this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Hey there,

I'm on the search for an alternative to Mattermost for a small institution I'm working with. Mattermost was the strongest contender for our needs, yet they changed their policy regarding self-hosted instances. The factor that killed it for us, is the hard cap on 250 registered users, as we potentially might need to commodate more than that.

Rocket.Chat has similar caps.

We found Zulip, and it seems as it might be what we are looking for, but we haven't tested yet. Nonetheless, I wanted to address this community, as you may have another good idea?

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[–] vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I'm in the same boat, running a Gitlab Mattermost instance for a small team.

Gitlab has not announced yet what will happen with the bundled Mattermost, but I guess it will be dropped entirely, or be hit by the new limitations (what will hit us the hardest is the 10000-most-recent messages limitation, anything further than that will be hidden behind a paywall - including messages sent before the new limitations come in effect - borderline ransomware if you ask me)

I know there are forks that remove the limitation, may end up doing that if the migration path is not too rough.

I used to run a Rocket.Chat instance for another org, became open-core bullshit as well. I'm done with this stuff.

I have a small, non-federated personal Matrix + Element instance that barely gets any use (but allows me to get a feeling of what it can do) - I don't like it one bit. The tech stack is weird, the Element frontend receives constant updates/new releases that are painful to keep up with, and more importantly, UX is confusing and bad.

So I think I'll end up switching this one for a XMPP server. Haven't decided which one or which components around it precisely. I used to run prosody with thick clients a whiiille ago and it was OK. Nextcloud Talk might also work.

My needs are simple, group channels, 1-to-1 chat, posting files to a channel. ideally temporary many-to-many chats, decent web UI.

Voice capabilities would be a bonus (I run and use a mumble server and it absolutely rules once you've configured the client, but it doesn't integrate properly into anything else, and no web UI), as well as some kind of integration with my Jitsi Meet instance. E2E encryption nice but not mandatory. Semi-decent mobile clients would be nice.

For now, wait and see.