Helmholtz Mattermost Chat: Upcoming Changes

Bad News First …

Today, HIFIS and the HZDR as the service provider have to announce that HIFIS’s Mattermost service is unlikely to be kept in our service portfolio any longer and needs to be replaced during the first half of 2026. The company behind Mattermost decided to restrict their free offerings and also deprecated the technology with which we were able to enable the login via Helmholtz ID. These changes are pretty daunting, because Mattermost has become one of our most widely used services in Helmholtz during the last years. Many Helmholtz members integrated Mattermost into their daily routine and we are aware of the fact that we can not just switch off Mattermost. Of course, we are looking for alternatives.

… Good News Next

At the moment we are talking to service providers in Helmholtz, collect ideas, evaluate alternatives and migration paths, to finally be able to make a well thought-through decision. There are a couple of promissing alternatives and in order to make the best possible choice, we join forces in Helmholtz to achieve that. At the end of this process we will be able to offer another chat solution to you before we might turn off Mattermost entirely. While we try to make the switch as smooth as possible, we can not guarantee that all data will be transferred to the new chat service, but we make this a priority. We will keep you informed about our next steps and also provide a roadmap as soon as this plan is complete. In the end, together we will say: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Strengthen the Resilience of the HIFIS Service Portfolio

Of course, this possibility and risk is not new to HIFIS. We are permanently facing business decisions made by companies who restrict access to free editions of open source software we are using. Due to these uncertainties, we are aware that we have to choose our offers wisely, in particular for mission-critical services. Recently, we started a pilot project to work on exit strategies for these critical services. Our pilot use case is GitLab. We are evaluating alternatives for our code hosting offers before business decisions are made by companies that might lead to a discontinuation of a service offer in HIFIS. Please refer to an associated talk held on the IT4Science Days 2025:

Strengthen Research Associations Through Exit-Strategies for IT Services

Team HIFIS Community on Mattermost

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Mattermost News No. 1 (2025-11-07)

Summary of the changes to free offerings of Mattermost

The company developing Mattermost changed their free offerings. In particular, they removed the feature to authenticate with the Helmholtz AAI responsible for the login to Mattermost. In consequence, we are forced to look for alternatives until the end of the first half of 2026.

Discussed Alternatives

Possible alternatives are the following:

Purchase Mattermost Enterprise licences for Helmholtz
Develop a fork that supports login to the Helmholtz AAI
Evaluate other chat solutions (Matrix, Zulip, Nextcloud Talk, openDesk Chat, etc.)

Working Group

In discussions with other service providers inside and outside Helmholtz, a working group (current members of HZDR, GFZ, DESY, GSI, UFZ, FZJ, CISPA) has formed that will initially evaluate and test Matrix — the most promising service in the selection — as a federated service for Helmholtz. The goal can be to host few Matrix servers in Helmholtz that can interoperate. The other alternatives will also be evaluated as part of the next steps.

Selection Criteria and Migration Paths

During the evaluation we will look at various aspects such as reliability, maturity, feature set, security, and user‑friendliness, and we will test migration paths so that, ideally, the group structures and chat histories in Mattermost can be largely preserved.

Why Matrix as a first test pilot?

Many research organisations and universities trust Matrix as a good chat solution and did the same migration in the past. We are among others in communication with GWDG which did such transition recently for their clients, including Max Planck Society. These are a couple of reasons to choose Matrix:

Matrix is a modern protocol.
It is decentralised with no single point of failure. This emphasises the robustness and resilience of such a solution.
Its open-source nature and possibility to run it on-premise guarantees data sovereignty without any claims by companies.
It has a high interoperability. Due to federation it is possible that different Matrix servers communicate with each other, thus, users can chat with users on other servers.
Privacy and security is among other things taken into account by end-to-end encryption.
The user benefits from versatile communication options like real-time messaging, voice, and video calls.

User Feedback

We would like to keep you in the loop and also involve interested people with useful ideas and suggestions. In case you would like to share your ideas and suggestions with us, please join our Mattermost channel: