Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Andrew Janke]

On 5/12/19 3:49 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> I looked at Zulip chat which was used for GSOC meeting. That one would
> also only retain the last few thousand messages unless we payed an
> amount that we could not afford as a project.
> Mattermost probably doesn't offer any free SaaS option?
> Discord would probably work as a free service, but I'm not too keen about it.
> 
> I wouldn't mind cloud solutions, but it probably boils down to either
> paying, or being limited by X, or hosting it yourself.

You might consider Matrix as a first candidate, then? I've been playing
around with the various Slack clones for my own group recently, and my
understanding is that the free hosted SaaS version of Matrix on
matrix.org both retains all messages permanently, and has a good
migration path if and when you decide to host your own Matrix instance:
when users on your own instance ("homeserver") join Rooms originated on
the matrix.org instance, that will cause propagation of the entire Room
history to your server. You just need to make sure you configure the
room so that all members can see the entire room history, not just since
they joined; I don't recall if that's the default. If you configure it
so that all members can see the entire history of the room, you then
have a public archive.

And Matrix seems to be the open source-iest of this crop of clones.
They're all about the open federated protocol, which is being developed
in public and ostensibly to be handed over to an independent foundation
eventually, and then provide an open-source client on top of that.

> Mattermost probably doesn't offer any free SaaS option?

Mattermost only offers a free 30-day trial for their SaaS option. Their
model is really more about self-hosting, and selling a hosting service.

Cheers,
Andrew