Comment by nixosbestos
8 months ago
Oh yeesh. If I ranked chat platforms, Mattermost would barely be above Slack. It's pathetic that Discord runs circles around Mattermost, Slack, and Matrix for practical usability, features that make it possible to actually use with teams (not Teams).
Mattermost still can't do follow System Theme, (and Slack requires you impersonating Chrome). Of course neither can Gmail. Salesforce and Google are such tiny companies though, so I sympathize.
It's craaazy what shit we put up with.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
I think Zulip is missing out on a lot by not having a "complaint" (SOC2-type2, etc) offering. I think Zulip is brilliant.
Discord at least has "forums" for forced threaded discussions, and the in-room threaded conversations work far better than Slack or Matrix's.
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...
[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
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Funny. Using Discord through Firefox I can't even copy links out of a conversation. Additionally, for some reason as of two weeks ago every time I click on a channel name it opens in a new tab. I'm not sure what that's running circles around, but I'm guessing not Mattermost.
The mobile app is also buggy as hell. Notifications of direct messages (when someone wants to reach you personally) work only sporadically whereas in group chats they're reliable. Then when you click one of those group ones, it opens the group chat, flashes you the message, then loads the rest of the history, scrolls you down, and marks the whole chat as read. I've eventually found that you can find it again by going out of the chat and to your in-app notifications and tapping it there again. Then iirc to reply, you need to click some "open in chat" option (while you're already literally viewing the chat) and then it seems to scroll and show you the message correctly. Or maybe that latter thing was from search results, idk
I'm also pretty sure it silently deletes old direct message chats. I'm missing some that I really thought existed. Don't fault them for deleting things btw, seeing all the (literal and figurative) shit that thousands of teenagers post in this server I was helping out on, but it shouldn't be silent