Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article

We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack

So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency

You can self-host Mattermost. It seems that is likely what they are going to be doing from the article since they talked about how important it is to own your data.

Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.

Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min ago)

We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.

Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.

Off topic, but this reminds me of apples worst UI sin in my book: holding the refresh circle bo longer dumps the cache foe the page.

It always felt weird to me that glorified IRC could command such a price premium. Admittedly, a bunch of engineering was put in place to make things work, but it was still just humans chatting with each other for what is probably tiny amounts of data storage.

We used Mattermost but eventually started getting annoyed by the nags to upgrade in the free version. Zulip is has been far better.

> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.

I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.

And the self hosted is, effectively, just `docker up`. Saved us $1000s

Anything you can self-host is mostly safe, because at the very least you have access to the raw data and can move elsewhere if you need to.

Yea. The reply feature in Discord is way better and their introduction of "threads" makes everything worse.

What happens in Mattermost if you open up a thread and send a message in it without replying to a message? Does it still show up outside of the thread? I can see how that might be confusing.

I missed that part in the article, but yeah - self-host or nothing. We are self-hosting as well, although our group is not a large one.

It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe Zulip is better?

If you make the reply in the thread it will go in the thread. Threads in Mattermost are single-tiered (you can't do sub-threads). So they're somewhat limited, and sure, people will occasionally respond to thread conversations out-of-thread. That's a user issue more than anything else. They're not perfect, but they are very useful.