Rocket chat [LWN.net]

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 20, 2026 18:33 UTC (Fri) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628)
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

There is also rocket chat and mattermost as well if you're looking for alternatives that isn't on this list.

GNOME and KDE both use matrix, the experience has been good and bad. But both of us were hit by CSAM and so there are definitely need some work with moderation tools. At the recent FOSDEM, there has been some focus on better moderation tools.

I like matrix, but the clients could use a lot work. There hasn't been an client that has a UX that lets me efficiently monitor conversations in various rooms. For instance, I do not see one that allows for "most recent activity".

It would be nice to be able to apply some external algorithm that I can use to monitor rooms when there are a lot of them.

to post comments

mattermost

Posted Feb 21, 2026 17:11 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

I once used "mattermost" at $WORK and I was very, very impressed. While I'm not an "advanced" user, for me mattermost did everything Slack does and just as well. Certainly much better than MS Teams.

It was self-hosted at the time. It's apparently 100% open-source but please don't take my word for it.

mattermost

Posted Feb 21, 2026 17:32 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Yes, I like Mattermost quite a bit. I have a self-hosted instance for a few friends and me. That said, it's a bit of a nag and constantly tries to upsell you to the paid version. I guess I could build my own from source with the nagging removed, but that seems like a big hassle compared to downloading the pre-built binaries.

The Mattermost user experience is quite similar to Slack, but without Slack's anti-features.

mattermost

Posted Feb 23, 2026 8:22 UTC (Mon) by rnestler (subscriber, #160299) [Link] (1 responses)

I also used mattermost at a former employer. One nice thing is, that it is bundled with GitLab, so if you self-host GitLab it's very easy to just enable the mattermost server as well and integrating it with the user management of GitLab (https://docs.gitlab.com/integration/mattermost/).

We also use it in our Hacker- / Makerspace as the main communication tool and it works very well for us.

mattermost

Posted Feb 23, 2026 13:15 UTC (Mon) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]

Unfortunately, Mattermost will no longer be bundled with GitLab as of 19.0 (which I believe is scheduled to be released in May 2026).

Rocket.Chat experience

Posted Feb 21, 2026 23:39 UTC (Sat) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (1 responses)

Speaking as someone who is a Rocket.Chat (co-)admin for a self-hosted community instance for a FOSS project: do not recommend. (This advice does not necessarily apply to the enterprise version, I haven't used that.)

The release management is horrible. Regular regressions (sometimes also within patch releases), only fixed two feature releases later instead of in a patch release if you're unlucky. No mention of those regressions in the release notes, you have to trawl through the open and closed bug reports opened since the last upgrade. That may take hours and then you have to decide whether you break usability or stay on an old version. You can't stay indefinitely on an old release if you want push notifications in the app, though. Those push notifications will be cut off 6 months after the first release of a minor version if you stay on that minor version regardless of patchlevel. Official Docker images are not always available if you're looking for the latest patchlevel of still-supported older releases.

The upgrade procedure is somewhat reliable. Always make backups of your database and of the installed Rocket.Chat version. A version rollback is documented to be impossible once the database has been accessed by the newer version and I had to rollback after an upgrade more than once. Server snapshots FTW.

Warning messages about deprecations (e.g. for certain MongoDB versions in the backend) do not correspond to the documentation.

Warning messages in general stack up, even if the warnings are identical. If a warning "doesn't disappear" after dismissing, it's because you're seeing another identical warning in the same place. Such warnings can stack 20-high or more, creating a click orgy to dismiss them.

The security model is weird: Installed Rocket.Chat apps on mobile devices will still receive push notifications including the full message text after the user is logged out in the app. (This may be time-limited, but I only waited a few days before logging in again.)

If you're not willing/able to pay for enterprise and want to use the self-hosted community edition, the following restrictions will bite you:

Federation is an enterprise feature, i.e. you don't get it in the self-hosted community edition, so participation from people registered on other servers is not possible.

You have a push notification limit of 10,000 push messages per month. That sounds a like lot, but for a community of 50 people in a chat room with only a single phone each, you reach the absolute limit for the whole server after 200 messages in that chat room. Apps on mobile devices will still receive push notifications including the full message text even after they are logged out, possibly even after the mobile device doesn't exist anymore (commenters in the Rocket.Chat forum seem to disagree on whether that counts towards the total message limit). You can't find out which chat or which account is causing all the push notifications and exceeding the limit. If you don't have access to the Rocket.Chat central services console, you can't check how many push notifications you already used. No, you can't buy additional push notifications, you have to move to the Enterprise version if you want that. No, you can't use your own push gateway without recompiling the Rocket.Chat mobile app and uploading it to the various app stores.

If you become admin of a server which has been registered with Rocket.Chat central services (mandatory for push notifications), not having access to the email address used for registration means you can't log in to their central services console. You can get that fixed via support, but only if you buy the enterprise version. You're stuck if you only have the community edition.

On the positive side, Rocket.Chat had better usability (and easier administration) than Slack and Matrix back in 2021. Back then, we chose Rocket.Chat for those advantages and we're thankful for what we got. However, the Matrix world has evolved quite a bit, whereas Rocket.Chat stagnated. Currently, we're migrating to Matrix for our community.

Rocket.Chat experience

Posted Feb 22, 2026 1:53 UTC (Sun) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

For a period of time GNOME did use rocket chat and it seemed ok. One of the co-founders of Matrix, Matthew Hodgson spent a lot of time with us and in fact one of our members works for Matrix org so we have some close relationships. We moved to Matrix because of overall it seemed the closest to IRC. We still have some bifurcation where IRC was still something a lot of our members prefer because it doesn't have a lot of things that cause distractions like emojis, images, and giphy type things.

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 10:27 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (10 responses)

I am using Mattermost in one of the communities I am in. Works nicely.

At work we used to use Rocket chat. The way that it aggregated a new message to an older message by the same poster while there had been several intervening messages by others proved to be a real problem for one application where we used the chat for coordinating timing: a start command was aggregated to an earlier message, and some of the intended recipients did not notice it.

At work Rocket chat has been replaced by Matrix (using Element as the software). Works fine for the stuff we have done with it (but we no longer use the chat for coordinating timing in the same way, so I don't know if the problem mentioned above exists there); I also started out with a session that adjusted it to work well for that use. I find the thread feature not so great for many uses: I want to use it to keep a subthread together, but it basically hides all the answers (which may also be a legitimate use, but not always what is wanted); I have not worked much with threads in other chats, so this problem may not be limited to Element/matrix.

As a user of the chat parts of these systems, they all appear pretty similar (and similar to the chat part of Discord). One thing I hate about all of them is that, by default, pressing Enter sends the message. Someone showed me how to change that for one of them, and it's probably possible for the others as well, but having to adjust that on every application (and maybe every client) is annoying.

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 12:42 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (9 responses)

Most modern chat software seems to have converged on using shift-Enter for line-breaks without sending the message in my experience.

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 15:31 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (8 responses)

The trouble with using "Enter" to send a message is it is objectively bad by most measures. Primarily the "principle of least surprise".

Likewise "tab" is horribly abused,

Both come from typewriters, and are learnt by anyone using a word-processor - "enter" is even synonymous with "return" - and there are no obvious alternatives - unsurprisingly because these meanings are about 150 years old.

Then they got hijacked by web technology to mean other things, but it's the classic "muscle memory" problem - if the instinctive reaction actually does the wrong thing, then it's almost impossible to fix, and no - improved training is NOT a fix when the environment re-inforces the wrong behaviour.

If I'm used to using "return" to mean "return" then absolutely no amount of training will help me to learn that actually, "enter" really means "send"!

Cheers,
Wol

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 15:42 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

Eagerly awaiting the return of keyboards with a big lever for carriage return?
Oh wait...
https://www.7keysworld.com/products/tw1867-retro-typewrit...
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/qwerkywriter

Now all we're missing are mechanical sliders for margins and TAB stops ;-)

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 15:47 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (6 responses)

If I'm used to using "return" to mean "return" then absolutely no amount of training will help me to learn that actually, "enter" really means "send"!

Well, perhaps no amount of training will help you but this is something I got used to before the turn of the century. ;-)

If I recall correctly, "Enter to send" has been standard behavior for IRC clients and early chat platforms since at least the mid-90s. I'm always surprised when I have to do "Shift+Enter" to send a message. Fewer and fewer users have muscle memory from using typewriters or word processors. (That is, word processor devices, like the poor, overworked Brother WP that I used early in college...)

That said, it should ideally be configurable behavior in any well-designed client. Users should be able to set one or the other to suit their preferences.

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 17:09 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> (That is, word processor devices, like the poor, overworked Brother WP that I used early in college...)

Except that return/enter in word processors / text editors like Word, WP, Writer, vim, emacs et al still means return ...

And I probably use them a lot more than I use IRC/Chat/whatever. I think about the only time I use an app where "Enter" means "Send" is the work Slack client ...

Yes it is people-dependent, but for us old-schoolers, our daily grind still re-inforces "enter means return". :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Enter meaning send or return

Posted Feb 27, 2026 17:45 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

At least in the chat clients I use, bar IRC which is line-oriented anyway, I can configure them such that Enter means "new line, don't send yet", and I use Shift-Enter to send. I've done this to work's Slack client, because Enter is muscle memory for me when I finish a logical line, and Shift-Enter is not, so I don't accidentally send things when writing longer resposnes.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 8:13 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (3 responses)

My muscle memory comes from Email and Usenet where sending the message is definitely different from adding a line break, which I do with Enter/Return. The same is also true for various web fora.

I have never used IRC, and maybe sending a message on Enter was appropriate for that. But with modern chats that use Markdown, where you have to insert newlines because the format requires it, I don't think that sending on Enter is appropriate.

On at least one of the chats I use, I can switch to Enter->insert newline, Shift-Enter->send message, but the problem is that I use several chats, and several clients for these chats, and I have to perform the switch using some chat-specific way on every chat and maybe even on every client on every chat. It would be great if there was some general way to do that, like Unix's use of environment variables like $EDITOR.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 10:16 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

I feel like shift-enter should always be the "softer" version, the one that e.g. starts a new line instead of a new paragraph, and especially never finishes and sends the message. I prefer using ctrl-enter for actually sending the message, leaving both enter and shift-enter for formatting the message (even when both enter and shift-enter act identically). It's what I'm used to in Thunderbird, but I think I've seen it in other mail clients and in chat boxes as well.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 10:54 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

To me it seems like any chat system I have ever used has used Enter for sending and if it supports multi-line at all Shift-Enter for soft newlines without sending, seems reasonably close to a universal standard that we probably shouldn't screw with it because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different chat applications would be the worst of all worlds.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 6, 2026 15:02 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different chat applications would be the worst of all worlds.

because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different ---- applications would be the worst of all worlds.

There. Fixed it.

Cheers,
Wol