Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative
> We’re a YC-backed indie video game company releasing an open source alternative to Slack.
Don't want to troll you guys here, but if you're a video game company why are you spending so much time building a Slack clone?
I was expecting some short of explanation in your blog post like "we did this because this serves as a core piece of our company for X reason and Slack didn't fit our use case for Y reason".
I don't really get why there is so many Slack alternatives coming up these days.
On every post like this there is tons of comment linking to other Slack alternatives, it's not like this is gonna be _the_ Slack-alternative.
Here is a non exhaustive list :
RocketChat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624737
Let's Chat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841
> Teams who can’t use SaaS rely on cryptic, decades-old technologies. As an example, the US Army uses myIRC to order missile strikes
"myIRC" doesn't exist. The name of the protocol is IRC. The name of a popular Windows client is mIRC. WikiLeaks called their leak "mIRC logs," which is where this trope came from.
The United States military (not just the Army) uses Internet Relay Chat for a whole lot of C2. It runs on a network, both IRC and IP, dedicated to the purpose. Given how long IRC has been in existence, that they've been doing it since the early 90s, that the use case is the perfect ideal for IRC, and that the average modern Web app is less reliable than my last Datsun, I have a hard time finding incredulity at sticking with something that works.
Even beyond that, IRC is text-based. It is not cryptic. An IRC client is a common first software project. About twenty lines of Go gets you a bot. You can make IRC look exactly like Mattermost with a week of hacking in your favorite framework of choice, and then you're not reinventing fanout. Entire products have been built atop IRC.
Even beyond that, guess how many protocols are decades old in just the software development workflow for this product. Pretty tired of "that's old, let's do it better," even though I hate finding myself on this side of defending IRC.
Here's the code: https://github.com/mattermost/platform
From the look of the screenshots ( http://www.mattermost.org/70-2/ ), I'd say there are some copyright concerns with the styles. This isn't a Slack alternative, it's a Slack clone. That's very problematic from a copyright stance. Why not create your own design style?
Gogs had (has?) this same issue: https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1069
Mattermost team here,
There's been a number of questions of what's coming from Mattermost, and how we design things. I wanted to share some raw, unpolished work we have of what's coming up.
It's a feature called "App Center" that we're working on to support 3rd party applications.
It's just a Google Doc of our early design that we're sharing on Hacker News to get feedback: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6vrticxgz9PsxePQ-dFrsKp...
Would you find this interface interesting for building 3rd party apps?
What do you like about the design?
What do you wish we changed?
There's a couple 1st party Apps we'd start with, like an Admin Console and a Custom Web App. We're thinking there could be a marketplace for 3rd party workflow apps.
Example: create an "Expense Report" app where a user can upload the photo of a receipt from lunch from their phone and type "#expense #meals" and have a 3rd party app create a labeled expense report that would be viewable in App Center.
Would love to hear thoughts from the community. This is an early idea, it's just a Google Doc right now. Your input would help shape it.
One thing I really like and appreciate is that there's a dockerfile right in the root of the project, which makes spinning up a container a relatively nice experience... haven't run it or looked into the code though... that just struck out at me...
Looking at the dockerfile, it seems pretty big, and it also strikes me slightly that they have dependencies on node, ruby and go, along with mysql and redis. The UI appears to be react based.. not sure what's running in ruby.
Also, there is http://getkaiwa.com/, with roughly the same features, open protocol and a built-in LDAP. Hubot integration is also possible.
Nice project but the documentation is a bit terse (yet). We like https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat atm.
Things that would be essential for me to use it in a company are
- LDAP or OAUTH integration - Hubot integration
I'm not sure Zapier integration cuts it for use cases where I want a self hosted solution.
What a horribly uncreative rip off. That may sound harsh but I'm a bit floored that this is getting so much attention...but YC right?
Reproducing functionality and growing an idea is fine. It's the blatant disregard to UX and UI where this company has literally pixel for pixel ripped off slack.
Mattermost team here. Thank you!! This feedback is awesome. Working on some replies...
Once a month an “insert something tech-related here” company releases an open source slack clone.
While I am grateful to all you guys, how much free time do you have to work on these clones instead of your main product?
I've tried so far let's chat and rocketchat and I liked them. I will give a spin to mattermost and I am sure I will like it too. I think the one that matures first, will be a big hit because we need a slack clone —as evidently shown. But also as with any other open source / free software project it will need commitment.
That's all good, but the differentiating factor of Slack over Hipchat & the like is how well it integrates with everything your team is likely to use. It works seamlessly with Github, Trello and IRC.
I don't mean to devalue this product at all, but This is not a viable Slack alternative, it's a generic (and good looking) communication tool. This said, I commend the open source approach, it could probably help the product evolve towards something much better and integrated.
You know what else is a great open-source on-premises Slack alternative? Most IRCds.
There are many slack alternatives out already, as volent has pointed out. What I'd like to see is one that is based on Tox technology.
Having a decentralised network would be much better as it would remove all costs of self-hosting.
Such self-hosted services might help us a lot, as Slack is currently blocked in China already. I think the two main reasons are that the Chinese government is unable to inspect the data at will, and also they fear sensitive data being leaked to the US government easily, which is actually quite legit. No interest in politics nonsense and having full control over your own sensitive data is probably the best possible thing to do.
I tried to spin up the docker container locally and it worked until it had to send me a mail for registration.
Looking at the README it says that it does not work if my ISP is blocking port 25, which I don't think it is.
But anyway I created a droplet on digitalocean and ran the container there, but "MySQL init process failed."
I would love to try this project, or at least try a demo deployment somewhere :)
Cool :). It would have been nice to see some more screenshots or product videos in order to get a feel for it.
Help: anyone able to get it going on Mac with Kitematic?
Does it set up mail server that can get email to my Gmail account? I signed up but didn't get an email. Are emails dumped somewhere or possible to lookup whatever I need to get started?
Open source and focus are the wrong arguments here.Unlike Slack, Mattermost is open source... Teams suffer when SaaS companies lose focus. Since it’s open source, Mattermost can endure through its community. If quality declines, anyone can fork the code and take stewardship.(a) Mattermost is built by a video game company, so there is no focus to start with.
(b) Moving from a SaaS product to a self-hosted open source component runs against the process of commoditisation so is ultimately only ever going to be of niche value. After all, why spend scarce and expensive engineering time setting up, maintaining, and potentially having to fork a product, when you could just pay $however-much/month and not have to worry about it.
Will there be plugin support so teams can share their add-ons?
Does it have email notifications? That's a killer feature missing from most Slack replacements.
Awesome to see more companies questioning Slack, and developing their own solutions!
So, can it be used as an improvement over XMPP? A new IETF standard may be?
Why is there no package? I have to use docker? Why? Why? Why?
Are you planning to open source you android client as well?
Some of the comments here are... aggressive.
Better to have slack-compatible APIs.
undefined
can i run it on Linux?
no ldap?
Did you know that One fifth of the planet speaks Chinese?. Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue of over 873 million people, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world, you can find more information through http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype