Good Foss Alternative to Slack?

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!

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Element/Matrix, plain old IRC

Mattermost is a great alternative.

At 30 people, buying a refurbished rackmount server is my recommendation.
They run anywhere from $250 to a couple thousand, but I'm running a media server and ebook/comic library server on an HPE DL360 Gen 9 with 64gb DDR4 RAM and dual 8-core Xeon processors, which I paid $450 for.
That will give you so many more options for your co-op.
- For 30 people? A $10us VM at Digital Ocean would be more than sufficient.
  
  My t2.small instance on AWS runs me about $40/month when you factor in elastic IP, backup snapshots, traffic, bursting, etc. I haven't used DO before, so I don't know what kind of overheads they get beyond the raw instance compute costs, but even at $10/month you'd have paid for the server in less than 4 years, (and just 1 year at $40/mo), and you're getting a MUCH beefier server.

Is it text only? xmpp should be lightweight and smooth sailing. prosody configured to never expire messages would give you a forever archive on the server. There are good mobile clients, plus web/pwa and native desktop clients.

Really depends on what you're looking for. I'm a big fan of xmpp and irc but that might not fit the bill

@Chemslayer I run a self-hosted Mattermost instance. It works like charm.

We use matrix with Element and set up our own video server so that we can do video meetings etc. All encrypted and self hosted.

Matrix and Element work. It has apps for desktop IOS and Android. Can have multiple channels for different topics. Not quite slack level of workspace management, but it's an option.

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