Hey Beehaw, I wanted to check if anyone knew of any good Foss alternatives to slack?
I live in a co-op, and we currently use free slack to organize our online discussions, but we’ve run into issues with the free version (namely being unable to see posts older than 3 months). Paying for pro is way out of budget, so Im looking for alternatives.
We could probably self-host if required, assuming it doesn’t require a ton of power. And it’d be very important for it to have a good phone app or phone front, as that’s how most people interact with the internet. We’re only just shy of 30 people, so no need for super-high capacity. Thank you in advance!
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I second element! Also would like to say I’ve heard Rocket chat tossed around on a few podcasts I listen to but haven’t tried it myself. Could be a good one. Good luck!
Mattermost is a great alternative.
Is it text only? xmpp should be lightweight and smooth sailing. prosody configured to never expire messages would give you a forever archive on the server. There are good mobile clients, plus web/pwa and native desktop clients.
Matrix and Element work. It has apps for desktop IOS and Android. Can have multiple channels for different topics. Not quite slack level of workspace management, but it’s an option.
At 30 people, buying a refurbished rackmount server is my recommendation.
They run anywhere from $250 to a couple thousand, but I’m running a media server and ebook/comic library server on an HPE DL360 Gen 9 with 64gb DDR4 RAM and dual 8-core Xeon processors, which I paid $450 for.
That will give you so many more options for your co-op.
For 30 people? A $10us VM at Digital Ocean would be more than sufficient.
Really depends on what you’re looking for. I’m a big fan of xmpp and irc but that might not fit the bill
We use matrix with Element and set up our own video server so that we can do video meetings etc. All encrypted and self hosted.
@Chemslayer I run a self-hosted Mattermost instance. It works like charm.
I haven’t used it in years, but Rocket.Chat was super solid for me when I did. Only had about 5 users at the time, but it did the job well and let me tweak the CSS to my liking.
