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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

#621

Post by laumars »

kkarakk wrote: post #605
laumars wrote: post #432

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. 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

At risk of sounding like a broken record:

> I did also list other options that wasn't reliant on your ISP as well.

However that aside, you could nitpick solutions until the cows come home but it’s unproductive because self hosting is still more resilient from takedowns than a SaaS solution. And that’s what matters. Self hosting gives you options that you simply don’t have with SaaS.

Frankly, I’m amazing anyone is even arguing against that point in the first place.

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

#622

Post by danShumway »

nemothekid wrote: post #507
adriand wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as ethical, intelligent and conscious individuals, we folks in the developer and hacker community want people to make decisions on the basis of principles, when the reality is that people generally make decisions on the basis of convenience. In fact, people are often willing to sacrifice their principles (to a certain extent) in the name of convenience. If we want people to use principled technology, then we…

If we want people to use principled technology, it has to be usable, full stop. As a developer, being able to say "I'm willing to sacrifice convenience, in the name of principle", is a privileged position - you know how to navigate software when it gets difficult - other people don't. What I find a lot of people miss when comparing Slack to IRC, is that not everyone using Slack is a developer. The world doesn't consi…

> being able to say "I'm willing to sacrifice convenience, in the name of principle", is a privileged position - you know how to navigate software when it gets difficult - other people don't.

In the same breath though, saying, "I'm not willing to sacrifice convenience in the name of principle" is also a privileged position, because Iranians who live in the US/Canada are currently being banned. Convenience is something we can address in the future, but bans aren't.

The concerns people raise about Slack -- that until very recently it wasn't blind-friendly, that it takes away control of user data, that it can arbitrarily ban companies and users for any reason; none of those are theoretical deontological postering. They are entirely practical in the sense of, "there are people who are affected by this who can't join your community because you're not using a tool that's accessible to them."

I think that it's easier and preferable to teach my friends and family members to use open tools than it is to use something that blocks people of Iranian descent from participating in my community. Yes, that means my communities will be less accessible to tech-unsavy people. But that's a problem I can try to address in the future. I'm OK making their life harder for right now if it means not permanently banning people based on a random company's whims.

That is selling people out, in the sense that it's making a calculated decision about which people are most important to support right now. But if the Go community is using Slack, they're making the same exact same decisions to prioritize accessibility for some people. They're just choosing different people.

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

#623

Post by arendtio »

krageon wrote: post #602
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…

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?

Well, experimental doesn't mean it isn't usable (we are talking about an experimental standard here, not about experimental software).

I run an ejabberd server and for example the Client State Indicator (XEP-0352), which is one of the extensions that improve battery life for mobile clients, was experimental for a long time but at the same time also available for major servers (e.g. community edition of ejabberd) and mobile clients like Conversations (open source too).

So in my experience, the battery consumption of a modern XMPP client is quite good. When people are complaining about the bad mobile experience they are mostly referring to the time before the mobile extensions were built.

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

#624

Post by arendtio »

If you want to know what protocols are real alternatives, take a look at the second last column (IETF):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHal...

(I didn't make that spreadsheet, but found it quite interesting when it was posted on HN a few weeks ago)

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

#625

Post by walterbell »

SamWhited wrote: post #551
walterbell wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are VC funded and sell services (Wire Pro, Wire Red) to large companies.

That seems like enough of a reason not to pick it as a good shared base protocol, even if technically it's good. It's nice that they're funding MLS though; looking forward to the results of that effort.

Could you give some examples of acceptable funding models?

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

#626

Post by rootkea »

gsich wrote: post #617
jackvalentine wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... they learned Slack.

Nothing to learn there.

That's correct. Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.

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

#628

Post by jackvalentine »

gsich wrote: post #617
jackvalentine wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... they learned Slack.

Nothing to learn there.

I don’t think you realise how well you just made the case for using Slack instead of IRC or XMPP with that comment.

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

#629

Post by u801e »

rootkea wrote: post #626
gsich wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing to learn there.

That's correct. Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user. Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.

> Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack and connecting by entering the address in the browser.

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

#630

Post by winrid »

krageon wrote: post #603
PascLeRasc wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true. If you are in the EU you might not even legally be able to use a US hosted solution depending on what data you are sending over the chat...
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