What are people using for a self-hosted "slack" type messenger these days? I have looked at Matrix (which I am interested in but I think needs time to settle right now), Zulip (I really like their threading model but it has been confusing for other people I have tried it with), Rocket chat (only recently aware of this one). What else is there? Anyone have good/bad experiences with any of these?
I hear this on occasion (though more rarer nowadays than in the past)...But curious, is there something specific that you're finding in matrix that is not yet settled? By all means, the beauty of open source stuff is that you get to choose whether you (and your circle of contacts) uses zulip, mattermost, etc...So, i encourage you to use whatever open source offering gives you (and your circle of contacts) what is needed/desired. But with me being such a fanboy of matrix, i always get curious. Would you care to share specifics?
That's basically it. A lot of options but they all have some flaw. Rocket Chat and mattermost both lock features behind an enterprise paywall (although Rocket Chat is more forgiving and has optional E2EE), Zulip is nice but still a small player and some people aren't fans of the UX, and Matrix lacks the polish of slack and moderation tools are not up to speed with Slack/RC/Mattermost, which is a problem for larger groups.
Yeah, I have good experiences with Mattermost (bundled with GitLab) as chat for a hackerspace/makerspace. As long as you're OK with unencrypted push messages, building your own version of the app and keeping it up to date is horrible. (React native levels of horrible.)
