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My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.

I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.

My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.

Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.”

Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.

It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech.

EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.

This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized.

My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).

Related, the internall messenger for NATO also uses Matrix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41781762

zulip seems to me like it would be a better solution to me (open source, self hostible, familiar paradigm, etc), but then again, I think _anything_ would be better than teams... so more power to them!

I don’t know how Teams even got the approval to be released. It must be so embarrassing to be Satya and be forced to use this shitty piece of software.

I can’t believe that software of this quality is used so widely. Market competitive forces are not able to do their thing unfortunately.

It's incredible in the first place that companies want people use those kind of terrible and useless software, and that people accept using it.

I'm surprised Mattermost doesn't get more love generally, it's fully oss isn't it? https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost

* open source

* don’t suck (too much)

* no planned rug pulls

* not infested by US or Chinese spyware

Are there any?

Microsoft Teams is such a low bar, that anything else is probably an upgrade.

Can someone that uses Matrix compare it to Zulip? Which would have been my "obvious" choice.

Is it functionally comparable, discussion threads and all? Or is it much closer to something like Discord?

As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication.

Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model.

Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.

If they can't pass chat control- Simply adopt something full of holes but seems reasonable.

Teams takes like 4 min to boot on my work laptop.

When they launched the "new" one they proudly showed the improved boot time...

Defs worth a go, I'd say. Have tried it - still warming to it tbh

an open-source app built on an open protocol would be great for everyone, not just the EU (assuming the app doesn't suck, of course).

Good luck. The only reason I use teams is because it’s free.

If nothing else this puts the spotlight on alternatives to Teams/Slack, which will increase adoption, and should increase pressure to improve (as far as that goes...)

I've not liked Slack for FOSS projects (it's not IRC, it has problems with moderation enforcement), and NOBODY likes Teams.

Dreambroker

So on balance, would we say this is bad for the US?

The real issue is that there is no easy-to-self-host complete enough solution. We do not have something go install-able, pio-able, without a gazillion of deps web-app who offer:

- a direct call UI

- a chat UI, with optional group chats

- a simple web site to be used as a wiki-like tool to share textual stuff + common media, storage internally managed

We have anything to do all of the above, but all very complex, spread across many different projects, fragile, hyper tedious to set up etc.

It's good to start somewhere, but as a reminder, it's the same European Commission that:

1. runs on Microsoft software that it buys from Fujitsu UK that HN crowd knows from the UK Post scandal

2. Has multi-billion euro digital initiatives and a puny single-instance public Gitlab with a handful of shamefully incomplete "projects".

3. Tells everyone that they have their own AI helpers while actually renting LLMs from Azure.

Help me here

Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app?

There’s are EU companies that make teams alternatives:

https://euroalternative.eu/alternatives/microsoft-teams

Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor

lol good luck