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Comment by decentrality | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosted ( if you want that ) but not P2P: https://about.mattermost.com/

Yeah, not solving the problem really, unless you run the software locally/in a intranet.

Problem still stands, when your self-hosted instance/software goes down, I still can't communicate with people sitting literally meters away from me, connected to the same WiFi. It's incredibly stupid.

( Technically an on-premises install solves the originally stated problem, and here the scope increased. P2P doesn't solve the real problem domain either, as soon as you aren't in the same room, a lot of the internet variables return )

It does not. My point is that me and another persons laptop could send packets to each other. But with the on-premises service, I still need to be directly connected for the client to work.

P2P networks can also work even if you're not connected to the same network. Point being that it's a direct connection to the person that you're communicating with, with no indirection.

So you really think there is a serious need for a solution that handles the 1 hour per year or less that services like slack are down? Or are you trying to solve for a location that has spotty internet? Because I have a problem with neither.

> I still can't communicate with people sitting literally meters away from me

That doesn't seem like a problem that software can solve.

Absolutely. ad-hoc networks, using sound/bluetooth as a transport. Connected to the same network in general. We have all these things available for us to use, but we haven't so far. (well, there is experiments, but no big application like Slack has actually built something solid and usable with it)

build it, you'll have a hit

If you're on the same network you can use multicast-dns (like what Chromecast uses)

During today's Slack downtime, we just communicated with each other use that old, reliable, uniquely human analog method.

You can do this with an application called patchwork that uses a p2p protocol called ssb (secure-scuttlebutt)

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

I tried self hosting Mattermost as a family communication tool. It just wasn't solid enough to keep the wife and I happy.

If you don't mind, can I ask what particular issues you faced? We're looking at moving from Slack to Mattermost later this year to help streamline the security clearance process so it's a little concerning to hear that it wasn't solid enough for something as simple as family communication.

I would be interested to know WHEN it was used also, because it has substantially improved to the point it is a drop-in replacement for extremely heavy Slack implementations

We used it for about 2 months until Nov 1 2017. We switched to Signal giving up on a self-hosted solution.

* We would send each other messages but wouldn't be alerted on our phones in a timely manner.

* At one point we had to re-login to the client, because our ssl cert expired (let's encrypt), I think.

These issues might be because we ran the server from a home internet connection, but I run a lot of things from home without issue.

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