The Software Underground — a free chat group, a community, a movement — is moving to the Mattermost platform. As of right now, it lives at mattermost.softwareunderground.org.
After a little over 8 years on Slack, we have taken the decision to move to the open-source Mattermost software (note, that link is only for the software, not for our instance of it). We are hosting it ourselves in Hetzner’s cloud (based in Finland), which means we own our own data… and maybe have a little more control over our destiny.
Apart from being open source, there are some other cool features of Mattermost, compared to Slack:
- Full support for Markdown, plus LaTeX equations.
- Syntax highlighted code blocks.
- The concept of Teams, allowing us to host subcommunities.
Oh yeah, and it will cost us about a third of what we were previously spending on Slack 💸 that is, until they doubled our payments in September when apparently they changed how they count ‘active members’. Even with the 85% non-profit discount, Slack was simply too expensive. And some people were not comfortable with its ownership and general direction. For example, it recently introduced a 90-day message lifetime for teams on the free tier, all but obviating its use for smaller communities (who already had a 10,000 message limit).
If you’ve been looking for somewhere to hang out and chat — or even just to lurk and learn — about the digital subsurface, then Software Underground might be for you. It’s full of coders, people learning to code, earth scientists, and people learning to earth science. Check it out.