Hi!
DHH (co-founder of Basecamp) announced yesterday that they’re making their group chat software open source and free for everyone to use. This is fantastic news, especially considering this piece of software previously required a $299 payment just to access the codebase (far too expensive, in my opinion).
It looks like we now have another excellent open source alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams, thanks to this move. I really hope more companies will follow this trend soon.
What are your thoughts?
There are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features
https://zulip.com/
https://revolt.chat/
https://mattermost.com/
https://www.rocket.chat/
Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively
Revolt can’t be considered viable in my mind until the mobile app stops hardcoding the official instance and lets users connect it to selfhosted instances.
That and SSO.
I’m been trying to stand up a zulip instance. It’s working but I haven’t used it much. I want a feature complete jitsi instance to go with it and that’s only partially implemented right now.
That said, zulip does seem like the best option for me presently.
Haven’t tried revolt.
Mattermost seems to be perpetually entangled but being disentangled from some other suite. Confusing and frustrating.
I haven’t tried rocket chat for 5 years or so. I think last time I read about it people were complaining that the FOSS plan is very limited.