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!
Element/Matrix, plain old IRC
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.
Really depends on what you’re looking for. I’m a big fan of xmpp and irc but that might not fit the bill
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.
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.
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.
My t2.small instance on AWS runs me about $40/month when you factor in elastic IP, backup snapshots, traffic, bursting, etc. I haven’t used DO before, so I don’t know what kind of overheads they get beyond the raw instance compute costs, but even at $10/month you’d have paid for the server in less than 4 years, (and just 1 year at $40/mo), and you’re getting a MUCH beefier server.
To run an XMPP server you don’t really need a beefy instance. 2 gigs of RAM, one core, 2TB of transfer per month (which I’ve yet to even touch given how much I use that server), 50 gigs of storage locally, a static IPv4 address, IPv6 addresses if I want them, snapshots, and enough traffic that I don’t think I’ve even noticed it on my invoices.
That will give you so many more options for your co-op.
Sure, if they are only ever going to do text over XMPP, that’s plenty. If they ever want to do more than that, VPS will mean more money, whereas a self-hosted server won’t. Shared docs, video or music streaming, e-book library, etc will murder a small or medium instance on AWS if you’ve got 30 people using it at once. Music and video especially, obviously.
Co-ops generally want to minimize costs and outside reliance, and “scale up on hosted cloud stacks as-needed” is sort of the opposite of that philosophy.
@Chemslayer I run a self-hosted Mattermost instance. It works like charm.
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.
