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Good Foss Alternative to Slack? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by Chemslayer@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Hey Beehaw, I wanted to check if anyone knew of any good Foss alternatives to slack?

I live in a co-op, and we currently use free slack to organize our online discussions, but we've run into issues with the free version (namely being unable to see posts older than 3 months). Paying for pro is way out of budget, so Im looking for alternatives.

We could probably self-host if required, assuming it doesn't require a ton of power. And it'd be very important for it to have a good phone app or phone front, as that's how most people interact with the internet. We're only just shy of 30 people, so no need for super-high capacity. Thank you in advance!

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[–] drwho@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For 30 people? A $10us VM at Digital Ocean would be more than sufficient.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My t2.small instance on AWS runs me about $40/month when you factor in elastic IP, backup snapshots, traffic, bursting, etc. I haven't used DO before, so I don't know what kind of overheads they get beyond the raw instance compute costs, but even at $10/month you'd have paid for the server in less than 4 years, (and just 1 year at $40/mo), and you're getting a MUCH beefier server.

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To run an XMPP server you don't really need a beefy instance. 2 gigs of RAM, one core, 2TB of transfer per month (which I've yet to even touch given how much I use that server), 50 gigs of storage locally, a static IPv4 address, IPv6 addresses if I want them, snapshots, and enough traffic that I don't think I've even noticed it on my invoices.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That will give you so many more options for your co-op.

Sure, if they are only ever going to do text over XMPP, that's plenty. If they ever want to do more than that, VPS will mean more money, whereas a self-hosted server won't. Shared docs, video or music streaming, e-book library, etc will murder a small or medium instance on AWS if you've got 30 people using it at once. Music and video especially, obviously.

Co-ops generally want to minimize costs and outside reliance, and "scale up on hosted cloud stacks as-needed" is sort of the opposite of that philosophy.