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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

#441

Post by SamWhited »

ChrisClark wrote: post #345
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a software space that could really use more devs. IRC is fine but many people can't use it because it's too technical. We need more user friendly XMPP clients with features that non-technical people want. I hate Skype but damn if the non-techies I work with don't love it. I tried to download and run Jitsi a couple months ago for a project and it's voice quality was terrible. Skype just works. I sometimes have…

I've heard Matrix might be a good IRC replacement. But it also still looks rough to me. I only tried it once, but didn't continue as I didn't need it for anything.

Matrix the protocol is pretty awful, and I'm not a huge fan of the "official" clients, but YMMV. The real problem with it though is that unlike IRC and XMPP the protocol itself isn't developed in a sustainable way by a standards foundation with a reasonable funding model. The protocol itself doesn't really matter that much though as long as we pick one that will be maintained and won't just go bankrupt (so IRC or XMPP depending on what you want to build) and then build nice services that support it. Remember, Slack is a service and a protocol, XMPP/IRC are just protocols. You still need good services like conversations.im or Freenode built on top of them for it to be usable. Unfortunately, we don't have many good services like Slack that have commercial backing but use an open protocol.

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

#442

Post by wbl »

mtgx wrote: post #387
walterbell wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An effort is underway to standardize E2E encrypted group messaging in the IETF with the MLS [1] protocol. Open-source participants include Wire and Matrix. Commercial participants include Facebook, Cisco, Google and Apple. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ Wire is open-source today and usable by regular people, with E2E encryption and email-only accounts.

I'm curious, have you followed those discussions, and have you noticed say Google or Facebook do anything to "nudge" the protocol towards being "more convenient to use" (read: less secure) and less privacy friendly than it was originally intended to be?

We're all individuals at the IETF. I have seen people agree to changes that make their job harder because it was the right thing to do.

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

#443

Post by SamWhited »

IshKebab wrote: post #341
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 wonder if part of the reason we don't have any great open source Slack competitors (yes I know about Mattermost, Zulip, etc.) is that so many open source developers (or at least commenters here) seem to be under the illusion that IRC is a reasonable alternative to Slack.

IRC isn't an alternative to Slack at all, which is why this argument is frustrating. IRC is a protocol, not a service. Slack could have been entirely based on IRC but they are greedy assholes who want to lock you into their clients. It could also have been entirely based on XMPP and federate with the broader ecosystem. Or based entirely on Matrix or whatever other protocols are out there.

Unfortunately we as a community tend to mischaracterize things and position the public Jabber network or "IRC" as a competitor even though it's not even the same sort of thing. Another way of phrasing it is that we don't need to encourage people to use the Jabber network necessarily, we need to encourage companies like Slack to adopt the protocol and interop with the network. Then people can choose whatever they want.

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

#444

Post by taejo »

hartator wrote: post #367
taejo wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR has the force of law in its area of jurisdiction. If Slack can't comply with it, then they'd better not do business in that jurisdiction. That's how the law works; there isn't some hierarchy of one country's laws overriding others'.

/s Exactly. It’s why we never saw two countries going to war.

Are you suggesting the US go to war with the EU to force them to repeal the GDPR, so that Slack can do business in the EU? I know HN typically takes a pro-business angle politically, but that seems beyond even the most rabid line that I usually see here.

If not, I am totally confused about how your response connects to what I wrote.

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

#445

Post by pera »

jamiek88 wrote: post #372
ryandrake wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily disagreeing but could someone provide some solid examples of IRC being a terrible user experience? Whenever IRC comes up, people say it lost and it’s not the right technology. When pressed, they wave their hands around saying “...because, uh, user experience reasons!” As a longtime user of IRC, I’m probably blind to these issues. What’s so bad about it that causes people to put up with these inadequat…

setting up, just getting started with IRC for a non-tech person is basically way too hard bordering on impossible from their perspective. We can talk about all the other issues around persistence and UX but just getting started is something beyond the vast majority of computer users. It’s really hard for us to remember and empathize with this.

Too hard? I installed mIRC on my own at age ~12 in the late 90s and I don't remember having any issues, the only thing you had to do was to type a nickname and choose a server. Nowadays it's even more simpler since you don't even need to install a client (qwebirc, kiwiirc, etc.).

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

#446

Post by kalleboo »

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…

The only problem with IRC is that iOS doesn't allow background processes. Otherwise it could be extended to support anything Slack or whatever does. If not in an open way, in an interoperable way.

Even Comic Chat was based on IRC, and that's as far from "user-unfriendly" as you can get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

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

#447

Post by taude »

Without spending a lot of time on this, I don't believe that Slack just used ethnicity to ban this account. Could the OP have been using VPNs or something that led Slack to believe his IPs were coming from IRAN? I don't see Slack doing anything differently, and all this "outrage" seems to be unfounded at this point.

Edit: one thought, hopefully they can open a new Slack account with IPs originating in Canada and Slack can copy/move/reinstate the account.

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

#448

Post by SamWhited »

cyphar wrote: post #437
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…

Matrix.org is really doing a good job of being a Slack replacement (it even has Slack and IRC bridges). It's also federated and has a bunch of other nice features (like e2e which is based on Signal's crypto with some improvements for group chats). I would suggest taking a look (and I would suggest that people start switching to it). Honestly, at this point, I can't really tell the difference between Slack and most "S…

Matrix.org's problem was that they reinvented the wheel (again) WRT the protocol. Now you have a protocol that if the main company goes under, probably can't be developed further and doesn't already have wide adoption and lots of clients written for it (as is the case of IRC/XMPP). HipChat had a better model here where they used XMPP (admittedly, in the worst way possible and completely misunderstood and broke the protocol in lots of places) but build their own service on top of it. You could still use third party clients, the experience just wouldn't be quite as good. If they had enabled federation it would have solved the Slack problem to a certain degree.

Matrix could have done the same thing, but they chose to waste time and money reinventing the wheel (and doing a bad job of it) instead of focusing on the service and the clients.

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

bad_user wrote: post #413
brianpgordon wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

irccloud is great and solves many of these issues. I'm not suggesting it's an alternative to Slack because of course then you're paying them $5/user/mo instead of paying Slack $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started, but if you're an IRC user looking for history/synchronization across devices, image previews, a mobile client, and drag-and-drop image sharing, irccloud is IMO totally worth it.

>> you're paying them $5/user/mo instead of paying Slack $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started Are we complaining about price or are we complaining about proprietary services?

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by eigenspace »

colanderman wrote: post #265

What a great reason to switch to an open-source, self-hosted solution. Fortunately there exist several: http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ https://rocket.chat/ https://mattermost.com/ https://zulipchat.com/

Has anyone here used any of these? I'd love to hear your thoughts vs Slack.
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