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Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

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Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#391

Post by gregmac »

ashelmire wrote: post #358
aetherson wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.

What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.

Off the top of my head...

persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND).

Some of this can be approximated with bots, of course, but there's a lot of extra work then required to make that work (namely, setting up, writing and maintaining the bot). Some of this can be done client-side, but then you have inconsistent experience.. you don't know if the other user is going to get the image preview or if their client understands markdown or some other formatting, or is going to interpret and display your message using some other markup format. Some of this you can also work around with one of those persistent IRC connection proxies, provided each user gets one and that is also maintained by somebody.

Eventually someone packages this stuff all together for simple deployment.. and basically creates a bad clone of Slack, but with 10x maintenance requirement and so many more things that can break.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#392

Post by Raphmedia »

mirimir wrote: post #285
Raphmedia wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit scary. As a developer, I often test websites performances / features using a VPN. Since Slack is the platform developers use to communicate, it often stays open as I test "from other countries". My Slack IP log likely has accesses from all over the world.

I'd say be careful with that! At a minimum, put the VPN in a separate VM, so nothing to Slack could get routed through it.

Agreed. I avoid using public sites like Facebook and Google+ while on it because of possible geolocation issues.

Slack was the exception because it's the tool people use when developing, so I somewhat blindly expected them to be alright with it. Especially since there are public answers to VPN issues on Twitter (https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/510137942296518657?lang=e...).

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#394

Post by ekianjo »

wpietri wrote: post #336
SamWhited wrote: post #305

I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the…

I would love to see more things built on open protocols. But for that to be the case, we have to find ways to make better apps built on top of open protocols. We should start by admitting that Slack beat IRC. Beat it like a cheap hallway rug. IRC was always a terrible experience for novices, and it wasn't a great experience for experts. That it had any users at all is a testament not to IRC, but to what it enabled. S…

> admitting that Slack beat IRC.

In which world does it beat IRC? Number of users? That's not even sure, since there are dozens of thousands of IRC servers worldwide. And that's not even counting the private, self-hosted IRC servers.

IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat".

As for the user experience, this would merit a whole post in itself, but Slack sucks in many ways: threads are completely unusable, channels are hard to discover unless you know about them, and now Slack makes you pay for searching thru your past messages.

I'd say there is a lot more to this topic than "Slack beat IRC".

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#395

Post by mirimir »

ashelmire wrote: post #358
aetherson wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.

What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.

Slack's "persistence and access to history" seems questionable.

And re IRC, I gather that Sabu got doxed based on EFnet logs from the late 90s.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#396

Post by dlgtho »

adventured wrote: post #306
kakwa_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly never quite understood the extremely high stance against Iran. Iran has not really stage any offensive wars since 1856 (and most of the XIXe century wars were in fact to recover/maintain control over the Persian Empire which was slowly eaten by the Russian and the UK). Since 1940, Iran was constantly meddled with by foreign powers, first being invaded during the WW2 by the Allies and the Soviets, with the S…

> Then the democratically elected Mosaddegh was deposed Mossadegh was not democratically elected. He was appointed by a dictator. The only part of that process that was even slightly democratic, was indirectly via Majlis vote. The people of Iran never specifically elected Mossadegh. > No wonders Iran government stance can be a bit tense at time and that they want the Bomb to be at peace. How does being at peace squar…

Don't you get in the way with facts. They don't support the narrative. Iran is an unfortunate victim of Western politics!

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#397

Post by CalChris »

beobab wrote: post #349
eponeponepon wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".

My dad used to say: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained with stupidity", but I love yours too.

This is a play on Arthur C Clarke:

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#398

Post by kuschku »

gregmac wrote: post #391
ashelmire wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.

Off the top of my head... persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND). Some of this can be approximated with bots, of c…

As long as you’re willing to run a bouncer (and an organisation could run one for all their users), there are usable mobile clients with synchronization between devices, persistence, user status and even profile images.

For example my app https://quasseldroid.info/ which requires you to run the https://quassel-irc.org/ bouncer, but provides all that. As well as IRCCloud and Weechat-Android, which are also very awesome and provide a similar amount of functionality.

The other features are atm a work in progress.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#399

Post by simias »

uberswe wrote: post #255
simias wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except looking at the past 20 years or so it seems clear that the trend is going the other way around. Slack itself is an example of that, not long ago it would've been a set of self-hosted tools. People have ditched IRC in favor of Discord and friends, they've ditched decentralized forums, BBSs and mailing lists for social networks, everybody hosts everything using the same four or five cloud providers, streaming an…

It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. It's slow right now and we are still learning, we need things to be easier. The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX. Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting. Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not th…

>It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream.

Again, this is looking at things backwards IMO. You seem to imply that there's a slow momentum from a centralized web to a decentralized one when in fact there's been a rather fast momentum in exactly the opposite direction over the past decades.

To me what you're saying sounds like "horses are about to become a very common way of moving goods". Maybe you're right but merely looking at the trend it's clearly not going that way at all.

>The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX.

You'll have to tell me more specifically what you have in mind there because that sounds very optimistic to me. We've had decentralized "backends" for as long as we've had the internet. The web is mostly decentralized by design. Even DNS is distributed across plenty of authorities for the various TLDs (even if each of them is effectively centralized and not anybody can become an authority).

Email is decentralized. BitTorrent is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. We're collectively moving away from these technologies, not towards them. I'm personally still a heavy user of all three of these things but it definitely feels niche now (email obviously isn't but self-hosted email is).

>Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting.

Which is pretty much irrelevant in this conversation then. It's about the technology people use to share content with each other, not about how Blizzard chooses to update your WoW client. It's a locked-down, vendor-approved way of distributing software from a centralized authority.

>Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)

It's not the same but it's related. In general if something is truly decentralized then it becomes self-hostable otherwise it's more distributed than decentralized. Anybody can host their Bitcoin node, their Bittorent peer or their email server. I can't host a Facebook node.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#400

Post by PakG1 »

ekianjo wrote: post #394
wpietri wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see more things built on open protocols. But for that to be the case, we have to find ways to make better apps built on top of open protocols. We should start by admitting that Slack beat IRC. Beat it like a cheap hallway rug. IRC was always a terrible experience for novices, and it wasn't a great experience for experts. That it had any users at all is a testament not to IRC, but to what it enabled. S…

> admitting that Slack beat IRC. In which world does it beat IRC? Number of users? That's not even sure, since there are dozens of thousands of IRC servers worldwide. And that's not even counting the private, self-hosted IRC servers. IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat". As for the user experience, this would merit a whole post in itself, but Slack s…

How about user count? Isn't that the only metric that really matters for the question of who won? Slack beat IRC for work-related chat. It hasn't beat email for general written communication.
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