I think both, rocket.chat and mattermost.org are interesting. Owning
vital infrastructure, like the one of communications, is key for proper
community empowerment, but the problem is that this is a small community
without many spare resources and I don't know if any has the
time/infrastructure to volunteer hosting them and making the test. What
is a fact is that Slack has changed the way community interacts, mostly
for good so exploring and owning alternatives is a valuable pursuit.

Cheers,

Offray

On 16/12/15 07:05, Martin B��hr wrote:
> Excerpts from Dimitris Chloupis's message of 2015-12-16 11:04:04 +0100:
>> So since Slack has been so successful for our community , far more that IRC
>> has been in terms of participation and useful discussions (at least the 2
>> years I have been around)
>>
>> it made me wonder if I could find an open source alternative to Slack that
>> is at least as good as it if not better without a very different workflow
>> (so we have to learn everything from zero) all the big pros and something
>> that could easily interface with Pharo.
>>
>> Ladies and gentlemen meet Rocket Chat
>>
>> https://rocket.chat/
>>
>> The good news about Rocket chat is that it seems to have all the pros of
>> Slack like close integration with tweeter, github etc etc . It has clients
>> for all OS and mobile devices.
> what it doesn't have is support for irc clients:
> https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/1259
>
> for me, that's a deal breaker. because as nice as these services are, i don't
> have the patience to run a dozen clients for all different communication
> services.
>
> it is bad enough that these services are not federated and i have to connect to
> them to communicate, but at least support for common, already existing clients,
> should be there.
>
> it does seem to have an irc bridge at least. a bit ugly, but workable.
>
> but there is also mattermost: http://mattermost.org/ (and it has irc client support)
> seems at least as mature as rocket.chat.
>
> greetings, martin.
>