRC is lacking a lot of features
that get mentioned in every HN chat solution thread.

------
pwenzel
Can it send push notifications or other alerts to my phone?

------
mholt
Congratulations, Mattermost team! Huge accomplishment :)

~~~
it33
Thanks mholt!! We're working every day to make something people want,

------
copsarebastards
Just what we need, another solution to a problem that was solved two decades
ago!

