Comment by realityfactchex

It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally.

So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?

Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message.

The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.

You might enjoy this :

https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509.

You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you control your data much more.

Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.

Is it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a sensible manner).

Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made with regards to our tools.

> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable

I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..

Botom line is that's how they want to earn money and it's not supported in their official apps without a subscription. I believe all the plumbing is in place but you have to build and maintain your own push sever intermediary and clients and push server.

The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.

If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.

I have been following that project for a long time. They are "good people". They want to make sure the project survives. I am bummed about that change and I could probably get the their notification service free if i asked for it (little bit involvement with some things) but I didn't. I respect their decision. Though of course I do have the same concerns as you. I just want to think it won't happen.

Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...).

And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip having monetization for self-hosted business use? (Mobile notifications have always been free for most communities, and we have discount programs for various use cases detailed on our pricing page).

Look, in 2025, and one should be very wary of rugpulls. But Zulip has no venture investors. I've personally funded the project for almost a decade now, so that it can operate in line with our values (https://zulip.com/values/).

I want to use applications that are ethically managed, self-hostable, privacy-supporting, open-source, and excellent. Zulip aims to be that kind of project, and even with all the community contributions that we've fostered, I don't see how we could maintain Zulip responsibly without our professional team.

Should it be a red flag for an open-source application to have monetization that charges businesses for using services operated by its professional team? Or would the red flag be a project that lacks a professional team who one can count on to maintain it responsibly?

They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.