1. Complete control over your data - Since it's self-hosted, you or your organization maintains full ownership and control of all communications data.
2. Customization and integration - The platform offers extensive API access and webhooks that allow for deep integration with your existing tools and workflows.
3. Robust plugin system for configuring various custom made features.
4. Open-source flexibility - Being open-source means you can modify the code to fit your specific organizational needs.
5. Team collaboration features - It includes robust messaging, file sharing, project management, and collaboration tools similar to proprietary alternatives.
6. Security and compliance - Mattermost provides enterprise-grade security features with options for on-premises deployment to meet strict data sovereignty and compliance requirements.
7. Cost-effective - While there are paid enterprise options, the core platform is free and eliminates per-user licensing fees common with other enterprise communication tools.

Scripture Tools - tools that allow you to search and share the scriptures

Newsbot - RSS feed curator, manage your own socially active newsfeed.

Janitor - Setup Automated channel cleanup.

Quotes - manage and curate your own database of quotations, definitions, ect.

Firewall Control - Easily control user access with handy firewall tools.

Howdy - Group voting tools for actions regarding noisy or quiet members.

Emblems - Publish your threads or channels as public websites.

The True Cost of "Free" Social Media: Privacy & Freedom at Stake

In today's digital world, your personal conversations, photos, and interactions have become valuable commodities, harvested by social media companies without your meaningful consent. When you use mainstream messaging platforms, you're not just sharing with friends—you're sharing with corporations whose business models depend on extracting value from your private moments.

These companies collect staggering amounts of data: who you talk to, what you discuss, when you're active, your location, your interests, your habits, and even your emotional states. This information isn't just stored—it's analyzed, categorized, and monetized in ways that extend far beyond showing you relevant ads:

• Your conversations are processed by AI to build detailed psychological profiles used to predict and influence your behavior
• Your connections and interactions are mapped to create "social graphs" that reveal intimate details about your relationships and communities
• Your location data is tracked to understand your movements, routines, and the places you frequent
• Your content engagement patterns are studied to determine how to keep you on platforms longer, regardless of impacts on your wellbeing
• Your personal information is often shared with third-party partners and data brokers who further package and sell insights about you

When you use these platforms, you're engaging in a transaction where you pay with the intimate details of your life. Every message, photo, reaction, and even pause while typing becomes currency in this exchange. Your private conversations about health concerns become data points for targeted pharmaceutical ads. Your late-night venting sessions to friends inform algorithms about your emotional vulnerabilities. Your travel plans, relationship status changes, and career discussions all feed into systems designed to extract maximum profit from knowing who you truly are.

This surveillance-based business model has profound consequences for both individuals and society. It creates power imbalances where companies know intimate details about you that you may not even know about yourself. It enables sophisticated manipulation techniques that can affect your purchasing decisions, your political views, and even your self-perception.

The Censorship Problem

Beyond privacy concerns, mainstream platforms present serious challenges to free expression:

On these platforms, your expression is constantly filtered through changing corporate policies and automated algorithms you never consented to. Posts about certain topics may be invisibly suppressed, reach reduced, or accounts quietly restricted without explanation. These decisions aren't made based on what's best for users but what protects platform revenue and appeases various stakeholders. During politically sensitive periods, corporate censorship often intensifies, with certain viewpoints systematically disadvantaged.

Even more troubling is that these censorship decisions are inconsistently applied. High-profile accounts may receive special treatment while ordinary users face strict enforcement. Topics that were once allowed become forbidden overnight as policies shift. The rules themselves are often vague by design, creating a chilling effect where users self-censor to avoid potential penalties.

Reclaiming Your Digital Dignity

When you choose an alternative like self-hosted Mattermost, you're not just selecting a different app—you're rejecting this extractive model entirely. A self-hosted platform puts censorship decisions where they belong—in your community's hands. Your group consciously decides what communication norms work best, with transparent rules everyone understands. This doesn't eliminate content moderation—it simply makes it democratic, contextual, and accountable to actual community members rather than distant corporate interests.

Perhaps most importantly, you're reclaiming your right to connect with others without being exploited, and you're protecting not just your data, but your autonomy and freedom from manipulation. This isn't about having "something to hide"—it's about maintaining the basic human dignity of choosing what you share, with whom, and on what terms.

See for yourself!

Demo accounts are temporary and frequently removed.

The services offered on gather.rest feature mattermost servers protected with an advanced server level firewall, a web application level firewall and automated suspicious login protection mechanisms, this creates multiple robust layers of defense against potential threats. This security stack provides exceptional protection by:

• Creating a geographic filter that dramatically reduces exposure to common attack sources
• Automatically detecting and blocking suspicious login attempts and potential brute force attacks
• Hiding your server's actual IP address behind Cloudflare's network, making direct targeting nearly impossible
• Benefiting from Cloudflare's enterprise-grade DDoS protection and threat intelligence
• Maintaining real-time monitoring and automatic IP blocking for suspicious activity patterns
• Leveraging LetsEncrypt's SSL/TLS encryption to secure data in transit
• Implementing rate limiting to prevent overwhelming server resources
• Creating detailed security logs for analysis and audit purposes
• Overall decentralized benefits of being a self hosted application

While no system is 100% impenetrable, this multi-layered approach places your Mattermost server's security on par with enterprise-grade solutions, making it significantly harder to compromise than typical cloud-based messaging platforms that may be subject to broader attacks or data harvesting.  While the platforms offered on gather.rest are configured with security in mind, In a general sense, owning or operating a webserver comes with important risks to consider:

Security Vulnerabilities

• Exposure to cyberattacks including DDoS attacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and malware infections
• Risk of data breaches exposing sensitive information
• Vulnerability to zero-day exploits in server software or dependencies

Technical Failures

• Hardware failures causing downtime or data loss
• Software crashes or compatibility issues
• Database corruption or performance degradation
• Network outages affecting availability

Operational Challenges

• Ongoing maintenance requirements including security patches and updates
• Performance monitoring and scaling needs
• Backup and disaster recovery planning
• Technical expertise required for proper configuration

Compliance and Legal Risks

• Responsibility for regulatory compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.)
• Potential liability for data breaches or service disruptions
• Copyright or content liability depending on hosted material
• Jurisdictional complexities if serving international users

Resource Commitments

• Ongoing costs for hardware, bandwidth, electricity, and cooling
• Personnel costs for administration and monitoring
• Time investment for troubleshooting and updates

Business Continuity Risks

• Single point of failure if not properly architected
• Reputation damage from extended outages
• Customer/user trust issues following security incidents

Having your own webserver is like owning digital real estate where you make all the rules. Instead of renting space in someone else's digital neighborhood (like using Discord or WhatsApp), you control everything about your online presence. Your data stays on your property, where no company can suddenly change policies, start charging fees, or decide to shut down the service. A webserver lets you host websites, run custom applications, store files securely, create personalized experiences for visitors, and connect various digital tools together in ways that suit your specific needs. For businesses, this means building exactly what your customers need without limitations. For personal use, it means having a digital hub that works exactly how you want it to, where you can host anything from photo galleries to websites to messaging platforms like Mattermost. While it requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain, the freedom and flexibility of having your own digital space makes a webserver one of the most powerful tools in the digital world.

Instructions and a few themes:

Official Mattermost Instructions

Tons of great themes:

GitHub Collection