As a YC alum and co-founder of Mattermost, I often get asked by early stage YC companies about what it’s like to build a commercial open source business. With the start-up’s permission, we’ve started recording some of the Q&A sessions, transcribing them and sharing the more popular questions on the Mattermost blog in short form articles.

Our community has been at the heart of what makes Mattermost great since the earliest days. The first community members were people who were trying out the earliest versions of the platform, filing bugs and wanting to make feature improvements. Our open source community has grown, contributing thousands of pull requests, from new features and plugins to translations and documentation.

We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.

Teams are always looking for a speed advantage, and that comes from planning, crisp execution, and teamwork. To this end, we’re excited to release new enhancements to Incident Collaboration to help make life easier for DevOps teams during incident response. The Mattermost platform includes built-in Incident Playbooks with predefined response plans and task lists. Playbooks can be customized to your environment and specific use cases.

Mattermost v5.33 is generally available today. This new release offers the following new features (see changelog for more details):

In March 2021, the Mattermost server repository officially surpassed 20,000 stars on GitHub, and we couldn’t be more excited! Huge thanks to our community for their incredible support of the Mattermost open source project and their belief in the power of secure workplace messaging solutions built for developers by developers.

Users now gain the flexibility to express their current status in any way they prefer. Set a custom status to add a descriptive status message and emoji that’s visible to everyone throughout the app. Custom user statuses are available in Mattermost Cloud today and in Mattermost Self-Managed v5.33 (available March 16), with mobile support coming soon.

Mattermost is dedicated to providing effective solutions that can be utilized by as many people as possible. Accessibility is central to our core belief that chat should be simple, intuitive, and functional. For users who are visually impaired, elements such as predictable navigation are not just nice to have, but altogether necessary.