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Ask HN: Which self-hosted tool for team-based communication with topics/threads

5 points by martin_a ↗ HN
Hey! Looking into establishing a new communication tool for our company.

While Slack and Mattermost are great for chats in small teams, it's hard to keep up with things, when you're a larger team or been out of house for some days or several ideas are discussed in parallel and so on. People just feel overwhelmed or have the feeling of not knowing everything they should.

So I found twist.com which integrates "topics" and thread-like display of those topics and I think this is an interesting addition to what Slack/Mattermost do.

As this tool would hold internal information, it needs to be self-hosted. On the other hand, it also should be similar to twist in terms of topics and threads, so Mattermost does not really fulfill what we need.

I already thought about setting up a phpBB or something like that, but maybe anyone of you got a good idea what I should look at.

Thanks!

13 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but if you want threading / topics, self hosted, searchable, then consider looking into NNTP (what usenet runs on). It is the oldest threaded messaging system. It scales really well. Most importantly, it is not a chat system. In other words, distractionless! The downside is, the number of daemons that support TLS are few. For a while, AD supported NNTP and used AD authentication. I think they may have recently dropped support for it.

phpBB is great. You can delegate control of boards to different teams and there are addons for just about everything.

Slack and other chat systems are very distracting and have become highly complex vendor lock-in to API integrations that essentially relay command & control between companies. Being a 3rd party, there are legal limitations about what data may flow through those systems and I predict that will be a major source of contention in the future.

martin_a
NNTP seems to be a bit low-tech these days with dwindling support by new clients. But I might be wrong on that, will have a second look.

You totally got my point: E-Mail is distracting and people feel stressed by the amount of mail they receive, while on the other hand they feel not informed enough about various topics. And you also give sensitive data into external hands and hope it will not get leaked or breached.

I think self-hosted "board software" (in whatever shape it comes) might reduce distraction, you can read and write when you want and people from other departments can keep up with current developments and also chime in if they have something to contribute.

And with something like phpBB you also have full and easy control of the data. I think that's an important point, especially for companies.

Might be worth the discussion and a try with a small team.

jon-wood
I'm worried this is going to come off as snarky, but when someone says "tool to keep track of topics, with threading" the first thing that comes to mind is email. If you use something like Google Groups then you get searchable archives of everything, and there's no shortage of clients whatever the platform.
martin_a
I want to get away from email. While everybody is used to it, information tends to get lost in the 14th partial quote of an email which went to only three of five people and two more which are not responsible for the project... You get the hang of it.

And Google Groups would not fulfill the need for a self-hosted solution, so it's a bit out of focus. But I get your point and would like to thank you for it.

mrsareen
Try Riot.im, been using it in self hosted mode for about an year now.
martin_a
Looks good. Seems to have a concept for rooms (= teams) but not for topics, or am I wrong on this?
Arathorn
yup, we don’t have threads yet (despite planning it for 2016, e2e encryption and working decentralisation got in the way).
martin_a
Important things first, I'm cool with that. Any idea when threads might be integrated?

Will take at least a quarter or half year before we get to actively work on this, but I wouldn't want to switch systems once it's up and running so people can accept one new system...