Mattermost

Mattermost is an open-source, self-hostable online chat service with file sharing, search, and integrations. It is designed as an internal chat for organisations and companies, and mostly markets itself as an open-source alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams.

History

The code was originally proprietary, as Mattermost was used as an internal chat tool inside SpinPunch, a game developer studio, but was later open-sourced. The 1.0 was released on October 2, 2015.

The project is maintained and developed by Mattermost Inc. The company generates funds by selling support services and additional features that aren't in the open-source edition.

There are desktop clients for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and mobile apps for iOS and Android.

In the media, Mattermost is mostly regarded as an alternative to the more popular Slack. It was also integrated into GitLab as "GitLab Mattermost", although in 2017 GitLab acquired Gitter, another popular chat tool. In 2021 GitLab sold Gitter.

Adoption among non-profits

Mattermost was adopted in the tech/non-profit sector that was in need to move away from limitations of corporate services, and praised for its bridging to IRC channels. It has been tested for community use by Wikimedia as Wikimedia Chat on Wikimedia Cloud Services as of late summer 2020.

Building Mattermost plugins for FreeBSD

The Mattermost plugin marketplace does not work in FreeBSD. Every plugin needs to be manually built and installed. Add the following to the Makefile next to similar code:

   cd server && env GOOS=freebsd GOARCH=amd64 $(GO) build $(GO_BUILD_FLAGS) -o dist/plugin-freebsd-amd64;

Add the following to plugin.json next to similar code under "server" and then "executables":

   "freebsd-amd64": "server/dist/plugin-freebsd-amd64",

If the plugin.json edit did not work, replace whole "server" section with the following:

   "server": {
       "executable": "server/dist/plugin-freebsd-amd64"
   },