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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

#601

Post by krageon »

zanny wrote: post #480
SamWhited wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

I could count the number of good, modern, high featured XMPP and IRC clients on one hand. At least compared to their proprietary counterparts. Matrix has at least as many either mature (Fractal, Riot) or up and coming clients as I'd consider usable with anything else, and it has bridges into all that legacy, something I have never seen IRC or XMPP manage well. If you have legitimate grievances with the protocol and f…

The phone experience for riot is really, really bad (extremely high battery usage, even when the app is not in use. I'm aware of the technical reasoning behind it and I frankly don't care as a consumer). This was (and is) the one barrier stopping me from using it and converting my friends to matrix (they're not platform loyal at all).

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

#602

Post by krageon »

SamWhited wrote: post #549
mst wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP on mobile was always a disaster for data use and battery life - back when gtalk was still XMPP the mobile clients used a proprietary protocol to talk to a google server that unwrapped it into XMPP. Pure-XMPP simply would not have worked. (I have my issues with the matrix protocol, mind, but they had good reasons to create a protocol even so) Edit: I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why facebook messenger sw…

This is a myth (or one of those things that may have been true at one point but is now repeated as lore even though it was solved 15+ years ago); XMPP is actually pretty good on mobile. Between the persistent TLS connection which can let the radio go to sleep when no data is being sent (without the tail time of creating a new TCP connection constantly) and TLS style stream management it's very battery efficient when…

The last time I looked into this (maybe 6 months ago), this could only be achieved using non-standard/experimental server extensions with absolutely no guarantee of stability. This then led me to believe that it was one of those things that was theoretically possible, but not practically possible. Has that changed in the meantime?

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

#603

Post by krageon »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #541
simonsaidit wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen exactly those reasons by those people in those size companies to explain why slack could not be allowed.

I've seen that too, but it's usually the same people who just reject anything hosted somewhere else with statements like "we're not doing airquotes The Cloud" and think all tech companies are conspiring against us.

No, it's because all of the big chat applications are hosted in the US and this is a completely unacceptable country to have any data in.

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

#604

Post by mst »

SamWhited wrote: post #549
mst wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP on mobile was always a disaster for data use and battery life - back when gtalk was still XMPP the mobile clients used a proprietary protocol to talk to a google server that unwrapped it into XMPP. Pure-XMPP simply would not have worked. (I have my issues with the matrix protocol, mind, but they had good reasons to create a protocol even so) Edit: I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why facebook messenger sw…

This is a myth (or one of those things that may have been true at one point but is now repeated as lore even though it was solved 15+ years ago); XMPP is actually pretty good on mobile. Between the persistent TLS connection which can let the radio go to sleep when no data is being sent (without the tail time of creating a new TCP connection constantly) and TLS style stream management it's very battery efficient when…

It was rather less than 15 years ago I had the conversations with gtalk architects (who liked XMPP and left when google abandoned interoperability) that led to my opinion.

So apparently not everybody shares your definition of 'solved' - I appreciate the alternative opinion, but simply declaring it a myth is, I suspect, unlikely to convince remaining skeptics.

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

#605

Post by kkarakk »

laumars wrote: post #432
paraditedc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you live, but in many places you can't host your own servers from your room because of ISP restrictions. Also, there are not a lot of places where you can find data centers that rent servers out for personal uses.

> I am not sure where you live, but in many places you can't host your own servers from your room because of ISP restrictions. We have those restrictions in the UK but I've never once known any ISP act upon them. But in any case, I did also list other options that wasn't reliant on your ISP as well. > Also, there are not a lot of places where you can find data centers that rent servers out for personal uses. Sure the…

>but I've never once known any ISP act upon them

what happens when ISPs do start acting on them? they do in india.court ordered blocks on whole ranges of IPs

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

#607

Post by gog »

ryandrake wrote: post #363
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…

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…

You need a bouncer if you need access to history, that is a deal breaker for most people. Also, being able to ping somebody via a push message on their mobile is also a nice thing when working in a remote team. Apps on mobile are also not that nice.

That being said, I wish there was a better open source alternative.

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

#608

Post by ge0rg »

mst wrote: post #604
SamWhited wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a myth (or one of those things that may have been true at one point but is now repeated as lore even though it was solved 15+ years ago); XMPP is actually pretty good on mobile. Between the persistent TLS connection which can let the radio go to sleep when no data is being sent (without the tail time of creating a new TCP connection constantly) and TLS style stream management it's very battery efficient when…

It was rather less than 15 years ago I had the conversations with gtalk architects (who liked XMPP and left when google abandoned interoperability) that led to my opinion. So apparently not everybody shares your definition of 'solved' - I appreciate the alternative opinion, but simply declaring it a myth is, I suspect, unlikely to convince remaining skeptics.

I wouldn't subscribe to the "15 years ago" statement, but we have figured out mobile battery use pretty well, and the respective solutions are avialable in both server and client implementations. Have a look at [0] and [1] for (slightly biased but more detailed) elabortations.

simply declaring it a myth is, I suspect, unlikely to convince remaining skeptics

It's hard to provide specific counter-arguments to anecdotal evidence repeated since back when gtalk was a thing.

[0] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html

[1] https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/index.php?title=Myths#Myth_Three:_....

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

#609

Post by jorgelbg »

PakG1 wrote: post #274
walterbell wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people export/backup messages from Slack?

Migrating to Mattermost from Slack and transitioning all the data is easy. My team at work transitioned to Mattermost a few years ago. https://docs.mattermost.com/administration/migrating.html#mi...

If the account is already closed, this is not possible. And this is a major problem.

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

#610

Post by ants_a »

ya3r wrote: post #354

First off, as many know, this is not a single incident. This has happened to many of us (including me) from "sanctioned" countries. (I am from Iran, but live in Germany) But this makes me think. Many of the services I use are from US companies. Most notable are: Gmail (Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.), Github, Dropbox, Trello and Toggl. Should I be worried? Should I actually start switching away from these servic…

Toggl is not US, it's from EU. But even as an European I feel uneasy when dealing with US companies, because the political landscape there seems to be quite unhinged.
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