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!

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    At 30 people, buying a refurbished rackmount server is my recommendation.

    They run anywhere from $250 to a couple thousand, but I’m running a media server and ebook/comic library server on an HPE DL360 Gen 9 with 64gb DDR4 RAM and dual 8-core Xeon processors, which I paid $450 for.

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

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • The Doctor@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            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.