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Comment by robotbikes | Hacker News Reader

Wow. This seems rather unprecedented and unnecessary, based upon the lack of action in this regard by other companies I don't know why Slack would do this. If for instance this kind of arbitrary action took place on GitHub I could see it having a detrimental impact to free software projects. This is another good reason to choose Zulipchat and other self-hostable platforms instead of proprietary SaaS solutions.

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Totally agree about going to the self-hostable path. I would add as an alternative, looking for non-US products, maybe from neutral countries.

As someone mentioned in the twitter thread, this could happen to any product: Google, Facebook, even taking the bus!

Neutral countries? What’s a neutral country?

It's Switzerland.

yes. are there any Swiss technological developments? are there any other neutral countries?

Switzerland hosts, among other things, the EFPL, which does a great deal of technlogical achievement. The EFPL itself leads the Scala language development, among a lof of other stuff !

I'm not familiar with other countries as neutral as Switzerland which has a successful track record of staying neutral during two world wars on their borders, but I suspect there should be actually quite some. I _think_ that for example Kazakhstan is currently trying to follow a similar neutral political path.

Costa Rica is another relevant example.

Wire is a Swiss Slack alternative that’s open source. Do note the comment close to this one mentioning that Switzerland would also have to comply with the sanctions.

ProtonMail, maybe.

Switzerland?

Switzerland

"Neutral" countries also have to conform to sanctions; Switzerland is mentioned a few times but "the sanctions regime in place is based on the Federal Act on the Implementation of International Sanctions" and "Does Switzerland implement UN sanctions? - Yes."

https://sanctionsguide.eversheds-sutherland.com/countries/sw...

I get the impression that neutral in this case is being confused with some libertarian / anarchist / lawless utopia.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I guess that makes the self hosted path the only safe and sustainable path for managing one's information.

> This seems rather unprecedented

EULAs already sometime shad rules to excluded people based on the country they were a national of. Those one could simply ignore. With SaaS this is a different story.

>This is another good reason to choose Zulipchat and other self-hostable platforms instead of proprietary SaaS solutions

until someone targets your host and gets it shut down.

I don't understand what's wrong with this comment, but OP is right.

We have seen cases where domain registries or hosting providers suspend accounts for violating their ToS, which is totally legal.

Because you don’t need a hosting provider to self host. You don’t even need a domain name either.

But in all honesty, there are hundreds of registrars and thousands of hosting providers around the world. Not all of them fall under US jurisdiction. But if you’re really really paranoid of getting shut down, there’s also .onion sites or distributed systems like IPFS.

You can not prevent people from communicating on the internet any more than you can prevent people from writing letters.

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.

Even then it's only a question of money, and you can keep local backups without having to fear it'll all be gone tomorrow.

> 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 there are. Hosting providers don't care if you're a business or private individual - they just want your cash. There's even serval places in Europe where you can send them a Raspberry Pi and they'd host that for you (obviously for a monthly fee). There really isn't a shortage of places to host bare metal nor VMs.

>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.

Then at least you can move it elsewhere.

Zulipchat offers free SaaS for open source projects and also provides you with the ability to export your data and choose to self host at any time in the future. I've found it to be superior to Slack but it just doesn't have the same level of name recognition and thus people are less inclined to use it for some reason. I hope this builds into a real campaign to have free software projects choose a more ethical alternative.

I'm not familiar with Zulipchat specifically but unless you're running a community with thousands of concurrent users then you could easily host most self-hostable chat platforms on a low powered devices (eg Raspberry Pi) on a home broadband internet connection.

Obviously this is a less than ideal solution, but my point is you're not reliant on AWS / OVH / Digital Ocean / whoever you choose for hosting.

You are still reliant on your isp however.

Don’t forget your electricity provider as well. Of course you could run a solar system and mesh WiFi.

Even if you run a solar system with mesh WiFi, you're still reliant on getting food and clean water.

Incremental improvements are still improvements, even if you still rely on some people for some things.

Not if you use a distributed system like IPFS.

There is a technical workaround for any form of censorship - the real question is how difficult it is for ordinary folk to us.

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