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    Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

    (skyfall.dev)
    1806 points JustSkyfall | 24 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source | bottom
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    realityfactchex ◴[18 Sep 25 02:22 UTC] No.45284350[source]▶
    Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.

    Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].

    Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?

    Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.

      [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) 
  [1] https://zulip.com
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    1. novatea ◴[18 Sep 25 02:32 UTC] No.45284470[source]▶
    I'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things though.
    replies(5): >>45286003 #>>45286166 #>>45286826 #>>45287113 #>>45287452 #
    2. mobilemidget ◴[18 Sep 25 06:02 UTC] No.45286003[source]▶
    Does give you more things to 'hack' for the club. Not all bad I guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some 'new projects'.
    3. _zoltan_ ◴[18 Sep 25 06:22 UTC] No.45286166[source]▶
    mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
    replies(2): >>45287083 #>>45287494 #
    4. gregoriol ◴[18 Sep 25 07:53 UTC] No.45286826[source]▶
    Matrix would be a better alternative
    5. Freak_NL ◴[18 Sep 25 08:32 UTC] No.45287083[source]▶
    Is it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a sensible manner).

    Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made with regards to our tools.

    replies(2): >>45287321 #>>45287412 #
    6. devoutsalsa ◴[18 Sep 25 08:37 UTC] No.45287113[source]▶
    I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
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    7. ForHackernews ◴[18 Sep 25 08:43 UTC] No.45287176[source]▶
    Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.
    replies(1): >>45287322 #
    8. actionfromafar ◴[18 Sep 25 08:48 UTC] No.45287209[source]▶
    You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you control your data much more.
    replies(1): >>45287284 #
    9. wltr ◴[18 Sep 25 08:58 UTC] No.45287284{3}[source]▶
    Last time I checked they cripple the self-hosted version, asking to subscribe for enterprise plan here and there. Source: deployed their chat locally a couple of weekends ago. Overall, I liked their Slack clone, they this one was a red flag to me. Now I’m not sure we want to deploy this, but I know very little alternatives. Zulip, but it cripples its self-hosted version too. It allows just 10 mobile users (notifications). Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
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    10. wltr ◴[18 Sep 25 09:03 UTC] No.45287321{3}[source]▶
    What about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?
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    11. pcthrowaway ◴[18 Sep 25 09:03 UTC] No.45287322{3}[source]▶
    What's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally being usable under Apache 2 terms
    replies(1): >>45287602 #
    12. ◴[18 Sep 25 09:10 UTC] No.45287367{4}[source]▶
    13. Simran-B ◴[18 Sep 25 09:16 UTC] No.45287412{3}[source]▶
    Funny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky, especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality and the search just works for about everything.
    14. Freak_NL ◴[18 Sep 25 09:18 UTC] No.45287438{4}[source]▶
    Not much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the newest versions?
    15. shaky-carrousel ◴[18 Sep 25 09:19 UTC] No.45287452[source]▶
    I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
    16. fransje26 ◴[18 Sep 25 09:25 UTC] No.45287494[source]▶
    > mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable

    I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..

    replies(1): >>45288212 #
    17. adastra22 ◴[18 Sep 25 09:29 UTC] No.45287516{4}[source]▶
    Mattermost is AGPLv3. You can deploy the whole stack and own your data without paying a cent to Mattermost the company.
    18. adastra22 ◴[18 Sep 25 09:30 UTC] No.45287521{4}[source]▶
    I've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost. Where do you see it?
    19. ForHackernews ◴[18 Sep 25 09:40 UTC] No.45287602{4}[source]▶
    That's how they describe themselves: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost

    > Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration

    replies(1): >>45287755 #
    20. Arathorn ◴[18 Sep 25 09:58 UTC] No.45287703{4}[source]▶
    > Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment

    Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.

    21. pcthrowaway ◴[18 Sep 25 10:05 UTC] No.45287755{5}[source]▶
    Interesting. Notably, they also call themselves "open source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit that gives no explanation: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.

    Notably, they do have some "source-available" code that goes into the enterprise release, at https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/server/...

    This mainly seems to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a relatively recent development). Until recently they also had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search)

    So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and almost all features, are currently still open source.

    replies(1): >>45289098 #
    22. _zoltan_ ◴[18 Sep 25 11:15 UTC] No.45288212{3}[source]▶
    yawn it's very, very old to tell people "do it better else shut up", which is exactly what you did.

    people can have an opinion you know. this is my opinion.

    23. jamespo ◴[18 Sep 25 11:16 UTC] No.45288224{4}[source]▶
    How are you expecting the devs to get paid with zero incentive for customers to do so?
    24. jrochkind1 ◴[18 Sep 25 13:00 UTC] No.45289098{6}[source]▶
    It sounds like the enterprise release is not open source? When someone above says "The whole thing is AGPLv3," I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same "whole thing"?