OT: Re: Younger generations preferring social media(esque) interactions.

Tue Mar 23 15:29:13 UTC 2021

On Tue, 23 Mar 2021 at 02:46, Cynthia Revström via NANOG
<nanog at nanog.org> wrote:
>
> I have used Mattermost but iirc it has very limited access control unless you have the enterprise version and generally doesn't seem to be made for public groups.

I'm going to chime in here since I admin the DNS-OARC Mattermost
server, which is for public groups.  For those not familiar with it,
DNS-OARC is a NOG-like organization specific to the DNS.  More info at
<https://www.dns-oarc.net/>.  I'm writing this just to provide
information as someone who's already operating Mattermost in the use
case under discussion .. not advocating for its use at NANOG.

Less than a year after deploying it (replacing our Jabber server), we
currently have a little under 400 users on their default 1000-seat
not-for-profit license, which is at their E10 (E for Enterprise)
level.  Mattermost has three license levels:  Free, E10, and E20.

We use a chat platform for three main use cases: internal staff chat,
member to member chat, and a public chat platform to accompany the
dns-operations at dns-oarc.net mailing list, which—again—is a bit like a
DNS-specific version of the public NANOG list.   The main reason we
selected Mattermost for the role is because of the option to self-host
the platform.   On top of the common motivation to not want our data
to disappear because a proprietary platform went away, we have some
additional information and data privacy concerns because we facilitate
confidential communication between  our members.

I agree Mattermost isn't designed with public groups in mind, although
we manage to make it work for that just fine.  The main clue about
their intended use case is that they seem to have made the assumption
that anyone using the platform is well known to the admins of the
platform.  For example, finding and pruning idle users requires you to
write a bit of your own code—the assumption seems to be that you're
onboarding and deleting users as a reaction to some other process
(such as hiring) and not that you might have users where it's unclear
whether they're still using the platform.

Other than that one glaring gap (and they seem to be working on fixing
that) I have found it to do an excellent job.

NANOG as an organization has a lot more financial resources than OARC
and, if it was deemed desirable, I'm sure that something could be
worked out for NFP pricing for more users than the 1000-user cap on
the default NFP license, and probably even for E20 levels of features.