RocketChat is software we’ve been using for about ten years. We’ve run our own installs, paid for RocketChat hosting, run Cloudron installs. We were happy to pay for RocketChat hosting to support the project but RocketChat management made two mistakes:
- they kept changing the pricing from monthly flat fee to per user and up and down and all around.
- they moved their infrastructure to AWS. Any open-source privacy oriented project which puts its users data on US big tech is no friend to open source.
Still the self-hosted version seems great. Your server, your data. No per user fees. A hassle to administer, but privacy has its price.
RocketChat’s approach to the attractiveness community edition is to make it so awful that no one can use it.
- RocketChat Community Edition will not support push notifications without allowing federation.
- RocketChat Community Edition arbitrarily limited to 50 users. Apparently at one point it was 1000. At 1000 users there are apparently there are hardware issues, requiring multiple servers at least that’s what RocketChat support announces.
You’ll probably need multiple instances (>10) and a load balancing proxy to manage them (look into HA Proxy). Hardware specs (multiple CPU Cores and >=16GB of RAM)
Such hardware limitations on a reatively suggest deliberately poor optimisation. Sabotage. Anything to cripple the community edition.
It looks to me like RocketChat was subverted/bribed at some point to become part of the US intelligence collection universe. The way to do it is to put RocketChat instances on US hosting. There’s not even an economic argument in favour of AWS. In no way is AWS hosting is in any way efficient or cost-effective unless a service provider is constantly spinning up and down capacity (something seasonal or one-time, say a Super Bowl week service).
And the second step is to limit RocketChat so no one can run an independent version.
Another third weak leg on the stool is support for the Community Edition, which is unimaginably awful. Here’s a simple question on the RocketChat forum:
Our rocket chat database is growing a lot. After some digging into mongodb we noticed the collection rocketchat_apps_logs is about 90GB. Is this just used for app logs?
How can I safely clean this up or limit the amount logged here?
Here’s the answer from the official Community Edition head of support reetp:
Not without knowing what it contains or causes it …
Need more debugging info. You were replying to a year old thread. We need to know about your setup.
Pretty sure Rocket logs tell part of the story but we need more info.
History of server, deployment details etc etc
I can hear the freeper voices already screeching”:
Incredible pedantism. Any decent developer would know exactly what causes logs to balloon and would be able to either suggest how to fix or prune the logs or ask for the exact bit of information s/he needs. reetp’s answer is like going to the doctor for a broken arm and before s/he’s willing to put a splint on your arm he needs to delve into the circumstance of your birth and any hereditary conditions your mother may have had.
The support thread just goes downhill from there. Here’s a screenshot of the full page as it may just disappear or be heavily redacted.
You’re not prisoners, why do you keep using RocketChat?
It’s not quite that simple. We’ve built all kind of external notifications and services into RocketChat. We have a rich archive there.
There’s no really good independent solution out there. Mattermost is often suggested but it’s also a US company and also suffers from ambiguity about whether they really want to be a FOSS project at all.
I regret ever leaving behind IRC chat. That’s all we really need. The image upload, custom embedding, special groupware is just a distraction from real time secure chat channels.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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