<h2>DISCLAIMER: <em>steem.community</em> isn't intended to be a competing project to <em>steemit.chat!</em> Just a pilot run to compare the differences between two open source Slack alternatives. </h2>

<h2>Edit: Follow this link to sign up! https://steem.community/signup_user_complete/?id=d44w91po9tfcuypn1qbr6q6h1w</h2>

<h2>Edit #2: If you can't find your verification email when you try to register, be sure to check your spam folder. DNS has been updated to fix the issue. It could still take a few hours to propagate but I flushed the records out of Google's DNS cache. Mail delivery should be working as expected now. Please let me know if you're still having trouble./h2>

<h2>Edit #3: Mattermost has been upgraded to the latest release v3.2.0. Custom emoji are here!</h2>

<center><img src="http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/iconWhite_WS-1024x598.jpg" /></center>
I spent some time last night setting up a Mattermost server at https://steem.community so that the Steemit community can take it for a test drive. This is basically what you'd expect from an open source Slack alternative: less features and free software.

I've never used Mattermost or Rocket Chat before this week, but I figured it would be good to have each of them set up so we can collectively determine which one performs better. I know I'm not the only one that has had problems with the Rocketchat OS X client crashing repeatedly. And the interface seems to be sluggish in my experience. Being in the general channel seems to bog down the entire client. Granted, there is over 1000 users on that chat.

Certainly, these issues could be hardware bound due to having too many users for the amount of hardware, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to test another Slack clone software out and see if it has a little more polish or if it suffers from the same issues.

<center><img src="https://media3.giphy.com/media/13Qumr2SLqrl5e/200.gif" /></center>
<center><h3>So, why another chat server?</h3></center>
- To compare performance and feature-set vs. RocketChat.
- Mattermost supports importing users, channel archives, and themes from Slack.
- Built with golang, react, postgresql; and comes with a full test suite.
- If the other steemit.chat gets bogged down by having too many new users, they can overflow into https://steem.community.
- I'll implement a karma bot!

<center><h3>What about the team that put work into steemit.chat?</h3></center>
<p>If the community converges on https://steem.community due to higher performance, then I am happy to turn over the administration reins to the awesome team that took the initiative to get steemit.chat up and running ( @cass, @riverhead, probably others?). The main reason I'm doing this is to give the Steemit community an opportunity to pilot an alternative to Slack and RocketChat. Who knows, it may even be worse! As I see it, there's no harm in taking it for a test drive, though. Maybe it'll end up being a good way to handle load as new members join Steemit and seek help in these chats.</p>
<center><b>Native apps for Mattermost can be downloaded <a href="http://about.mattermost.com/downloads/" >here</a>.</b></center>

<center><img src="https://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/08/03/C2-in-rackf1495.md.jpg" /></center>

<h2>Please leave feedback and suggestions! SD earned from this post will offset the overhead from hosting. Right now it's running on a Scaleway C2M dedicated instance, with 8 x86 64-bit cores and 16 GB memory. If a lot of users join, I'll migrate it to the C2L with double memory.</h2>