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!
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.
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.