Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version).

I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?

I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances.

You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team?

Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux, which is why I use it.

If you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service

I get the sense that Mattermost is the same kind of eventually-get-you-paying play as Slack.

Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free as well as Free open source.

I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately. I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.

I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).

Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.

I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have time to experiment with it.

So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in this article

Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.

I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.

And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.

And so on.

We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).

I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.

Strongly disagree.

It is NOT a good place to share docs.

Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed.

The calls are fine though, and the chat is substandard. A bunch of teams use it for support channels, however there doesn't appear to be a way to join the group for support without being pinged by @channel_name. So you join for support and then you are alerted by everyone else who is looking for support.

At least they have stopped fucking around with "newest on top/bottom", there was A/B testing last year (or maybe the year before) and you couldn't tell which way you had to scroll from one day to the next.

This would make sense if you were talking about the old Element app, but Element X is generally seen as a night and day improvement. Can you say what the problems are on Element X?

Trying to speak dispassionately as someone who lives their life in Element X iOS, I find it is way more reliable than WhatsApp (where I get way more “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t E2EE.

I am not disputing the lived experience on your side, but something big must be different. Is the server underpowered or misconfigured or something? Or is it using a beta server like Dendrite?

For docs, there is cryptpad.fr

> I tried running a community on it and it was a colossal failure.

I'm sorry to hear that. When was this? We have been making a huge effort to fix problems like these over the last 1-2 years (albeit focusing on workplace comms rather than discord-style comms, but the hope is that discord-style comms will follow).

> The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts

It sucked for sure on the legacy apps, but I think we fixed it on Element X.

Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.

> there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server

Assuming we're talking about the same thing, the canonical identity server is http://github.com/element-hq/sydent (formerly http://github.com/matrix-org/sydent).

While I agree with you. Element is tooo heavy! I know there is Element X, but it has a lot issues working with others who has different clients. I would rather not use element if possible. There is a lighter weight Hydrogen seems more pleasing on code and front end.

https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login

So on the up side about matrix is if you don't like you can roll your own.

I don't know about the server being underpowered or misconfigured.

I compared it with those Messengers because that's what we as users are used to. I know that TG is not E2EE and therefore not comparable on a technical level, but that's still what users of Element are used to.

I personally use iMessage the most as my Messanger and in the last >10 years I never had any problems with a message not being able to be decrypted. And iMessage not being as featureful as Element is not an excuse for having more bugs especially in key areas of the service. Again, iMessage being just an emxample.

I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.

Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.

A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.

Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.

Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.

But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.

We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should stop falling for it.

Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.

> Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed.

That's a feature not a bug.

Chats are for quick collaboration on documents. You share it, you get immediate collaborative editing, you do what you have to do and then you eventually archive the document somewhere it makes sense to archive it which in MS Teams would be a Team.

I really like the break down between Team which persists and chat for one off things but I know it really throws off some people.

We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!

Campfire is solid: https://once.com/campfire

Very shameless promotion but if you really enjoy threaded chat we're building https://cushion.so which keeps everything threaded by default.

You can create DM groups with yourselves if you like private chats in groups also.

(unfortunately Hydrogen is no longer being developed; nobody funded it. Instead, focus is on Aurora, aka Element X Web: https://element.io/blog/hacking-for-a-sovereign-digital-euro... etc)

> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.

Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it working, not even with matrix's identity URL.

We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite capable it seemed to me.

This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to find, I think sydent may not have been as officially "canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up? It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have time to resolve after taking a crack at it.

I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x however we recommended our members not to use the element x app since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!

I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for it one day when discord enshittifies.

Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer communication.

Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.

No channels either.

Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how good the clients are though.

we stopped offering identity server a long time ago because of the privacy concerns the whole concept raised and the fact the only non-Sydent option at that time was basically abandoned (ma1sd). The situation was basically 2 bad decisions: either lock in with Sydent or don't use an identity server at all.

Considering the low interest in the identity server functionality and the amount of concerns around the concept, we took the latter bad decision - that way we don't offer a self-hosted identity server but don't limit customers in using the matrix.org's one (even with their own Matrix server). That seems like an acceptable trade off. After all, even Sydent's README contains the following:

> Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver? > > Short answer: no. > > Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity server whatsoever.

PS: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers

Night and day improvement is relative. For example, last time I tried the iOS version had no localization to some languages, which the old one has, and not everyone can deal with an interface falling back to English.