From the headline I assumed it was some weird bug, instead it’s enshittification of an open source project. Suddenly they chose to hold ransom of the free users data, so they have to contact sales to know how many thousands of dollars you need to pay every year to access those old messages. It’s self hosted, this limitation doesn’t make sense, it’s pure extortion
Mattermost user here, I self-host an instance for friends and family (and their children).
To upgrade and discover I’d lost access to the message history on my own instance was infuriating. I’m investigating alternatives right now.
So far Zulip seems reasonable - although Google and especially Apple being shits about push notifications means you can’t self-host push notification servers 🙄 So I’m considering forgoing push notifications altogether and leaning on email notifications instead.
Were you using the enterprise install without a license or team edition install? I’m on team edition and haven’t upgraded to v11 yet.
Depending on the group using it, you can apply for a Community plan to enable mobile push notifications. I do wish Zulip would use UnifiedPush or something like that, or even allow your own ntfy setup, but I’m placated by the Community plan.
Have you explored what it takes to self-host a notification server? I explored Zulip, and it looks similar, but I haven’t explored the notification server yet.
Zulip paywalls mobile notifications, but you can apply for a Community subscription which is free, and includes mobile notifications.
That may work for a family, but won’t work for a smart company that uses chat occasionally. We’re having like three managers who’d use the chat all the time, while the rest of the company may send 10 messages a month. Company subscription price would be an absurd one for that situation. We’re able to self-host any chat solution, yet I’m not sure which one. It looks like none fits the criteria, with the exception of Matrix perhaps. But I haven’t hosted it myself yet, and it looks like they’re looking for ways to motivate self-hosters just not do that.
Isn’t mattermost GPL’d?
Mostly. Official releases are licensed MIT only as compiled software. Derivatives are explicitly required to be AGPL 3.0 but they muddy that with trademark terms that give them a lot of ways to excuse crushing genuinely AGPL 3.0 forks. It’s a minefield and it’s designed that way on purpose. In reality, it’s more “source available” than “open source.”
Ew, gross.
That’s what? A few megabytes of storage? That’s an absurd restriction.
Worse, it’s a few megabytes of selfhosted storage. Data on a server you own that you are not allowed to access.
About 8MB is you assuming average message size is 200 UTF 16 characters.
Didn’t realize Mattermost still existed.
Do you know of a better alternative? No irony here, I’m looking for something similar for family and company (50 to 100 people) setting. Was thinking of deploying Mattermost. For family, we settled on Matrix and it mostly works. We are at their default server, and I’m considering self-hosting it in the future. Yet, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have Matrix deployed for a company. It lacks too many features, including search. Mattermost looked like the best option for me. I did try it locally a couple of months back, and mostly liked it.
However, I never liked them as a company. They have been giving me those ‘we’d give you the community this wonderful opportunity to develop the software for us, for free’ vibes. Now, it feels like my impression correct.
Have you tried Zulip?
I just looked at this as I’m looking for a self hosted version, and Zulip has the same 10000 message history limit as the OP.
Not for self-hosted installations, where Zulip aren’t paying for the storage themselves.
I did, while it mostly okay, I don’t like the mobile notifications limit. Even for a family, ten people is quite small, as inviting a couple of friends would reach the limit.
With all the chat options, I’m looking for a self-hosted fully controlled version. So for me, that’s a bit weird that a self-hosted version is crippled in any way. If Zulip allows me to self-host the mobile notification thingy, then I think it’s a good alternative. I haven’t explored that yet.
It’s still used pretty heavily in enterprise and high security environments.
I know of at least one big tech company that uses a self-hosted, self-contained Mattermost instance, hosted with a major cloud provider totally separate from all their infra, for communication in major outages when all their internal tools are down.
If it’s the same one I’m thinking of they had to use saws to cut into their data centers after a major outage.
High security? Without encryption?
They’re not connected to the Internet at all in a lot of cases.
Plus these large organizations want to be able to read the chats in the DB for compliance and legal reasons.
Yep, and very actively developed too.
Whilst I disagree with some of their technical decisions, it’s really good at what it does.
This report is sad to read, and concerning that Mattermost are not communicating back to the community.
Ah, quality IRC replacements.
I have the same thought. Group chat is a solved problem, why do people keep flocking to shittier alternatives is beyond me. Want notifications? Install a bouncer, done.
Also, IRCv3 exists.
I haven’t heard of v3, I’ll have to check it out.
There’s IRC, XMPP, and nu-messaging with enshittification.
IRC is too difficult for normal people to figure out. Normals don’t know how to /join, /nick, and all that other stuff. People want a username and password, because that’s a standard thing that everyone knows.
Even Matrix is too complicated for most people.
IRC serves a purpose, but judging by the success of Discord there’s obviously something lacking from IRC.
IRC is too difficult for normal people to figure out.
“Connect to any server you have ever heard of. Enjoy.”
Even Matrix is too complicated for most people.
The problem with Matrix is that its encryption technologies are FUBAR. Unencrypted rooms are slightly nicer to use than IRC channels. But then again: why?
