In what way is it crippling?

(I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)

Good news and good luck with that, hopefully Mattermost will behave better.

Make sure to warn others of Slack/Salesforce, customers need to have a voice and this behavior must become prohibitly expensive for Salesforce.

Not sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.

> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.

A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)

I'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.

Zulip is great

Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.

Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.

Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.

is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?

> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.

This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.

Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives exist.

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.

I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".

I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.

The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.

Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.

Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.

Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.

I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.

I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.

I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived

When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.

Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.

> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack

Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?

Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?

Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.

Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.

Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.

I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost (integration) in a couple of days.

I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.

Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?

Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.

Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.

I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.

It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.

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.

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.

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.

Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.

Hi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.

I wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone felt very proud of having automated this important, but often neglected part of their business model.

> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this

It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.

Slack is not a VC backed service right now. It is owned in full by Salesforce.

Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea and that I agree with.

Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.

there exists a fork that is basically limitless https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter so if that ever becomes a problem you just swap server binary

Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.

If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.

We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?

Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented.

Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.

Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here

> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids

that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!

Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!

It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.

1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.

2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.

FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.

Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...

welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry

It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...

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 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.

Mattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages

https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...

Yeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Can’t imagine there’s many people still left using it now.

Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?

Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.

This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.

That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.

Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.

Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...

(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)

For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:

In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."

Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies

Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?

What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.

I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.

Matrix would be a better alternative

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'.

Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?

What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice anything bad.

Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.

>It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law.

Under what principle? They were near the end of their contract, so there's no legs to stand on. It's not like there's rent controls for SaaS contracts.

Or didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion target".

I suspect that the same applies to discord.

I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?

This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS

> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]

Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).

Cory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.

Don't need a decade, I rarely if ever see Teams not malfunctioning daily...

Or an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.

Thank goodness we have a hundred improved protocol alternatives now. Matrix, Tox, Jami, Briar.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire?

My first thought was had this moved the stock price - but the day price is up. The 5Y price is back to where it was ... over all they're still 6000% up.

Just IRC with

- a decent mobile client that uses the same account - and decent notification system - a backlog that survives disconnects - a search - file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also persist - markdown

But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.

And archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace… very aggressive move to destroy free and non enterprise tier

what kind of joke is this...

Mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287107

From Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher well.

The responses you're getting perfectly encapsulate the problem.

I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but "<x> client sucks, use <y> client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.

I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads. Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy. The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for me.

I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!

I recommend Matrix, and it works well for me. I'm using Element (old) on Android though, not Element X.

Around a year ago I could do calls reliably on it, but recently I have been having a bad experience, I am not sure what changed.

Indeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.

Not unpopular at all. That’s the way

A fork that has not been touched in at least 7 months does not inspire confidence, especially when the mobile apps depend on the server staying up to date.

Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.

Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.

And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.

Once enough people do that, they'll fix this

Zulip is awesome too. On prem.

Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.

Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?

You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?

Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.

Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...

Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.

Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?

Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’

> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation

I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.

Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.

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?

mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...

When was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.

Yeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence, which is buried at the very end, after all the images.

If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.

The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.

That discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"

Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.

Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable alternative.

We've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more just cost or self-hostable.

This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.

This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.

Because microsoft would never do such a thing

I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them.

They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff.

I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI

Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.

Funny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you have any references where I can read more? I didn’t hear about that

I set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try again though.

I'm surprised GDPR has nothing to say about this. You should have the right to your data, but I suppose that doesn't extend to companies?

> the company started as the anti-Oracle.

The company was founded by an Oracle executive...

I can’t really comment on video calls in Matrix since I never used them in Slack either. For me the main draw is having one tool that does one job well, rather than trying to be the all-in-one hub for everything. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s actually good at that, instead of relying on a centralized system that tries to cover all bases but ends up being mediocre at most of them.

Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.

At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.

I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too

A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.

Are you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?)

(Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you give the app total permission to run in the background they should work.)

Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.

Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.

this is what we're doing :)

We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.

Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.

I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.

The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.

You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.

In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.

On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away.

I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.

Still a dick move.

I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.

I am a teenager and I approve this statement!

Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>

They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.

Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.

> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!

So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.

It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.

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

The revenue is from contributions

Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.

Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.

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.

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

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.

People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.

Hey, I think we agree on something.

Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.

Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.

What? No? Why?

And that if you don't fight it when everybody is telling you to, you end up with Bari Weiss running CBS news.

It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally.

So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?

Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message.

The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.

I liked Zulip a lot until that Flutter rewrite. Maybe it's more accessible now but the new look is not for me. I believe the app navigation is largely unchanged, and still doesn't quite feel right. I love the topic-based model nonetheless.

They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.

Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.

They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.

I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?

Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.

Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.

Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need. It happens, but should not be in the curriculum for kids.

I am sure that being forced to spend time on this steals time from more interesting projects.

I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now.

It really hasn’t required any maintenance at all beyond incrementing the version number.

They are starting to tighten the screws (showing admins a warning if you have over 2500 users), but it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.

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.

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.

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

My sales people love it.

I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.

But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...

Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.

>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.

I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.

Salesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s in an epic doom loop.

On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble.

Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.

Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.

I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.

I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.

The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.

If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.

You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you control your data much more.

If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad.

But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.

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.

> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable

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

Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.

Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.

Hundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet it’s a downward trend with no hope of a turnaround.

I find this absolutely ridiculous and I question how this can even be legal. Surely a contract cannot be unilaterally changed on such short notice?

Imagine your landlord increased the rent by 4000% and it's due in 5 days or you're out on the street.

Sure, they have the right to increase their prices, but there should be at least a month notice for something like this.

How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment?

Yes, I mean they are not difficult to remove, but I think it would be fair to add the context that they're going to have to fork it. E.g open source is not a panacea either, they will likely also struggle with postgres being a bottleneck for that number of users (particularly on search), the redis integration is not part of open core.

Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!

It also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may 2024 ? https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own fork.

Exactly what you’d expect from a sales department at risk of missing their arr target this quarter.

Almost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits. Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a standard playbook.

If you’re going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat conversations back into email, you might as well throw those summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..

You are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before having gone through arbitration.

Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if you are dead.

I don’t think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer how sticky are these products.

So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!

At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.

they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course

I mean we all know Microsoft and their reputation, but they not exactly known for rising price x40 for non-profits.

Usually Microsoft was opposite: giving a lot of software for education for cheap or free to vendor lock-in people into their stack.

NOT advocating for using Teams because God please no, but Microsoft reliability us much better than Salesforce.

Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*

(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)

It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.

At my work we use Zulip, and I haven't really found many people complaining about it. At least on iOS works just fine for me.

The Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.

I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.

We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).

It's well documented and very easy to follow, just need to run a few Ansible scripts

We found worse mobile apps was good because it put boundaries around our interactions and kept us using it in a focused way during work hours.

EU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to roll out.

If you want help, I'm more than willing.

I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...

I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)

It does to some extent, because companies have to respect gdpr for their own users as well: so individual employees/slack users have gdpr rights and they individually can get those enforced against the slack operators.

It has been a year or two since I used Slack heavily, but when I did the video calls were unreliable and poor. Maybe it has improved since then.

go to product > self-hosting

you might notice it's 100% free software

now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever

but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool

and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later

See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...

I still have old personal projects on there

Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over

It is open source and you can self host it.

Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers.

I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...

I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.

The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.

Noshareholder would be more honest.

Slack does have this. Basic AI summaries are included in all paid plans, and AI search and other features are part of the $20/mo plan.

Has any company got this feature? Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds good in theory but is hard to actually pull off. To complete this query you'd have to process almost the entirety of the chat history in every channel. Which sounds extremely expensive, and we know LLMs start to go off the rails when you give them too much context.

I know a few engineers in different companies within Salesforce. They're under lots of pressure to integrate AI everywhere, and leverage it. The way they've talked about it gives me strong "flailing around desperately" vibes, when the smarter money is on making more minimal but targeted efforts, or at least waiting to see what happens the other side of the bubble.

> Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need.

I disagree; this is the best time to unlearn "companies selling proprietary software are our friends"

Arguably it's a more valuable lesson than any technical lesson: ignoring existing open source projects in favour of proprietary stuff should hurt.

The more it hurts the better the lesson sticks.

Notably, Mattermost can be forked to a community edition if the team behind it does anything too user-hostile. It's a fine balance for them to keep their "team edition" nudging users to a supported edition without being so annoying that users are motivated to make that community edition.

I have other reasons to want a community edition personally, but sadly they've been successful enough thus far that there isn't enough interest from other developers to make it happen.

Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.

Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.

Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.

This is at a fortune 500 company.

Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.

Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.

There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet.

Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.

You’d think they failed based on the description given earlier. But that doesn’t sound like failure to me…

> Yeah they fucked Heroku hard

Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable

From one walled garden to another?

We just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago. Good riddance.

What I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more interesting to me than a story with fewer ones.

They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.

Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue stream from users or they don’t want the overhead of maintaining those users.

From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.

With moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if desired).

The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.

These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.

That sounds quite a bit like fraud.

Best place for info is probably the announcements channel on Kubernetes slack. that’s a link which is a good place to start https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p17500871180...

I mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they want to mow lawns.

It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/

VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.

I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.

If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.

Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.

Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people would stop recommending it until such time it works well.

A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams.

I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.

Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.

Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.

Oh, they know, that's why they have banned all other AI from interacting with Slack.

Skyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.

Because implementing _useful_ AI features is hard.

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.

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?

Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?

I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?

> 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).

As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.

> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.

Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.

It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.

Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me.

¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/

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.

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.

Why?

> I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.

Well, that's what you have lawyers for.

Otherwise, agreed with your comment.

Depends on what you want to fight about.

If your rates were raised and you have not received new contract, if you can drop the service at that point, they can't collect including any cancellation fees.

If you want to continue using the service, that's a bit trickier.

Well, you can amend a contract, but you need to send the new conditions, and it gives the other party option of not accepting the new contract, which means either amending party needs to accept continuation under old contract, or dissolution of the contractual relationship with no fees/damages/etc for the party that didn't accept new contract.

The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't even send a new contract.

Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!

Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?

I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.

Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.

Sure, so 5 years from now they will be in the exact same situation.

Going from a greedy corporation to another greedy corporation is not a good idea.

It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is done, but do check our website: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)

Not being funny, but I can migrate from Zulip SaaS to Zulip Self-hosted in about 45 minutes. The limitation is the speed of my internet.

I know this, because I've done it.

Similarly a migration from self-hosted to SaaS gitlab (though, not back).

Perfect is the enemy of good, but man, it can be pretty close to perfect if you choose your vendors properly.

in fact, if you actually look at the historical timeline, many of the things we think of as core to developer experience only were released after salesforce acquisition.

I think even multiple buildpacks at once only came a couple years after acquisition.

Possibly they were in the pipeline before acquisition, sure.

But I'd agree, heroku is still a better DX than almost any competitors, although it's features and pricing have really stagnated. So better DX as long as you don't need any features it doens't have. But it hasn't really been 'ruined' in any way, it just started appearing frozen in amber some years ago.

The new 'fir' platform is promissing, before that I didn't really know that any actual development was taking place in heroku, but it's a big move, modernizing things and setting the stage for more. Including slightly improved resource-to-pricing options. We'll see if it all works out...

You can self-host it.

My teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst case we're reading directly from the PG database.

Yes, they fucked up -- not by charging more, but by saying "pay us 10x your annual rate within 1 week or we destroy all your data", with no notice.

Knowing that they would consider treating ANY customer that way means no other customer should use their services.

We'll let you know how we like Mattermost once we've had a chance to actually use it :')

I will never create a new slack workspace unless forced to. Unless this non-profit is costing them more than what they were paying, I doubt this move made any business sense. And if it cost them more than 5000$ a year to support these users, there's either more to the story or Slack as a company has been heavily overvalued.

O365 pretty much always includes a Teams license, so if you're paying for O365 anyway...

For the young people who might be reading this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

Here is the public announcement: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kubernetes-...

> UPDATE: We’ve received notice from Salesforce that our Slack workspace WILL NOT BE DOWNGRADED on June 20th. Stand by for more details, but for now, there is no urgency to back up private channels or direct messages.

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.

It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.

Makes me filthy rich doesn’t imply I like it.

What about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?

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

To what? What is the alternative?

Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?

why the extra step of making them into PDFs?

> The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.

This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and they can migrate if it's truly necessary.

Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?

  - Zulip
  - Matrix/Synapse and Element
  - Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits

See discussions below in this HN thread.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...

[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish open source people would have opted to get him something more free than a MacBook.

> but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.

not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless 'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your data).

How about https://once.com/campfire

I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.

In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.

Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.

[1] https://revolt.chat/

This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in they've created.

This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.

It's really incredible, although expected.

Discord is pretty horrible when compared to Slack… can’t change the tiny font size for starters

I was going to suggest the same. Why would it not be free? I would expect it to be free. I don't think running a server costs anything.

what did you migrate to?

Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly.

And I might not like MS tech, but I never heard any stories of rug-pulls and pricing changing x10 overnight.

Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.

Oh, so I was missing something!

That was not very obvious from their landing page!

Well in that case, carry on!

Sadly as with many such products, if you want SSO and the like, you'll still end up paying per user per month. That gets stupid expensive quick

No. Also VMWare moved perpetual licenses to subscriptions, not the other way around.

I'm not implying they're holding it wrong - i'm explaining that we're finishing a migration from one VoIP stack to another, and the new tech is still beta, hence asking which one they're using. If you're going to try to flame my replies, please at least read them.

The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll generate some ARR short term but ultimately people will be looking elsewhere, new companies will start on alternatives and others switch when the opportunity arises. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.

PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.

(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)

For docs, there is cryptpad.fr

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.

> 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.

The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.

But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.

So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.

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.

Counterpoint though, they’re sometimes exactly what they’re described as.

Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this

Mattermost is AGPLv3. You can deploy the whole stack and own your data without paying a cent to Mattermost the company.

> 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.

How are you expecting the devs to get paid with zero incentive for customers to do so?

Margin Call is a great movie.

I've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost. Where do you see it?

Not much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the newest versions?

Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.

This is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.

No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!

What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack needs to do to enable this feature?

> 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.

Hush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to serve a simple status page.

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

Expo/RN TBH.

Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.

Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.

So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).

Human readable format at rest, I assume.

We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.

Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.

There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.

It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.

Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.

Second this. I'm fond of just enough principle, and this is exactly that.

Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P

That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.

Or better this: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

is... was it Ellis island?

Of course you can change the font and font size.

you can literally change the font size to up to 24px and then double it again if that isn't enough using zoom level in discord

That was until someone decided to start strong arming people with dissenting opinions via compromised companies.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...

> Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly.

Absolutely not. You had your physically purchased copy of Windows and its licenses. If your org was growing a lot you might be strong-armed into paying more for the new licenses but at least you kept what you already had, nobody could take it away from you. The SaaS world is a completely different story.

Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.

We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again

The special rate was charity.

He choose the laptop for durability because he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh. People didn't pick a non-free laptop without consulting him.

I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.

Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.

Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.

Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.

Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.

Not OP, but we originally migrated to Digital Ocean. But now, all complex stuff is on AWS and dual-stack stuff is on Replit.

Yet.

Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.

They are verifiably false statements made for the purpose of monetary gain. I guess the question would hinge on intent: did they just forget to check if anyone is using those features and if there is anyone who would be disrupted, or are they intentionally deceiving users by purposefully not checking?

Not overnight but I remember sql server licensing having a huge increase when they decided to pursue rent seeking via azure.

Or not.

> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our Zulip Cloud customers.

> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions. There is no “open core” catch — just freely available world-class software.

The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on self-hosted Zulip.

> That was not very obvious from their landing page!

It says in bold letters:

"Your data is yours!

For ultimate control and compliance, self-host Zulip’s 100% open-source software"

How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).

I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.

Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.

Useful summarization of long dialogues is harder than it looks.

Informed of the final cut-off date, sure!

How long have they had the bill mentioned in the top comment on this post? At the very least it's 3 weeks, and the comment suggests it is months.

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

I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V

Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"

It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.

and what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting env vars to replicate the heroku features?

also, you used replit for the frontend deployment? or frontend and some backend?

thanks - just super interesting as I'm in the space and feedback/real cases are really useful

We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)

we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to users.

Anyone except an American judge can see that this is intentional.

Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an organisation like this could legitimately need.

That Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects) and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to be involved.

Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group.

That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema".

And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow".

End rant

I'm an HPC admin, I can (and will) make you serve this page from NIC's unused core. I need these cores for streaming cat videos.

Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.

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.

Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.

If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?

To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and schools are not offered because large companies want to be nice, but because they want to catch future customers.

>he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh

Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.

So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.

Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.

I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.

A ThinkPad might have also been an excellent choice, but hope the MacBook serves him well!

Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.

Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.

And even then (let's say 2008), if you purchased the most expensive license (Enterprise processor license) and paid for all sockets (it was calculated per socket, not per core) you could run as many SQL Server instances with as many users as you wanted on that server, in however many VMs you needed. No subscription, permanent license. You might have to purchase support extensions if you wanted ability to call MS for issues, but that's separate thing and you can ignore it if you don't need it.

That's exciting! I didn't catch that from the pricing page, thank you for clarifying :)

Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site. In this case they apparently meant it, but to me that just registers as marketing speech.

I guess I've been on the internet too long, my brain automatically blacks certain language out, like a biological spam filter.

You can create chat between any group of people that you want and then rename the chat to have a name, but that’s not a channel and it’s not a team and it doesn’t really have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files in a rudimentary way.

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"?

Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores forever seti@home.

Runs Prime95 like a baws

Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.

Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).

> If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?

Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."

No reasonable person can have the expectation that a discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue forever!

At this discount, it really is charity.

It's just react native tooling

Yes, that is correct.

Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.

> in terms of engagement

What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.

I'm from 1987, are you sure? And I was talking about Jabber, not IRC.

Bro. Just let the kid have his MacBook.

This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.

Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.

> Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site.

...You could go to the Slack website right now and see? We're on the internet. It's all on the internet. We can literally just check.

Doesn't seem to mention anything about being open source, anything privacy-related, data, or hosting.

I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".

I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.

Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.

Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy

Framework?

Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.

https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...

Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.

12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.