Hi @it33_mattermost, thanks for providing insights about Mattermost’s choices and strategy.
As you said earlier, you don’t get much feedback from the community when things go well, which is unfortunate because Mattermost is a great piece of software.
Let me tell you about our instance.
I’m a member of Picasoft, a French NGO that promotes free software, raises awareness about mass surveillance, educates people about how the Internet works and hosts free software as a way to propose concrete alternatives to proprietary software (and surveillance), and as a way to have a more human-like relationship between users and admins. In short, we have interacted with most of the organizations that find their home on Picateam (our instance), and we are able to deal with their questions and problems - we provide support.
Some statistics about our instance : almost 11k users, 2 millions messages. It runs on appropriate hardware and we have no performance problem.
Picasoft has been entirely run by volunteers since its creation in 2016. In France, we are officially recognized of « general interest ». In order to operate, we need about 1k€ per year to support hardware failures and housing costs. We collect this amount exclusively through donations, whether it is from NGOs, companies, public services or individuals.
In short, our instance became a hub for small organizations seeking privacy, so we host a lot a small teams, mostly private teams. Our popularity grew by word of mouth. This scenario is only conceivable precisely because we have a single, recognizable instance. You said that the original intent of Mattermost Team Edition is to host a single team - but for us, it would be inconceivable to spawn a new Mattermost instance every time an organization hears about us, both in terms of sysadmin work and in terms of delay for users.
We really don’t need the features of other editions, so applying for the Mattermost Nonprofit License is not relevant. As you can guess, we have no way to afford any of the other editions (and still don’t need the features).
I do understand that, as a company doing business and seeking adoption, you don’t want your name being associated with slowness, bugs, and so on. But hard-coding limits won’t solve this, because any organization that reaches 11k users and is happy with the Team Edition won’t just drop it and buy another edition. The only solution for us is to fork and compile Mattermost without these limits, which just means more work for our sysadmin team and does not eliminate the risk of your name being associated with failures. No one wins in this situation.
From our point of view, this change is experienced as a need to “fight” against a once friendly piece of software, just like we have to do every day when working with proprietary, bloated software.
I hope this gives you another use case, and thanks again for providing feedback.