so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit, they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path
and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake?
In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
I have administered a number of Mattermost environments going back to 2019.
It absolutely is not a mistake. They’ve been slowly introducing limits to the Team Edition and screwing with the licensing in obtuse ways to drive revenue. It is something that has executive force behind it.
I have migrated everyone/everything to Zulip, which it turns out has a far better user experience and a much cleaner model. The admin tools are much more mature (and actually function reliably). I have not gotten any complaints.
And I also don’t have to deal with things like on-premise to managed cloud back to on-prem migrations due to ridiculous licensing and pricing instability.
It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to pay through the nose to access any history.
At least slack is clear upfront that this is going to happen, mattermost just did a rug pull and removed history from users who previously had access to it.
That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset users is the worst way to handle it. Even just closing the issue would've been less damaging at this point.
Because it is almost certainly not a mistake. They also removed support for SSO via GitLab in the Community Edition in v11, which was the only SSO option still supported by the OSS version. They are pretty obviously trying to push users towards the paid plans.
We migrated off them when they removed the license tier (there was cheaper self hosted tier that had LDAP feature we needed, and we really only got the enterprise version for) and essentially forced everyone to tier above.
I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity.
I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the 10k message history is the limit correctly.
And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over project channels, family related things etc. that was as reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public internet" and I am willing to manage that it does.
Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has better future proofing.
So I guess it's my turn today to start the holy war. If Whatsapp was enough, but you want it to live on your Linux box, Matrix will do just fine. self-hosting has been fast, responsive, low-maintenance, and easy for me over the past several years.
They're trusted by multiple government agencies to stick around and treat their users reasonably, and there are a plethora of clients to choose from.
Now I'll step to the side for the next person to tear me down and sell you on XMPP.
The next guy's job is to tell you XMPP is lighter, gen-er-ally viewed as simpler, with a wide array of clients and servers, optional encryption, and with a longer history (with that being viewed as rhyming with reliable).
My "job" in this holy-war thread is to tell you Matrix has become lighter over time, the "default" server Synapse has less, but IMO more up-to-date documentation with a real corporation behind keeping it up-to-date and useful, has a blossoming ecosystem of clients, servers, and bridges (allowing you to use it for other chat systems like Whatsapp and Telegram), has encryption being an enforced default for one-to-one mesasges (instead of XMPP's bolted-on after-the-fact extension), and a paid team to make Synapse more robust, reliable, lighter, faster, and more secure.
Take both arguments with a grain of salt, as I am biased as hell (to the point of donating a small amount monthly to Matrix, and starting flame wars like this one).
Thank you xethos, this has been exactly the kind of opinion and experience report that I've been looking for.
the one thing I really want beyond persistent over whatsapp is threads.
I hope matrix has a similarly trivial app/web/pc story as mattermost has, because the other users are not necessarily able to handle anything more complex than "download an app and sign in".
and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake?
very nice