Just wrote an email to Rocket Chat with subject "Dear commercial hungry bastards" and complimented them with raping the f out of one of the best chat applications there is. With decent apps and stuff. For people who don't know, Rocket Chat is a Slack-variant. Once almost the same. But it was completely self hosted and under YOUR control. Now, if you host it locally, you get a screwed up design that you can unlock by paying.. If two users register on y our rocket chat instance, you get a commercial message of them regarding the growing team. Also, i have by default some remote user of them named rocketcat in my chat. Wtf, who wants that ffs? And again! SELF HOSTED SERVICE. Imagine, they have servers under their control and don't even have to do the hosting. A big win-win for them I guess.

Idiots found themselves a marketing team apparently.

I was so bored with work in the end. It was more administration than programming. So, i kinda quitted full application development. The thing is, it's expected that you use some existing framework. First of all - they never work how you want and the programming part of your work is mainly solving the limitations the framework brings without hacking too much. You keep within the boundaries of the framework. Besides that - since all fun stuff is already done by the framework builders all you have to do left is kinda administration. Field here, field there, rest call here. Extremely boring. When you've setup the base good, there's no challenge anymore, just producing windows and input forms.

Now, a few days ago, I started to make a clone of rocket chat. I use minimalist http framework (aiohttp) and you have to build most features yourself on top. Same for the ORM, i use dataset which does schema synchronisation for you but doesn't come with models. So i made a complete model / mapper entity framework on top of that. I made one single validation system that applies on models, forms and frontend validation. There's only one truth of valid data. Within the models, services, mappers and forms there's always the services variable available making it possible to fetch any data from any object. Never weird exceptions has to be done to get data. The implemented global LRU cache system is super in auto synchronizing the objects, don't have to do anything manually.

Finally software development of a full product is fun again. If you know how to do it - making your own framework is way easier than an existing one. On top of that, it's more advanced. I do understand that frameworks are aiming to be a bit minimal to be multi purpose, but with that attitude in mind, they still achieve to make it annoying as fuck.

Regarding time, it's just a few days of development. That's nothing for something that does exactly what you want. We have to drop the use-a-framework-because-it-is-stupid-to-do-yourself mentality. We should be programmers again! Not administrators! It's not weird that chatGPT can do so much of our jobs, our projects became lame.

Anybody here using rocket chat? If so, what are your thoughts about it? From a technical and a user perspective

What is best equivalent to Slack? we switched to Rocket chat but UI is terrible, every one gets confused in channels when there is too many threads and replys. I need a free alternative which we can deploy its dedicated instance on our own server. also I prefer open source software with mobile support and better UI/UX than rocker chat.