This is the main reason why my team switched to use self-hosted Mattermost. Unlimited message history is important for us, but not worth what Slack would cost when something like Mattermost is available. If you're a tech team with people who know Linux, I don't understand why you would choose Slack over something like Mattermost. If you're a small business without a tech team, more understandable.
Some nice folks I know recently started http://relay-chat.com/ which is a hosted version of MatterMost. It allows both private instances as well as creating a team at http://open.relay-chat.com
I am more concerned about Mattermost long term future than Slack. If/when slack gets obsoloted and abandonned for the next big thing then what of Mattermost ? Will it have enough developpers's mindshare to ensure its existence considering if slack is gone then there's no need to provide an alternative ?
I suppose it'd be better to build a slack clone based on xmpp.
I'm not so concerned. I think the only thing that would kill Slack is financial factors (financing if it turns out people don't want to pay for it anymore) or bureaucratic factors (if it gets acquired and then mired in corporate stupidity). I think Slack did the favour of proving to the world that people wanted something more than IRC or Skype.
If Slack dies for any of the above reasons, that won't cause people's need for a solution to disappear. I imagine Mattermost would survive just fine. If Mattermost dies, it will be because something came along that's better, similar to how I started out with ICQ, then jumped to MSN Messenger, and now I'm on Whatsapp, WeChat, Kakao Talk, Slack, and Mattermost. Same for Slack. If Slack dies because of better competition, perhaps we'll shift to that away from Mattermost. Who knows?
Gah, how is it possible that the number of chat clients I use keeps growing?
Mattermost is open and self hosted so if development stops it'll just continue to exist in an unchanging state. If people start communicating in another way, their Mattermost history will still be available and searchable.
Honestly, it was so smooth. Deleting old unnecessary channels seems impossible, but whatever. Have all of our chat history migrated over, no complaints. One team member missed the old Slack colour scheme, but he found a Slack skin for Mattermost that makes it look the same for him.
If you are asking about Slack's Zoom plugin, I used it at a previous job, and it's pretty good. (We were a small team in Sunnyvale, CA, the bulk of the team was in Phoenix, some in Seattle)
I meant Mattermost - is the Slack one representative, i.e. it's the same client software behind a thin shim layer? Does it work as well as Hangout in terms of voice / image quality and stability? Can people click the screen and the presenter sees where they clicked?
Have not. We don't do much screen sharing among our own team, and external screen sharing is done using other tools. Interested in other people's opinions about it though.
