Well, officially in the market for a Slack replacement now. Hit me. What are you personally happy with in a small business setting, strong macOS/iOS support, user friendly, including nontechnical folks?
@mainec@janl Thanks for the tag, and for the patience! Just caught up reading the OP and the rest of the replies.
Matrix can be very user friendly in a controlled setting, or even in an uncontrolled setting with a seasoned hand or two to help configure things and guide new users.
But it's true that right now the available clients have some UX issues that can be a barrier. I expect we'll be in a much better place on that front in about a year given the progress I see on long running initiatives in the ecosystem.
For communities I suggest going where people already are, and setting up bridges so that people can engage on their own terms and so that it's less painful to migrate to another system if/when the need arises.
For a small business setting? V different. Sorry I can't be more helpful on that front, but looks like you got a lot of good ideas from other folks!
It's such a hard choice to navigate, tradeoffs all the way down. Thankfully FOSS options have come a long way in the last 10 years, so I'm confident these choices will get easier to make.
@josh@mainec yeah, I have long struggled but have since come to terms with with that FOSS will always be behind on mainstream usablitly, but we have generally hit “good enough” in commercial software and the only way for them is to continue lock-in and increase exploitation, so FOSS now has all the time in the world to catch up the last mile and become the default eventually.
@janl I use Mattermost; I self-host for personal use, and we also have a Mattermost server at $DAY_JOB for staff, editors, and contributors. Works very well.
@janl Negligible, especially when done well :) The work server is nicely managed through CloudFormation; my personal one is just docker images on an EC2 image that I manually upgrade.
Main things were:
(a) configuring it to store files in an S3 bucket that can be backed up, and
(b) running a cron job to take daily backups of the database
@menelion@janl are there any alternatives that do well with screen readers / vision disabilities? slack is only in the last few years usable and they routinely break or make worse screen reader usage patterns.
@r343l@janl I don't see them worsening accessibility, although I stopped using Slack for daily work starting this February, before I'd been using it for four years daily and hopefully will start again soonish. As I've said, there is no alternative known to me. I tested Mattermost, but it's a disaster accessibility-wise, Matrix also. I know some blind people using Matrix, but I had no luck in it at al: constant focus jumping, unintuitive interface, all the goodies of a poorly accessible app.
@janl Mattermost does the trick and is so similar that the learning curve is very shallow.
Heard good things about groups using Matrix, too, but it's a bit clunkier.
@janl i haven’t tried it, but if i was evaluating replacements, i’d throw twist to the mix. it is asynchronous (the main differentiator in functionality) but ran by doist, which are good folks. https://twist.com/
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