Open source, on-premises, Slack-alternative

We’re a YC-backed indie video game company releasing an open source alternative to Slack.

It’s called “Mattermost” and it’s the team communication service our company’s run on since last year. Like Slack, you can send messages and files across channels, get notifications on unreads and mentions, and search history–all from your PC or smartphone.

Unlike Slack, Mattermost is open source. You can download the code, run it on your own servers, and modify it as you wish.

http://www.mattermost.org/

This was bound to happen sooner or later. Appears to be written in Go.

Slack booms, adds Head of Platform to guide future growth

Workplace collaboration platform Slack has been a runaway success since opening for business just over a year ago: the company co-founded and led by Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield now has 1.1 million daily active users, with 300,000 of them paying for premium tiers of the service bringing in annual recurring revenue of $25 million. Now, Slack is stepping up its game and getting more serious about how it builds out its wider ecosystem. April Underwood — a longtime director of product at Twitter — has been appointed Slack’s first head of platform, a new role at the company.

As Slack Hits 1M Daily Users And 900K Integration Installs, It Hires April Underwood As Head Of Platform | TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/as-slack-hits-1m-daily-users-and-900k-integration-installs-it-hires-april-underwood-as-head-of-platform/

During my talk on Slack at CALIcon15 someone asked why I was putting my internal communication eggs into a basket that may b be home in a year. I replied that I thought Slack would be around next year and for years to come. This move seems to support my position.

Scrollback, an open source alternative to Slack

Nurture your community with meaningful conversations.
Create rooms based on your interest or follow existing ones.
Share ideas, discuss realtime and redefine your online community experience with Scrollback.

via Scrollback, where communities hang out.

While relatively new and still adding features, Scrollback is the closest thing I’ve seen to to open source Slack. Once running it’s eady for folks to join and start participating right away. This is a project worth keeping an eye on. The code is on GitHub at   https://github.com/scrollback/scrollback.

Written mostly in Javascript it requires Node.js, Postgres, and Redis to run.

Some love for Slack, our favorite group communication tool

VentureBeat: 10 things I love about Slack. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwiLS77SA

CALI has been using Slack for about a year and we love it. It has replaced our group mailing list as the primary way we communicate. We use it not just to talk to one another but we have it wired into things like Github and Nagios to help us keep track of things we’re doing and to alert ids to trouble with our systems. Very soon we’re going to invite more folks we talk to regularly to join us on Slack as a way to increase our communication with our members.

All in all I’d recommend Slack for any group as a great way to get folks telling till each other.

Why Email Is A Fail #768

One of the failings of email is the ease with which topics get stolen. The subject drift in email threads is often stunning. And it then clouds the original questions which don’t get answered.

I understand why this happens. A question or statement in a message triggers a thought that is somehow related to the topic so a reply is fired into the thread.

And boom!

Before you know it an email thread has gone from A to F without getting the discussion needed around A. Then someone needs to step up and redirect back to A. But what about C? That was a good topic too, but it’s lost now.

There must be a better solution. Maybe a threaded forum that made it easy to branch the topic to another discussion would help. Anything would be better than my email folders.