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.
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.
Isn’t mattermost GPL’d?
That’s what? A few megabytes of storage? That’s an absurd restriction.
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 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.
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.
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.
