> After a bit of research, I landed on Mattermost. I explained the reason for the shift, and migrated the whole family over sometime in 2019

Now that's an achievement I rarely hear, Here I am ostracized from the family and friends for not being in their WhatsApp groups.

My experience with being "the person who wants others to switch to the non default option" is that you need to be willing to do all the work: set up, helping people get started, technical support every day of the year, if something breaks because of (in this case) a Mattermost change take the blame, apologize for features that are missing or working differently than in the default option, live with the slight condescension of other who now have to make "all this effort" to install one extra app etc.

So either nemosaltat is incredibly lucky with his family, or he is an extremely patient person. Kudos either way.

That's true but switching family to secure solutions which doesn't require any maintenance say like Signal itself is turning out to be impossible.

I'm talking from my experience in India, WhatsApp has embedded itself deeply in the lifestyle, It is not just a messaging app but 'The gateway for Internet' as smartphones are the first computer for the majority.

So they see a personal connection to it, It has disproportionate level of trust leading to severe misinformation/disinformation issues; Especially alarming during pandemic w.r.t vaccination.

Everything from Govt. messages to banking messages arrive on WhatsApp. I've given up trying to convert people to secure solutions and so I have sandboxed WhatsApp in a VM to receive WhatsApp messages via email[1].

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/send-and-receive-whatsapp-message...

This has been exactly my experience. My family is used to me advocating for various “security best practices.” I’ve always been the “family tech support guy,” so I have ~15+ years of accumulated goodwill. Some folks were a little more resistant than others, but so far there’s been enough family/social pressure.

I’m not the most patient person, but I’ve made extra efforts to be patient with this. I’ve also done everything I can to include/involve interested family members in the process. We have a channel dedicated to feedback on Mattermost itself, and I’ve been able to recruit a few folks to help me evangelize.

I may not be able to change the world, but I can make a difference to those closest to me. I am extremely fortunate to have a family that humors me.

I have wanted to do something like this for a while, but I don't want to end up becoming tech support for my extended family and friends. So will stick to WhatsApp groups.

Maintenance overhead is a genuine problem and a real opportunity, yep.

It'd be nice to see it become as safe and easy to run an infrastructure service (like Mattermost) as it is to manage and update apps on a phone.

We're not too far off from that; small computers like the Raspberry Pi - or even smartphones themselves - could act as servers, and then container images could be used to package and distribute application updates.

Persistent data management becomes an issue at some point.. but that's already true for on-device chat messages. Perhaps SyncThing or similar tools could help there.

> It'd be nice to see it become as safe and easy to run an infrastructure service (like Mattermost) as it is to manage and update apps on a phone.

Sandstorm is basically this. Requires a bit of setup at the start, but afterwards installing apps is like installing phone apps, the apps and Sandstorm itself update automatically, etc.

For example, here's a Rocket.Chat instance I just spun up with a few clicks: https://sandstorm.terracrypt.net/shared/uaFeexA3f3mlU77m6nvJ...

Last time I interacted with sandstorm I saw that is not getting any updates? Is this still true ?

Sandstorm itself is updated at least once a month:

https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/blob/master/CHANGE...

A few of the apps get regular updates, but admittedly a lot of them have gone stale. Sandstorm's security model makes it so that this isn't a security risk in the way it would be on other platforms, but it's certainly disappointing if you're looking for the latest versions of apps.

It's no longer supported by a company so its pace of development has slowed, but it's still an active project, albeit one run by a small number of volunteers. I'm sure they would appreciate any contributions.

Cloudron is really useful for these situations. They greatly simplify self-hosting by automating upgrades and backups for a bunch of open source apps. Don’t think it runs on RPi’s yet, but they do have packages for both Mattermost and Syncthing.

https://www.cloudron.io

There's a definite gap, I think, for software that is:

* As trivial to set up as a smartphone.

* Visually appealing.

* Handles backup and restoration of user data seamlessly.

* Has an app store where you can grab docker images for apps like mattermost and handles upgrades seamlessly.

There's a lot of solutions out there but theyre all a bit ratty or require technical knowhow or both.

I kind of wish mozilla went down this route rather than trying to reinvent the smartphone.

I'm normally a self-host maxi, so respect for your solution. But may I ask why you didn't use Discord?

I self-hosted a Matrix server for family chat reasons but the encryption key changes (Let's Encrypt) and frequent need to re-login became a hassle for me and the "membership group" at large. Tried out Discord, haven't looked back.

My mother-in-law even created her own Discord "server" (all done very easily in-app) with no help from anyone.

Very slightly worried about content not being in my control, but shopping lists, pictures of the cat being cute, and requests to pre-heat the oven aren't high on my snooping paranoia list.

I wanted a solution I could self host. Discord doesn’t allow self-hosting, and at least according to their feedback forum, they don’t plan to[0]. I remember reading an explanation (an FAQ on their site I think, but can’t find it now). It was to the effect of “Our CI strategy is designed to provide all users with the best experience, so we can’t allow versions to get too far behind…” or something like that. Whatever their reasoning they’re closed source, proprietary, and commercial, and unlike SelfHosted [1], I don’t mind the hosting fees or extra work to run it myself.

Edit: grammar

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600301... [1] https://blog.ktz.me/self-hosted-launches-a-discord-server/

I'm not the GP, but lack of multi account support on Discord would be a blocker. I don't want to expose my "gamer" profile to my family.

Why couldn't you use the --multi-instance command line option?

That option doesn't seem to work for me, but personally, if I need to use another discord account, I just use another Discord client, as Discord has 3 official ones (Stable, PTB, and Canary) <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035675191-D...>, which all use their own account/data. For mobile, my OnePlus phone has a built in multi account app thing called Parallel Apps, and there are apps for it on Android.

Thank you, it's good to know, but is it supported on mobile apps? I think it's more problem on mobile, because on desktop, mostly Discord can be used in browser so Chrome profile or Firefox container works.

Oh, I don't really use it on mobile :( . It's on my work laptop where like you I keep my private and work accounts separate :) . You could certainly do it with multicontainer on android firefox but not on iphone :( . I suppose you could install multiple browsers in that case but again I only need in emergency situations on my phone.

It does support multiple accounts, at least since recently.

You already expose your personal data and metadata (and your family's) to Discord anyway.

Sounds like you didn't set up certificate renewal automation for LetsEncrypt via something like certbot? I can imagine that could be a hassle.

I'm curious by what you mean by frequent need to re-login in the context of Matrix? I've had a Matrix server for several years now and never needed to re-login.

The Riot android client would, periodically, require re-signing in.

The certificate issues were more specifically related to Apple devices not liking that an accepted certificate had expired, and a new one had taken its place, and wouldn't even allow for the updated certificate to be "trusted" in place of the expired one. On Android I'd have to accept a new certificate to trust, and it allowed me to do so - although possibly this resulted in the requirement to re-login (and if memory serves, old messages would be unreadable).

These issues may have been of my own making, or may be fixed now, but I've been using Discord happily for a whole now.

P.S. I don't multi-account on Discord (because I didn't know you could), but I do have different names depending on the server context.

> The certificate issues were more specifically related to Apple devices not liking that an accepted certificate had expired, and a new one had taken its place, and wouldn't even allow for the updated certificate to be "trusted" in place of the expired one. On Android I'd have to accept a new certificate to trust, and it allowed me to do so - although possibly this resulted in the requirement to re-login

Huh, that doesn't sound right. You shouldn't be having to accept anything -- a renewed certificate should just work, transparently, without any interruption. You shouldn't even notice it changed.

Given that a large part of the web now uses LetsEncrypt, if this wasn't so, you would've already had problems on other websites as well.

> (and if memory serves, old messages would be unreadable).

This may have been the case if you managed to lose your keys. This is quite unlikely now since (encrypted) server-side backup of keys is supported. Additionally, if you have more than one device, one of them will likely continue to have keys and can share them with the new device once it is verified.

It may have been a quirk of the Riot client app. All I know is, whenever the cert got updated, the ipad app spat the dummy, although the message about a different certificate seemed to be more a basic ipad security warning than Riot-app-specific.

The Android Riot client was fine with the updated cert, other than the cert update possibly being the catalyst for needing to re-login.

This was three-odd years ago, not sure how much progress there's been since (including on my side in the use of certbot).

I use certbot to automate certificate updates on a couple of self-hosted sites, and it works fine for them - it really was just the ipad being repeatedly / repeatably finicky back then.

agreed. I use Certbot for my server and Mattermost requires re-login every 30 days. I believe there’s a setting in the admin console to change the required relogin frequency.

I'm sorry for your family's safety.

Hmm, based on what i've heard, Mattermost is indeed pretty popular software - it seems to have a whole bunch of integrations with other platforms, for example, GitLab!

That said, personally i use Rocket.Chat, which has been pretty easy to self host: https://rocket.chat/

I'm sure that someone who has experience with both could drop by and share their experience, but if nothing else, it's at least nice to have these options to choose from.

Either way, i can definitely confirm that most of these platforms indeed are very well off on smaller VPSes, as long as you don't have too much data in them (think file uploads rather than just messages).

Getting more support for something like that in the company that i work in, however, is another story entirely. For a while they tried Nextcloud Talk, but it was a bit too barebones: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

And ever since, sadly, there has been little to no interest in setting up another self-hosted platform, even if there are teams whose old messages are eaten away by Slack's limitations, the management seemingly having little to no interest in paying a bit of money for it.

We run a stupidly simple (though small scale) gitlab instance in docker (official image its kinda one-click install). You get mattermost automatically, just need to enable it in the gitlab config and it will install/run mattermost within the gitlab container without any troubles. So if you already have (self-hosted) gitlab, mattermost is easy to setup and maintain (actually no extra effort at all). Depends of course on the number of users, I guess...

The integrations with gitlab issues/groups/etc are also look neat but are barely used tbh. Cant compare with rocket.chat.

As former Slack users, threaded messaging is huge for us. I wonder if teams who landed on Mattermost before using an alternative which used threaded messaging feel the same way?

Note: you do need to flip the feature flag to try it out: Account Settings > Display > Collapsed Reply Threads (Beta).

Personally I cannot stand threaded messaging - maybe it’s the IRC user in me, but I cannot stand having new messages randomly pop up at random points instead of at the bottom. If you have a discussion that is longer term or needs a separate context then spin it off to a different/new channel, otherwise I’ll spend forever searching for it again anyway.

This is an UX problem. There's supposed to be a list of threads so that you can find the one you're looking for easily. A thread is essentially a lite channel which shares all of the members of the original channel automatically.

god I have hundreds of threads and I hate it....

Mattermost has both! Messages always appear in sequence. Replies in a thread are visually identified as reply including the thread it is part of. This way you can do both grouping of discussions and follow the discussions from higher over.

I don't understand this post, are you saying threaded messaging in Slack is good?

Threads are deal killer for Slack.

Twist is kinda unreliable and flaky.

But I'll put up with anything to get sane threading.

Were you able to get push notifications working? From the setup guide it reads like you need custom builds for iOS and Android for those to work.

You only need custom builds if you want to use your custom push notification server. Since push notifications are handled by GCM (Android) / APNS (IOS), for some customers, they fail compliance regulations.

If you just want to self-host mattermost, push notifications should work out of box.

I get push notifications from the mobile and mac apps.