Comment by SwellJoe

11 years ago

I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them?

I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our people want an alternative to email and Google Hangouts for communications, and are pushing for Slack or XMPP. I've never been a big chat user and another of our people doesn't do chat at all (so we'd likely need some kind of email gateway for him). I'm not convinced anything exists that answers all these needs, but maybe I'm just way out of the loop.

Also, do any of these integrate with XMPP? Googling is inconclusive, but it seems neither connects to XMPP directly, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see an open standard backing whatever chat we choose.

19 comments

SwellJoe

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proksoup  11 years ago

I think HipChat might be the only one backing the XMPP horse still.

A timeline [1].

[1] https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf

  • SwellJoe  11 years ago

    HipChat, while providing the XMPP backend, and a self-hosted option, isn't cheap, and doesn't seem to provide the extensibility that an open source option would. But, it's certainly closer to the right thing than Slack (at least, from a surface level examination).

    I guess it doesn't even need to be XMPP, specifically. But, some open standard and some level of interoperability would be nice. In googling I came upon matrix.org, which also seems promising, but has the same problem XMPP has of not having great clients (though I also found Kaiwa, which looks like a pretty good XMPP client with Slack-like features). Maybe one of these open source projects will formalize their protocol, and we can all move forward on interop with that.

    • ara4n  11 years ago

      [Matrix lead here] The open source clients for both Matrix and XMPP are improving a lot currently. On the Matrix side there's vector.im; on XMPP there's Kaiwa and Conversations.im. If you want to help break the fragmentation and have an open standards based approach please run the clients and help us make them better - it is open source, after all!

      3 replies →

  • bshimmin  11 years ago

    That chart is amazing (and depressing, as another commenter said). I counted and I've used 18 different ones. I've also used a few others for video and audio conferencing, like WebEx (unless that falls under a particular Cisco one in the chart, I don't know).

    Currently I'm "only" using Slack, Skype, iMessage, and Google+ Hangouts (very occasionally, with considerable loathing).

    It strikes me the situation is inherently ridiculous, but after not far off 20 years of dealing with it, I can't say it bothers me that much anymore.

tabbott  11 years ago

Zulip has beta-quality integrations for mirroring content with a Jabber or IRC server (also we have one for Zephyr but that's a lot less popular). Check out bots/irc-mirror.py and bots/jabber_mirror.py. It's a bit complicated to setup right now though -- feel free to ping the Zulip development mailing list for help if you're interested.

(Patches welcome!)

it33  11 years ago

Hi SwellJoe,

Mattermost team here. We've had requests for XMPP, and potentially it can be added in future. Feature idea can be tracked here (and more ideas welcome!): http://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugges...

That said, communication has changed significantly since the XMPP standard. For example, after we implemented markdown in Mattermost it's really hard to go back (http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-adop...).

If you decide to try Mattermost, please let us know if we can help! Twitter at @mattermosthq or via community options at http://www.mattermost.org/

  • SwellJoe  11 years ago

    In doing research today I see some valid reasons for not going XMPP. The question that raises for me is merely: How do these things interoperate going forward? I'm through with walled gardens, particularly with something as important as team communications. If not XMPP, then what needs to happen to allow any chat to federate with any other chat? And, perhaps equally important, how does one move data from one to another. Data lock-in should be on everyone's mind, but it always seems to be an afterthought (so far after that it doesn't come up until the disastrous occurs and your vendor sells out and closes up shop, or becomes like SourceForge and destroys user trust).

    I don't mean to rant at you, of course. Mattermost looks great and it is open source, which means any complaints I have, I am free to put my money/time where my mouth is and fix it.

finnn  11 years ago

Kaiwa[1] seems like it's supposed to provide this slack-style group chat web interface thingy, but uses XMPP as the backend. I've played with it a little, not the worst.

[1]http://getkaiwa.com/

hanley  11 years ago

HipChat supports XMPP [0], and you can host it yourself.

Not sure about the guy that "doesn't do chat", he might be out of luck. Time to adapt.

[0] https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageI...