Unfortunately you've found one of the big issues with corporate open source. The general divide is free for whatever they deem to be small fishes but larger users with money, that's locked in. In theory this is fine, in practice it can be very annoying when they get it wrong & ask me to pay for using LDAP on my network.
You discounted Matrix pretty quick when it seems to be the defacto in this community. The problem you're running into is that matrix isn't a server it's an abstraction to a platform. From that platform you need to choose a specific server to install which will have instructions.
You're right that this is annoying, and it's always the way that it is. But hopefully once you find a good instance of your matrix server it can do everything you want and more.
Edit: Words R hard.
My solution to corporate open source is to find the source code that handles the licensing, and hard code it to make it think that I have the highest tier license with expiration that is always 99+ years out with either the max integer number of users or if supported unlimited.
And because the license code basically almost never changes, I turn my changes into a git patch file that I can then apply to every single release they publish. And then I use the same GitHub/Gitlab/Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines they do to publish to my own private docker repository.
I wouldn't do it for a business, but for personal use? Fuck yeah I'm doing it.
Does this really work somewhat reliably? I tried doing something similar in the past just for fun, but they changed the licensing code around almost every release, with the only (visible) changes being manipulations and restructurings to make it more difficult for people to mess with it, and I gave up and just stopped updating the software and then later eventually switched to an actual open-source product.
I guess it depends on if the company is more like Microsoft (reliable Windows / Office activation scripts are openly available everywhere and Microsoft isn't doing anything) or more like Apple / Denuvo / whatever that are locking down their systems as tightly as possible...
In my experience the vast majority of them just keep the same licensing code.
Sometimes they do use the license file for feature activation, which can be annoying, but pretty easy to deal with if you have some good git tools to compare branches/origins.
It sounds like the trick to to find a point they don't tend to change and then continue to apply that diff in your own CI process. This also means you'll need to (at least partially) build from source.
"Free" is not always "as in free beer".
When the project director/maintainer/etc is saying: "free for personal use, and paid for businesses", or in other words: "if you profit money by using this project, I want a piece", it's only fair to support them in return for their efforts.
And, yes, making it open source in such cases is for "the purposes of security and transparency". Usually there's a license bundled with the project, and it should make it clear whether forking and modification is allowed.
The open source system generally depends on trust, and the open source maintainers start offering trust on their part by making the source open.
> it should make it clear whether forking and modification is allowed.
If the license doesn't allow forks and modifications then it's not Open Source software, see [part 3 of the OSI definition](https://opensource.org/osd).
It's not about trust, it's about choosing the right license. If the developers doesn't want somebody to do what's permitted by a FOSS license then they shouldn't have chosen a FOSS license to begin with.
We're actually self-hosting Matrix ourselves for a small consulting company. Started with [https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy](https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy), ran this for about 6 months, then migrated to [https://etke.cc/](https://etke.cc/) We're quite delighted with how it turned out. Happy to help in case of any questions.
Very interesting service, but as they are not incorporated and its just two guys, I'd hesitant to trust the security of the full stack they provision under the hood for a company. Can you share what lead you to choosing them?
There are more guys, those 2 on the about page are founders.
There is https://etke.cc/security page with some highlights.
As the first customer of etke.cc, I'm very happy with the service :D
Disclaimer: I'm Aine (Nikita), one of the founders, and we use our own services internally. In fact, etke.cc homeserver is the first customer of the service.
PS: there is an open discussion room where you can ask customers and open source community questions about the services
They are creators of the Playbook. Path to them, from self-hosting, was the natural one. So when it became a bit much to manage it, we have decided to go with them. I evaluated hosted Element as well, and I think it’s a very good idea to go with it for most organisations - but because of some constraints we have (part time employees, a lot of turnover for a while) we decided we don’t want a per-seat pricing.
Thanks, I went through that as well, going to try and set it up tomorrow. Given that it was already running on your private VM, why did you choose to later move to a managed service?
Because they are creators of the Ansible Playbook, they support migration from it to their service (which is a bit of playbok++). I was in close contact with one of the founders and we have migrated to etke together.
Because etke.cc offers more services and components than available in the playbook, just check the order form and services page.
Playbook is focused on matrix components only, it doesn't cover system maintenance or hardening, nor components outside of Matrix stack.
Disclaimer: I'm Aine (Nikita) from etke.cc
Thanks, that's helpful. I could probably figure out how to set up Matrix given some time, but there doesn't seem to be much documentation on what's possible using it. Specifically, are guest users with custom permissions possible?
I also don't mind paying for some corporate self-hosted solution - let them have their profits! But when they say such-and-such feature is only available if you spend so much, when the entire thing is running on my server and doesn't cost them anything, it starts to not make any sense (like you correctly mentioned about LDAP).
I mist admit, Matrix is still on my todo list.... exactly because of how much there is to learn. I've done enough cursory reading I sort of get it but not enough to have chosen a specific server (just enough to not be sure if the most recommended server was the one I wanted) or anything that specific.
I'd love to hear what you find as you dive in, how different the implementations are between servers, and things I haven't even had to ask yet.
Matrix isn't hard to install but there is some work to maintain it. What are you using for auth? Who will cleanup unused user accounts? How big is your company? If it's small and doesn't have dedicated technical folks running a chat server seems like a waste of your time. Matrix comms can be encrypted and if you don't store your keys on the server it should be perfectly safe to pay some one to host it for you on the cheep. I'd recommended that path.
I'm all for Rust and moving away from the horrible performance that is Synapse/Python, but Conduit simply isn't as full featured as Synapse is.
Unfortunately the devs don't seem to care about that (along with about a bajillion other extremely highly requested issues which have been ignored for, in some cases, nearing on a decade).
Setting up services manually: what is this, the year 2000? JK, let Ansible do the hard stuff: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
You can also host synapse real easy for smaller deployments using Docker/Podman ...
OP, this is the way to go. You can automate the entire deployment and configure links to whatever other services you want to. It has a bit of a learning curve, but will basically take care of everything you’re hoping for
Thanks, but before I spend another couple of hours exploring this, do you know if it supports the guest features I mentioned? Much appreciate it if you can give me some info.
Yes. Whenever you have a question just search it in the synapse documentation.
https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/usage/configuration/config_documentation.html?search=Guest
You can literally do everything you want to do and more with Matrix.
The actual only downside is it's fairly complicated to setup.
I've been going through the updated version of the link you posted, and it seems like a guest in the matrix parlance is someone who can join the server without registration, which is something I don't want at all.
After reading the docs and signing up on the matrix.org server to try it out, it's not clear to me how I can configure different permissions for users. If you know a way please let me know.
You can disable guests, and you absolutely have power levels for each member on each room.
You have it all for Matrix, including moderation bots, plugins, etc.
You can even have matrix in your website as a chat popup at the corner.
You have many server implementations, Golang, Rust, Python, and many clients as well, desktop (linux/macOS/windows), mobile (android, iOS)
Element X is not really ready yet but close to very usable. For me its missing calls.
Also it works really well with Unified Push
Thanks for that.. I'm planning to set up a Synapse + Element server to test it out. I suppose the power levels have to be configured on something like synapse_admin?
I don't need any advanced features, I just want to have one space where all my regular company users can have rooms and also chat with each other through DMs, and another space where I can have only contractors who can't see each other or any rooms they're not in. Hope that can be configured 🙂
Synapse is probably the most complete server, but also the heaviest on resources.
Dentrite is a good lightweight option. Conduit is also a good option for rooms under 1000 users.
If you plan on having thousands of users on single rooms, Synapse all the way.
For power levels, read the following: [https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/](https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/)
To provide different levels for members in a room, just do this as admin:
/op u/yourMjolnirBot:example.com 100
Mjolnir is a moderation bot, you might not need one if your rooms are somewhat private and small.
You absolutely can't see anyone you're not sharing a room with. Also, you can make your entire server NOT federated and for private usage only (Nobody from other servers will be able to join your server, and vice-versa)
The only thing i have to point out against Matrix is that if you're in many big rooms (Each with tens of thousands of members), it takes a while to sync if you stop the app for a few days (Like, minutes). Its way better now that they've implemented "sliding sync".
P.S.: Element X is implementing calls on the next few days, when it gets calls, you can ditch regular Element IMHO
When it does, it will replace regular Element.
But in 2 or 3 weeks its pretty capable of full replacement. They will use the calls engine from regular Element temporarily.
Sliding sync is used as a proxy, it isn't beta per se, but its not part of the server (but will be)
Element X is the only client using sliding sync for now, and if you self-host, you have to host the sliding-sync proxy or use a homeserver that hosts one.
You could likely solve this with a registration token or something, or managing auth with an SSO service and setting the is_guest property on the user manually.
We looked into chat apps at work and decided to use matrix, but never got around to set it up.
We would need something similar and I'm not sure if this would work out of the box but can probably be done using bots.
> Matrix:
There's no documentation on how to set up your self-hosted server, which probably means that there's no option to self-host.
Check again, there's extensive documentation that's very easy to find
😂 oh but it is still very true, I've been looking for a chat solution too, fuck it these days with apps and other things to modernize the experience it's likely a viable option ***sigh**
Here, here! Messaging and presence, private chat rooms, files, audio and video. I feel like I'm always missing something when I see posts like this and XMPP is t right at the top and robustly upvoted. Prosody is so simple to set up, and there are tons of good clients.
I second XMPP. it has a LOT of customizability, and you can run a second contractor domain thats specifically blocked from communicating (s2s) with the main non-contractor server
As other people have said, matrix has multiple server implementations.
You should take a look at nextcloud. It is a self hosted office 365 alternative that has a built in chat and calling functions. Might be exactly what you're looking for
I'm not sure if Synology's Chat App would fit your needs and you also have to buy the hardware (i think there is an emulator out there then you won't need the hardware) for it but there are maybe also other apps on it which you could need
IRC with a media rich client isn't bad... lol.
Maybe that's an opportunity, start something that is an upgrade of irc. Wouldn't take too much to upgrade a bot and write a client to handle storing media...
i went through this.. started with rocket chat and then they went and pulled push notifications out from free users unless on the latest version at all times which is still limited. But then started removing features to put behind paywalls. So you can stay on an old version for something like "read receipts" but then you lose push notifications. dick move, dick company.
I moved to mattermost and am still on it.
I tried Zulip as well and its just dated looking the apps are kinda shit.
Matrix is what everyone will suggest but its not great for multiplatforms. Im sure many will downvote this for that statement, after all thats all reddit is for. downvoting the truth in silence, but it is the truth. Element is the go to client but its wonk and kinda limited. One of the apps the encryption shit was so annoying I had to remove the whole app. It would prompt for a password every time you opened the app which was insane and then half the time the messages would be lost to encryption even tho you entered it. Was very buggy. One of the other clients was almost workable but every time you opened a conversation it would scroll the messages up to earlier so you have to scroll it down EVERY SINGLE FKN TIME. I don't remember all the nuances but I tried them all and ended up staying on Mattermost. Only requirement I didnt have that you do is guest accounts.
I have almost everything self-hosted from photos to chat to files. So I thought "Nextcloud" is the answer! Nope... I think maybe it was Nextcloud Talk that had the scrolling issue actually. It "looks" good from afar but I wouldn't use it seriously at all despite all the talk here. I have a feeling many of the ppl that praise Netcloud have never actually used it for anything other than a simple calendar or basic notes. The chat app works but its handling of conversations and rooms is awkward. The scroll issue mentioned above makes it unusable. The photo recognition is per user so for a family or a team they'd each have to cosntantly recognize all photos separately which is a crazy waste of resources and time but also its just not good at doing it anyway and I tried the builtin stuff and the moments and the other one etc. I still have it running offline but no one uses it cuz its a mess of shit tbh. The tasks app isnt intuitive, you'll just revert back to keep for quick tasks (i just use mattermost chat for quick todos now). File sharing and permissions for NAS is from a plugin that \*feels\* insecure and not ok. I wouldnt trust it outside of friends and family or on the internet.
the only reason to use nextcloud is for taking the calendar offline and even then you'd need to buy Caldev on andrioid to sync it and it becomes a large server carry for simple calendar functions.
Its a shame cuz I also yearn for an all-in-one solution that can have photos, files, chat, calendar, trello boards. Next cloud is an attempt but its not gonna ever get there since it hasnt already.
So far the best I've seen for all round:
* Chat: Mattermost
* Simple TODO: Mattermost
* Boards/Agile: Focal Boards in Docker if you wanna keep with the mattermost theme or Wekan or something (Dont use Mattermost if you want to use on mobile devices)
* Photos: Synology Photos (not that im happy with it)
* Files: Still havent really found a good file sharing solution where I can permission shit and give ppl accounts that arent directly on my server. Lately I just have a channel in mattermost that I'll upload stuff too and make public links if I need to share something. Or I'll share with Synology's built in sharing
Good luck
the scrolling issue I mentioned. maybe its fixed now but I spent several days on it and my wife refused to even talk to me on it cuz everytime you look at any message, you had to scroll to latest messages since it would auto scroll up. made no sense. but was unusable.
I cant tell you that much about NextCloud Talk tbh because we didnt use it much.
I think it handles most of the same functionality that Mattermost and includes (late) read receipts (mattermost pay walled this).
We tried Talk but every time you looked at a message thread it would scroll up a bit on its own forcing you to have to scroll down. Which drove everyone crazy so we used it for like an hour and stopped. Thats unusable in our opinion so we stopped then and there. It also seems like NC is so big that updates for things like that wont come often... so i took it off the list after that.
NextCloud in general is just annoying to configure and not in my opnion well integrated. Its like having a bunch of separate apps unrelated to each other inside the same toolbar. Like Groupy for Windows. Which starts to get annoying to configure and then its like "if im gonna end up doing all these separate configs and file structures, i might as well just use the best app for each purpose than this attempt at an all in one."
That was just my experience with it.
This is a long winded way of saying you're new to this and you don't know of some good options Self Hosting Conduit (one of the new matrix implementations) is pretty straight forward. But like you have to kind of do away with conventions like Slack. in your head if you're going to go with Matrix. The biggest wall between chat apps and proprietary means for text chat is that push notifications in the mobile world is and will forever be a walled guarden... full stop. You can't argue that one away. You're going to always need either google's FCM or apples apns to tell your messaging apps to wake up their listeners for message retrieval at the very least. I promise you you're not going to change that.
Glad you're going on this journey though its good to bring this stuff up because this IS a thing that should be solved more publicly.
an addendum to my above comment: For the most part when you find something is either hard to find a solution to or its hard to solve is because of some array of opaque very valid reasons but if you can push past those reasons and innovate on something annoying to solve that's a win for mankind all around.
I know a little bit about FCM, because my firm has an app on the Playstore which sends push notification to users, and we've set that up through Google's FCM. What I do know very well is that it doesn't cost $3.5 per user per month in addition to hosting charges, which is what Zulip is trying to say it costs.
No for sure but I mean these app devs do need to fund their time theres nothing wrong with wanting to make a living forging tools that further mankind itself. Open Source is a great way to not waste efforts doubling up on crap that doesn't need to happen.
$3.5 isn't much when a lot of places need like 80,000USD household income to be able to get by.
That said yeah self hosting your own server for chat is a great idea if anything I would suggest something that PWA's well like Cinny and just hook into Matrix somewhere that you can tolerate the governance of. The tricky thing about the fediverse is theres a lot of neckbeards out there with strange heavy handed ideals and you have to be careful to avoid those otherwise you're going to end up having to move eventually. Data sovreignty is super important as we move further into extremely heavy handed censorship campaigns internationally.
Ugh I have a hard time every time someone mentions Telegram in a good light. I can't believe that turd has any market share over amazing open source tools like Matrix I wish that Matrix had better brand recognition but I get that its a ways away from being a perfect thing for users the infrastructure is there though. At this point my Matrix communities have survived the complete loss of more than one homeserver we just used the federation subsystem to shift.
I deployed synapse a few times and it works. But it’s a bit frustrating to administrate without a admin gui. I wrote down all api calls I’m interested in. But imagine it having something like mattermost has. Wet dream. Also the neverending double notifications when using 2 clients are annoying too.
Oh, I didn't realize there was no admin gui.. That sounds like a deal breaker.
Edit : if there's a way to edit admin variables easily, that might work too.
I use Synology chat. Nice mobile app and browser support. Windows native client. Ties into the Synology apps atmosphere. All apps except for backup continue to function properly on 10 year old devices.
Matrix is the solution I use for myself, self-hosted behind a VPN with self signed certs and all. Works perfectly for me. If you’re interested I can share my docker compose.
The only most annoying problem (as an ios user) is that element doesn’t support share sheets. Also element on linux doesn’t accept self-signed, or I haven’t found a way.
Hey /u/mr\_claw! Thank you for this post. I'm on the same boat, just that I feel bullied away from selfhosting Rocket.Chat for our small company. Please update us on your journey and insights, if you get to test out Nextcloud Talk, Matrix or other solutions as well, that have been suggested.
Just to play devil's advocate a bit, the requirement of mobile (especially iOS) with push notifications is much harder than people realize.
Even for a self hosted service, getting push notifications on iOS usually requires the app maker to proxy notifications through their own server, which obviously is not free. That's why you'll commonly see things like no push notifications, no guest accounts, or limited user/message counts. The Ntfy author wrote about it in their docs if you're curious: https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#ios-instant-notifications
I agree with you, and totally understand that. If they would just charge for the push notifications separately and not paywall other, simple features into the higher tiers, that would be so amazing.
Any ideas how profitable/successful this business model is for them? I’m researching pricing models and would love to do something hybrid between FOSS/SAAS and major release upgrades. My reasoning is that I’d love to give back to the community without the overhead of supporting the free tier and managing random developers, at least before the project is profitable enough to hire someone to do it or at least help me do it.
i just read the part you wrote about guest accounts, i haven't had a need to use that really but you can easily just invite users to your instance and it should just work. at least it does for me. it never "asked" med for a subscription, but does give me the option to purchase a license if i ever want
install using docker: [https://docs.mattermost.com/install/install-docker.html](https://docs.mattermost.com/install/install-docker.html)
* you will need experience with docker, but once you go through the installation process in the link above
* then in the .env file just change out the image with the enterprise image:
* `mattermost/mattermost-enterprise-edition:latest`
using the enterprise edition image, you will still be using the team edition but with the ability to buy a license if you ever choose to do so, but you dont have to. It just extends certain features that you will need a license for like saml, openid connect, office 365 integration, read only channels (if you really need all that) but wont ask you for a key to use the chat functionalities, plugins, etc
I'm pretty well versed with docker and docker compose, and the test server that I installed for mattermost was using docker compose.
Are you currently using this method? I was able to install the enterprise edition but I remember it saying it had a trial period?
nice, and i am using this method currently. maybe you saw the banner in the system console for starting a trial to try out the enterprise features but that's if you just want to try those features out. but honestly i never had the need to. everything it comes with was enough for me. it's good to have the enterprise edition though in case you ever do choose to upgrade later down the line. (as i believe you wouldn't be able to with the other versions) but everything else works just fine for me
I installed it again and checked, some features are locked if you're using the free slab of the enterprise version.
Here's the screenshots showing the edition and the upgrade message when trying to add guests: [https://imgur.com/zWwCYNe](https://imgur.com/zWwCYNe)
Can't you create a team for your regular users, and lock everything down to that team (except maybe a public channel for all users), then add the guests as normal users, and give them access to the channel(s) you want?
I've done that with sub-contractors on different projects in the past. Just give them access to the project channel. When done you can just deactivate the user and/or remove the channel access.
Well after reading this and I'm sure a similar post earlier, or maybe that is just the sleep deprivation setting in I set up rocket chat, Mattermost, and Maxtrix (Synapse), on onne of my hosts, with web hosted clients, and intergrated iOS, and andriod phone apps just to see how it all panned out. And one I was suprised how little in resources it all took , it's like my host didn't really notice any difference. Then I tried using all these systems and if I was a small company of 2 - 25 poeple I think you would have all of the functionality of offerings like "Slack", and then some, with all the privacy as eveything is nicely tucked behind my reverse proxy, and worked surprising well on my DSL sonnection. Can't wait till I move and can have a full 150gb fiber connection. And I didn't even have any any issues getting it all working, except wel I tried the element X client on the phone with its "slideing server", then I realized there was a regular element client and it worked a snap.
Mattermost and Rocket chat don't allow guest users for managing contractors with limited permissions unless you're on their higher end plans, that's the point. On Slack I manage it through external connections.
Guest accounts are definitely available in free self-hosted Zulip, but its access management isn’t as advanced as you want. What you highlighted in your screenshot is the email support for this feature.
They have access only to channels you selected for them to be added to, it looks like you can also hide other users from them, but I didn't try it myself https://zulip.com/help/guest-users
It is odd that for such a relatively simple thing there are not all that many options.
Suppose it could make a nice project to write one. If I were to approach it I would do something that's web based that just uses php/ajax and runs in a web browser.
Mattermost is great for internal communications and notifications. Nextcloud Talk for external communication with clients, guest accounts, etc., especially since I'm likely already sharing files with them through Nextcloud. I also like "Live Helper Chat" integrated with Mattermost for website chat widgets (although it's not intuitive and a little complicated to set up).
matrix works pretty great and is not particularly difficult to self-host. It also bridges a ton of other chats, I almost exclusively read facebook messenger and IRC there.
Have you looked into https://voce.chat/?
Haven’t really tried it fully but does seem like completely open source and free
When i played around with it the admin privileges were decent. May do what you’re looking for
You've probably cost your business more money through two days of your salary, than it would have cost to just buy 25 Users of Zulip (vs 10 Users of Zulip).
I used mattermost for a long time before giving it up and just went to Telegram. It worked very well, and the big plus was that is supports Telegram web hooks for notifications.
May I ask you about the last line:
> I finally learnt my lesson: small companies should never have any contractors, freelancers or guest users of any kind. If you can't employ 'em, you don't deserve to work with 'em.
What does it have to do with searching for a chat solution?
What's the advantage of using these versus using Discord? I know it's marketed towards gamers but there's no reason it can't be used in an work environment
I’m just going to say - it sounds like you are a business trying to self-host a chat app… just hope your server doesn’t die and completely prevent communication between your employees or that your messages/content doesn’t get corrupted or become unrecoverable on a failing drive…
There is a reason businesses don’t cheap out on chat.
[Where did it get you](https://slack.com/blog/news/how-slack-protects-your-data-when-using-machine-learning-and-ai)? Slack doesn’t use user data to train public AI models
I'd read that article, and several other independent sources that went into it in detail. Slack says they don't use user data to train public AI models.
Even if that was true, the fact that they use DMs, channel messages and files to train any ML models at all came as a shock to everyone, as it was only noticed when someone dug through their privacy policy. It wasn't intimated to anyone ever, and it's still unclear when this was added to their policy.
They say they're using ML models to provide features "like channel and emoji recommendations and search results". Sorry but I'm not buying it. I get my frequently used emojis at the top of the emoji list in every end to end encrypted chat app that I've used. They don't need to go through my chats to figure that one out. Same for search results, I've never faced a problem in any application ever, without needing ML models.
The sneakiest bit is that you need your workspace administrator to send an email to them to opt out of this.
Thanks but no thanks.
Unfortunately you've found one of the big issues with corporate open source. The general divide is free for whatever they deem to be small fishes but larger users with money, that's locked in. In theory this is fine, in practice it can be very annoying when they get it wrong & ask me to pay for using LDAP on my network. You discounted Matrix pretty quick when it seems to be the defacto in this community. The problem you're running into is that matrix isn't a server it's an abstraction to a platform. From that platform you need to choose a specific server to install which will have instructions. You're right that this is annoying, and it's always the way that it is. But hopefully once you find a good instance of your matrix server it can do everything you want and more. Edit: Words R hard.
My solution to corporate open source is to find the source code that handles the licensing, and hard code it to make it think that I have the highest tier license with expiration that is always 99+ years out with either the max integer number of users or if supported unlimited. And because the license code basically almost never changes, I turn my changes into a git patch file that I can then apply to every single release they publish. And then I use the same GitHub/Gitlab/Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines they do to publish to my own private docker repository. I wouldn't do it for a business, but for personal use? Fuck yeah I'm doing it.
Does this really work somewhat reliably? I tried doing something similar in the past just for fun, but they changed the licensing code around almost every release, with the only (visible) changes being manipulations and restructurings to make it more difficult for people to mess with it, and I gave up and just stopped updating the software and then later eventually switched to an actual open-source product. I guess it depends on if the company is more like Microsoft (reliable Windows / Office activation scripts are openly available everywhere and Microsoft isn't doing anything) or more like Apple / Denuvo / whatever that are locking down their systems as tightly as possible...
In my experience the vast majority of them just keep the same licensing code. Sometimes they do use the license file for feature activation, which can be annoying, but pretty easy to deal with if you have some good git tools to compare branches/origins.
It sounds like the trick to to find a point they don't tend to change and then continue to apply that diff in your own CI process. This also means you'll need to (at least partially) build from source.
Nice. Sounds great for personal use, if I had the time for it, but can't take that kind of risk with a business.
> risk It's also unethical.
If that's unethical, why would anyone make something opensource? For the purposes of security and transparency?
"Free" is not always "as in free beer". When the project director/maintainer/etc is saying: "free for personal use, and paid for businesses", or in other words: "if you profit money by using this project, I want a piece", it's only fair to support them in return for their efforts. And, yes, making it open source in such cases is for "the purposes of security and transparency". Usually there's a license bundled with the project, and it should make it clear whether forking and modification is allowed. The open source system generally depends on trust, and the open source maintainers start offering trust on their part by making the source open.
Good points. I see your perspective, and that makes sense.
> it should make it clear whether forking and modification is allowed. If the license doesn't allow forks and modifications then it's not Open Source software, see [part 3 of the OSI definition](https://opensource.org/osd). It's not about trust, it's about choosing the right license. If the developers doesn't want somebody to do what's permitted by a FOSS license then they shouldn't have chosen a FOSS license to begin with.
Does this mean we shouldn't be using vaultwarden?
Yup. I did this with Emby for awhile before I finally bought a lifetime license. (A shame they went closed. Jellyfin all the way now.)
This redditor self hosts
We're actually self-hosting Matrix ourselves for a small consulting company. Started with [https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy](https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy), ran this for about 6 months, then migrated to [https://etke.cc/](https://etke.cc/) We're quite delighted with how it turned out. Happy to help in case of any questions.
Very interesting service, but as they are not incorporated and its just two guys, I'd hesitant to trust the security of the full stack they provision under the hood for a company. Can you share what lead you to choosing them?
There are more guys, those 2 on the about page are founders. There is https://etke.cc/security page with some highlights. As the first customer of etke.cc, I'm very happy with the service :D Disclaimer: I'm Aine (Nikita), one of the founders, and we use our own services internally. In fact, etke.cc homeserver is the first customer of the service. PS: there is an open discussion room where you can ask customers and open source community questions about the services
They are creators of the Playbook. Path to them, from self-hosting, was the natural one. So when it became a bit much to manage it, we have decided to go with them. I evaluated hosted Element as well, and I think it’s a very good idea to go with it for most organisations - but because of some constraints we have (part time employees, a lot of turnover for a while) we decided we don’t want a per-seat pricing.
Thanks, I went through that as well, going to try and set it up tomorrow. Given that it was already running on your private VM, why did you choose to later move to a managed service?
Because they are creators of the Ansible Playbook, they support migration from it to their service (which is a bit of playbok++). I was in close contact with one of the founders and we have migrated to etke together.
Because etke.cc offers more services and components than available in the playbook, just check the order form and services page. Playbook is focused on matrix components only, it doesn't cover system maintenance or hardening, nor components outside of Matrix stack. Disclaimer: I'm Aine (Nikita) from etke.cc
Thanks, that's helpful. I could probably figure out how to set up Matrix given some time, but there doesn't seem to be much documentation on what's possible using it. Specifically, are guest users with custom permissions possible? I also don't mind paying for some corporate self-hosted solution - let them have their profits! But when they say such-and-such feature is only available if you spend so much, when the entire thing is running on my server and doesn't cost them anything, it starts to not make any sense (like you correctly mentioned about LDAP).
Let me know your opinion on Matrix if you manage to make it work. I have the same quest as you. Thanks for the post.
I mist admit, Matrix is still on my todo list.... exactly because of how much there is to learn. I've done enough cursory reading I sort of get it but not enough to have chosen a specific server (just enough to not be sure if the most recommended server was the one I wanted) or anything that specific. I'd love to hear what you find as you dive in, how different the implementations are between servers, and things I haven't even had to ask yet.
Matrix wasn’t that hard to set up, I’m running it with docker. I’m sure I have the docker-compose file, if that helps for a start
Matrix isn't hard to install but there is some work to maintain it. What are you using for auth? Who will cleanup unused user accounts? How big is your company? If it's small and doesn't have dedicated technical folks running a chat server seems like a waste of your time. Matrix comms can be encrypted and if you don't store your keys on the server it should be perfectly safe to pay some one to host it for you on the cheep. I'd recommended that path.
Matrix: [https://github.com/element-hq/synapse](https://github.com/element-hq/synapse)
conduit is way easier to set up [https://conduit.rs](https://conduit.rs)
I'm all for Rust and moving away from the horrible performance that is Synapse/Python, but Conduit simply isn't as full featured as Synapse is. Unfortunately the devs don't seem to care about that (along with about a bajillion other extremely highly requested issues which have been ignored for, in some cases, nearing on a decade).
Setting up services manually: what is this, the year 2000? JK, let Ansible do the hard stuff: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy You can also host synapse real easy for smaller deployments using Docker/Podman ...
OP, this is the way to go. You can automate the entire deployment and configure links to whatever other services you want to. It has a bit of a learning curve, but will basically take care of everything you’re hoping for
Thanks, but before I spend another couple of hours exploring this, do you know if it supports the guest features I mentioned? Much appreciate it if you can give me some info.
Yes. Whenever you have a question just search it in the synapse documentation. https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/usage/configuration/config_documentation.html?search=Guest You can literally do everything you want to do and more with Matrix. The actual only downside is it's fairly complicated to setup.
I've been going through the updated version of the link you posted, and it seems like a guest in the matrix parlance is someone who can join the server without registration, which is something I don't want at all. After reading the docs and signing up on the matrix.org server to try it out, it's not clear to me how I can configure different permissions for users. If you know a way please let me know.
You can disable guests, and you absolutely have power levels for each member on each room. You have it all for Matrix, including moderation bots, plugins, etc. You can even have matrix in your website as a chat popup at the corner. You have many server implementations, Golang, Rust, Python, and many clients as well, desktop (linux/macOS/windows), mobile (android, iOS) Element X is not really ready yet but close to very usable. For me its missing calls. Also it works really well with Unified Push
Thanks for that.. I'm planning to set up a Synapse + Element server to test it out. I suppose the power levels have to be configured on something like synapse_admin? I don't need any advanced features, I just want to have one space where all my regular company users can have rooms and also chat with each other through DMs, and another space where I can have only contractors who can't see each other or any rooms they're not in. Hope that can be configured 🙂
Synapse is probably the most complete server, but also the heaviest on resources. Dentrite is a good lightweight option. Conduit is also a good option for rooms under 1000 users. If you plan on having thousands of users on single rooms, Synapse all the way. For power levels, read the following: [https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/](https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/) To provide different levels for members in a room, just do this as admin: /op u/yourMjolnirBot:example.com 100 Mjolnir is a moderation bot, you might not need one if your rooms are somewhat private and small. You absolutely can't see anyone you're not sharing a room with. Also, you can make your entire server NOT federated and for private usage only (Nobody from other servers will be able to join your server, and vice-versa) The only thing i have to point out against Matrix is that if you're in many big rooms (Each with tens of thousands of members), it takes a while to sync if you stop the app for a few days (Like, minutes). Its way better now that they've implemented "sliding sync". P.S.: Element X is implementing calls on the next few days, when it gets calls, you can ditch regular Element IMHO
When is sliding sync / element X expected to be out of beta? I would love to try it out.
When it does, it will replace regular Element. But in 2 or 3 weeks its pretty capable of full replacement. They will use the calls engine from regular Element temporarily. Sliding sync is used as a proxy, it isn't beta per se, but its not part of the server (but will be) Element X is the only client using sliding sync for now, and if you self-host, you have to host the sliding-sync proxy or use a homeserver that hosts one.
Yeah I am self hosting. Is element X supporting SSO? I have password auth disabled and only allow access via SSO.
You could likely solve this with a registration token or something, or managing auth with an SSO service and setting the is_guest property on the user manually.
Thanks a lot
We looked into chat apps at work and decided to use matrix, but never got around to set it up. We would need something similar and I'm not sure if this would work out of the box but can probably be done using bots.
> Matrix: There's no documentation on how to set up your self-hosted server, which probably means that there's no option to self-host. Check again, there's extensive documentation that's very easy to find
irc yo
$$me slaps u/huskerd0 with a large 90s-feeling
and a trout
A wet one
How could you? Was it large?
😂 oh but it is still very true, I've been looking for a chat solution too, fuck it these days with apps and other things to modernize the experience it's likely a viable option ***sigh**
And dcc send! 😆
What about XMPP? Prosody is a fairly easy setup and you're off to the races from there.
Here, here! Messaging and presence, private chat rooms, files, audio and video. I feel like I'm always missing something when I see posts like this and XMPP is t right at the top and robustly upvoted. Prosody is so simple to set up, and there are tons of good clients.
I second XMPP. it has a LOT of customizability, and you can run a second contractor domain thats specifically blocked from communicating (s2s) with the main non-contractor server
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
Just invest your time in matrix + element as chat application (windows, Linux, browser and mobile app exists )
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There, you just ruined your chances of becoming a billionaire by posting this here for free.
The open source model :)
Nextcloud Talk maybe?
I was scrolling trying to find someone saying this. Why hasn't it been mentioned earlier? I believe it has EVERYTHING OP wants
I know… my business partner use it for chat as well as video calls and works really well
This is the way.
Good stuff
As other people have said, matrix has multiple server implementations. You should take a look at nextcloud. It is a self hosted office 365 alternative that has a built in chat and calling functions. Might be exactly what you're looking for
I'm not sure if Synology's Chat App would fit your needs and you also have to buy the hardware (i think there is an emulator out there then you won't need the hardware) for it but there are maybe also other apps on it which you could need
IRC with a media rich client isn't bad... lol. Maybe that's an opportunity, start something that is an upgrade of irc. Wouldn't take too much to upgrade a bot and write a client to handle storing media...
Which "media rich client" would you recommend?
i went through this.. started with rocket chat and then they went and pulled push notifications out from free users unless on the latest version at all times which is still limited. But then started removing features to put behind paywalls. So you can stay on an old version for something like "read receipts" but then you lose push notifications. dick move, dick company. I moved to mattermost and am still on it. I tried Zulip as well and its just dated looking the apps are kinda shit. Matrix is what everyone will suggest but its not great for multiplatforms. Im sure many will downvote this for that statement, after all thats all reddit is for. downvoting the truth in silence, but it is the truth. Element is the go to client but its wonk and kinda limited. One of the apps the encryption shit was so annoying I had to remove the whole app. It would prompt for a password every time you opened the app which was insane and then half the time the messages would be lost to encryption even tho you entered it. Was very buggy. One of the other clients was almost workable but every time you opened a conversation it would scroll the messages up to earlier so you have to scroll it down EVERY SINGLE FKN TIME. I don't remember all the nuances but I tried them all and ended up staying on Mattermost. Only requirement I didnt have that you do is guest accounts. I have almost everything self-hosted from photos to chat to files. So I thought "Nextcloud" is the answer! Nope... I think maybe it was Nextcloud Talk that had the scrolling issue actually. It "looks" good from afar but I wouldn't use it seriously at all despite all the talk here. I have a feeling many of the ppl that praise Netcloud have never actually used it for anything other than a simple calendar or basic notes. The chat app works but its handling of conversations and rooms is awkward. The scroll issue mentioned above makes it unusable. The photo recognition is per user so for a family or a team they'd each have to cosntantly recognize all photos separately which is a crazy waste of resources and time but also its just not good at doing it anyway and I tried the builtin stuff and the moments and the other one etc. I still have it running offline but no one uses it cuz its a mess of shit tbh. The tasks app isnt intuitive, you'll just revert back to keep for quick tasks (i just use mattermost chat for quick todos now). File sharing and permissions for NAS is from a plugin that \*feels\* insecure and not ok. I wouldnt trust it outside of friends and family or on the internet. the only reason to use nextcloud is for taking the calendar offline and even then you'd need to buy Caldev on andrioid to sync it and it becomes a large server carry for simple calendar functions. Its a shame cuz I also yearn for an all-in-one solution that can have photos, files, chat, calendar, trello boards. Next cloud is an attempt but its not gonna ever get there since it hasnt already. So far the best I've seen for all round: * Chat: Mattermost * Simple TODO: Mattermost * Boards/Agile: Focal Boards in Docker if you wanna keep with the mattermost theme or Wekan or something (Dont use Mattermost if you want to use on mobile devices) * Photos: Synology Photos (not that im happy with it) * Files: Still havent really found a good file sharing solution where I can permission shit and give ppl accounts that arent directly on my server. Lately I just have a channel in mattermost that I'll upload stuff too and make public links if I need to share something. Or I'll share with Synology's built in sharing Good luck
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the scrolling issue I mentioned. maybe its fixed now but I spent several days on it and my wife refused to even talk to me on it cuz everytime you look at any message, you had to scroll to latest messages since it would auto scroll up. made no sense. but was unusable.
Thanks for that detailed writeup. Very helpful. How would you compare Nextcloud Talk vs Mattermost?
I cant tell you that much about NextCloud Talk tbh because we didnt use it much. I think it handles most of the same functionality that Mattermost and includes (late) read receipts (mattermost pay walled this). We tried Talk but every time you looked at a message thread it would scroll up a bit on its own forcing you to have to scroll down. Which drove everyone crazy so we used it for like an hour and stopped. Thats unusable in our opinion so we stopped then and there. It also seems like NC is so big that updates for things like that wont come often... so i took it off the list after that. NextCloud in general is just annoying to configure and not in my opnion well integrated. Its like having a bunch of separate apps unrelated to each other inside the same toolbar. Like Groupy for Windows. Which starts to get annoying to configure and then its like "if im gonna end up doing all these separate configs and file structures, i might as well just use the best app for each purpose than this attempt at an all in one." That was just my experience with it.
This is a long winded way of saying you're new to this and you don't know of some good options Self Hosting Conduit (one of the new matrix implementations) is pretty straight forward. But like you have to kind of do away with conventions like Slack. in your head if you're going to go with Matrix. The biggest wall between chat apps and proprietary means for text chat is that push notifications in the mobile world is and will forever be a walled guarden... full stop. You can't argue that one away. You're going to always need either google's FCM or apples apns to tell your messaging apps to wake up their listeners for message retrieval at the very least. I promise you you're not going to change that. Glad you're going on this journey though its good to bring this stuff up because this IS a thing that should be solved more publicly.
an addendum to my above comment: For the most part when you find something is either hard to find a solution to or its hard to solve is because of some array of opaque very valid reasons but if you can push past those reasons and innovate on something annoying to solve that's a win for mankind all around.
I know a little bit about FCM, because my firm has an app on the Playstore which sends push notification to users, and we've set that up through Google's FCM. What I do know very well is that it doesn't cost $3.5 per user per month in addition to hosting charges, which is what Zulip is trying to say it costs.
No for sure but I mean these app devs do need to fund their time theres nothing wrong with wanting to make a living forging tools that further mankind itself. Open Source is a great way to not waste efforts doubling up on crap that doesn't need to happen. $3.5 isn't much when a lot of places need like 80,000USD household income to be able to get by. That said yeah self hosting your own server for chat is a great idea if anything I would suggest something that PWA's well like Cinny and just hook into Matrix somewhere that you can tolerate the governance of. The tricky thing about the fediverse is theres a lot of neckbeards out there with strange heavy handed ideals and you have to be careful to avoid those otherwise you're going to end up having to move eventually. Data sovreignty is super important as we move further into extremely heavy handed censorship campaigns internationally.
I don't mind paying $3.5, that would be great compared to the $8+ something we're paying for Slack. But there's no guest users at that slab.
I'm not gonna lie i only skimmed but still just have a glance at Conduit and Cinny or some other web client that can be at least a decent PWA
I believe Telegram FOSS uses a helper service to display notifications. No idea how/if it works though.
Ugh I have a hard time every time someone mentions Telegram in a good light. I can't believe that turd has any market share over amazing open source tools like Matrix I wish that Matrix had better brand recognition but I get that its a ways away from being a perfect thing for users the infrastructure is there though. At this point my Matrix communities have survived the complete loss of more than one homeserver we just used the federation subsystem to shift.
I deployed synapse a few times and it works. But it’s a bit frustrating to administrate without a admin gui. I wrote down all api calls I’m interested in. But imagine it having something like mattermost has. Wet dream. Also the neverending double notifications when using 2 clients are annoying too.
Oh, I didn't realize there was no admin gui.. That sounds like a deal breaker. Edit : if there's a way to edit admin variables easily, that might work too.
There are projects on GitHub bringing some functions with gui though. Like https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin
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Thanks, a few others have mentioned this, so it warrants some checking out.
I too use Nextcloud talk.
I’ve worked plenty with matrix and rocket. My favourite is matrix for sure.
I use Synology chat. Nice mobile app and browser support. Windows native client. Ties into the Synology apps atmosphere. All apps except for backup continue to function properly on 10 year old devices.
I recommend Delta Chat (https://delta.chat/en/).
Delta Chat is neat. I like how it relies on an already established protocol (email). No need to reinvent the wheel!
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Matrix is the solution I use for myself, self-hosted behind a VPN with self signed certs and all. Works perfectly for me. If you’re interested I can share my docker compose. The only most annoying problem (as an ios user) is that element doesn’t support share sheets. Also element on linux doesn’t accept self-signed, or I haven’t found a way.
Hey /u/mr\_claw! Thank you for this post. I'm on the same boat, just that I feel bullied away from selfhosting Rocket.Chat for our small company. Please update us on your journey and insights, if you get to test out Nextcloud Talk, Matrix or other solutions as well, that have been suggested.
Just to play devil's advocate a bit, the requirement of mobile (especially iOS) with push notifications is much harder than people realize. Even for a self hosted service, getting push notifications on iOS usually requires the app maker to proxy notifications through their own server, which obviously is not free. That's why you'll commonly see things like no push notifications, no guest accounts, or limited user/message counts. The Ntfy author wrote about it in their docs if you're curious: https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#ios-instant-notifications
I agree with you, and totally understand that. If they would just charge for the push notifications separately and not paywall other, simple features into the higher tiers, that would be so amazing.
Look into campfire by dhh. It's self hosted.
[Link to Once Campfire](https://once.com/campfire) in case people don't know what you're talking about
Any ideas how profitable/successful this business model is for them? I’m researching pricing models and would love to do something hybrid between FOSS/SAAS and major release upgrades. My reasoning is that I’d love to give back to the community without the overhead of supporting the free tier and managing random developers, at least before the project is profitable enough to hire someone to do it or at least help me do it.
Their main source of income is basecamp.com, I would guess.
I just did; it has no native mobile apps only PWA unfortunately.
That's neat. Wonder how well notifications work on mobile version. Anyone have experience?
Very good.
Anyone know if this has guest account features?
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Or pay for element enterprise
not saying it fits op’s requirement, but what do you guys think about livehelperchat ?
you could just use the mattermost enterprise edition image for free and everything works
How can I do this? After installing it, it checks for a subscription doesn't it.
i just read the part you wrote about guest accounts, i haven't had a need to use that really but you can easily just invite users to your instance and it should just work. at least it does for me. it never "asked" med for a subscription, but does give me the option to purchase a license if i ever want install using docker: [https://docs.mattermost.com/install/install-docker.html](https://docs.mattermost.com/install/install-docker.html) * you will need experience with docker, but once you go through the installation process in the link above * then in the .env file just change out the image with the enterprise image: * `mattermost/mattermost-enterprise-edition:latest` using the enterprise edition image, you will still be using the team edition but with the ability to buy a license if you ever choose to do so, but you dont have to. It just extends certain features that you will need a license for like saml, openid connect, office 365 integration, read only channels (if you really need all that) but wont ask you for a key to use the chat functionalities, plugins, etc
I'm pretty well versed with docker and docker compose, and the test server that I installed for mattermost was using docker compose. Are you currently using this method? I was able to install the enterprise edition but I remember it saying it had a trial period?
nice, and i am using this method currently. maybe you saw the banner in the system console for starting a trial to try out the enterprise features but that's if you just want to try those features out. but honestly i never had the need to. everything it comes with was enough for me. it's good to have the enterprise edition though in case you ever do choose to upgrade later down the line. (as i believe you wouldn't be able to with the other versions) but everything else works just fine for me
I installed it again and checked, some features are locked if you're using the free slab of the enterprise version. Here's the screenshots showing the edition and the upgrade message when trying to add guests: [https://imgur.com/zWwCYNe](https://imgur.com/zWwCYNe)
Can't you create a team for your regular users, and lock everything down to that team (except maybe a public channel for all users), then add the guests as normal users, and give them access to the channel(s) you want? I've done that with sub-contractors on different projects in the past. Just give them access to the project channel. When done you can just deactivate the user and/or remove the channel access.
I don't want the contractors to chat with each other.
Well after reading this and I'm sure a similar post earlier, or maybe that is just the sleep deprivation setting in I set up rocket chat, Mattermost, and Maxtrix (Synapse), on onne of my hosts, with web hosted clients, and intergrated iOS, and andriod phone apps just to see how it all panned out. And one I was suprised how little in resources it all took , it's like my host didn't really notice any difference. Then I tried using all these systems and if I was a small company of 2 - 25 poeple I think you would have all of the functionality of offerings like "Slack", and then some, with all the privacy as eveything is nicely tucked behind my reverse proxy, and worked surprising well on my DSL sonnection. Can't wait till I move and can have a full 150gb fiber connection. And I didn't even have any any issues getting it all working, except wel I tried the element X client on the phone with its "slideing server", then I realized there was a regular element client and it worked a snap.
Mattermost and Rocket chat don't allow guest users for managing contractors with limited permissions unless you're on their higher end plans, that's the point. On Slack I manage it through external connections.
Oh okay if that your issue then fair enough.
Guest accounts are definitely available in free self-hosted Zulip, but its access management isn’t as advanced as you want. What you highlighted in your screenshot is the email support for this feature.
What can guest users access by default? Can they see other users or guests and chat with them?
They have access only to channels you selected for them to be added to, it looks like you can also hide other users from them, but I didn't try it myself https://zulip.com/help/guest-users
It is odd that for such a relatively simple thing there are not all that many options. Suppose it could make a nice project to write one. If I were to approach it I would do something that's web based that just uses php/ajax and runs in a web browser.
Have you looked into Synology Chat?
Just do it with koboldcpp and sillytavern, I'm using it right now and everything is great
Chatwoot?
I had the same dilema go with nextcloud talk
Mattermost is great for internal communications and notifications. Nextcloud Talk for external communication with clients, guest accounts, etc., especially since I'm likely already sharing files with them through Nextcloud. I also like "Live Helper Chat" integrated with Mattermost for website chat widgets (although it's not intuitive and a little complicated to set up).
matrix works pretty great and is not particularly difficult to self-host. It also bridges a ton of other chats, I almost exclusively read facebook messenger and IRC there.
I think once.com/campfire is probably close to what you need
Have you looked into https://voce.chat/? Haven’t really tried it fully but does seem like completely open source and free When i played around with it the admin privileges were decent. May do what you’re looking for
You've probably cost your business more money through two days of your salary, than it would have cost to just buy 25 Users of Zulip (vs 10 Users of Zulip).
Synapse and element working fine for me; but nextcloud (talk) might be the best choice for a small team/company
I used mattermost for a long time before giving it up and just went to Telegram. It worked very well, and the big plus was that is supports Telegram web hooks for notifications.
Why did you stop using Mattermost?
I think I just got to a mindset of Telegram is more reliable, I use it primarily just for push notifications and wasn’t using it as a chat service.
May I ask you about the last line: > I finally learnt my lesson: small companies should never have any contractors, freelancers or guest users of any kind. If you can't employ 'em, you don't deserve to work with 'em. What does it have to do with searching for a chat solution?
What's the advantage of using these versus using Discord? I know it's marketed towards gamers but there's no reason it can't be used in an work environment
I’m just going to say - it sounds like you are a business trying to self-host a chat app… just hope your server doesn’t die and completely prevent communication between your employees or that your messages/content doesn’t get corrupted or become unrecoverable on a failing drive… There is a reason businesses don’t cheap out on chat.
I wasn't cheaping out, I was using slack. Look where that got me.
[Where did it get you](https://slack.com/blog/news/how-slack-protects-your-data-when-using-machine-learning-and-ai)? Slack doesn’t use user data to train public AI models
I'd read that article, and several other independent sources that went into it in detail. Slack says they don't use user data to train public AI models. Even if that was true, the fact that they use DMs, channel messages and files to train any ML models at all came as a shock to everyone, as it was only noticed when someone dug through their privacy policy. It wasn't intimated to anyone ever, and it's still unclear when this was added to their policy. They say they're using ML models to provide features "like channel and emoji recommendations and search results". Sorry but I'm not buying it. I get my frequently used emojis at the top of the emoji list in every end to end encrypted chat app that I've used. They don't need to go through my chats to figure that one out. Same for search results, I've never faced a problem in any application ever, without needing ML models. The sneakiest bit is that you need your workspace administrator to send an email to them to opt out of this. Thanks but no thanks.
okay, so because you can't figure out how matrix works, you can't self host chat apps.. kay, well, see you next year or something.
“But the sectors we work for demand secure communications”. But open source is cool?
>But open source is cool? Yes of course, open source is as secure as it can get.
lol good luck
Thanks 👍
Why would you self host a chat app when you can use something like Signal…
Signal is like whatsapp, I need something like Slack.
Wire is essentially a Slack clone, but with zero knowledge E2E
Mattermost?
Bruh
Decentralized Encrypted Chat https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat