I also saw a post in HN that MailChimp suspended accounts without prior notification. What's with these tech companies and closing accounts? It's scary.
Riot is a decentralised team messenger built on top of Matrix. https://riot.im/app/#/home
There are other providers, though, and hosting your own instance isn't too difficult.
[0] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#help-synapse-eats-all-...
Riot is well polished - polished enough that I was able to get my non-techie friends to start using it without any issue.
And it's open source, so it's decentralized in that many people host their own. It's not federated though.
Weechat is another popular choice, also offers access on mobile via Glowing Bear https://www.glowing-bear.org/
The fact that most IRC clients integrate the connection to different servers in the interface does not really make it decentralized.
Never encountered a netsplit, I see.
Some networks have bolted-on authentication to prevent people from riding netsplits and commandeering channels, but that's not a part of IRC itself.
People in channel #xyz on efnet doesn't have to be connected to the same server to talk to each other (during normal operation).
Basic, plain, no-frills IRC is also decentralized in that there is not a single user registry (since there is no user registration mechanism at all). Most of the time you're going to add on services (Nickserv and Chanserv at a minimum) and that's going to involve a single point of failure and control for authentication, so there is a potential downside there, but it's still arguably better than it being controlled by a single for-profit company that interprets and enforces laws in different ways.
Whether or not those caveats are in any way relevant to the use case you care about really depends on what that use case is... I would hazard to say that for most people, no matter what the use case, it would be more than sufficient - piracy rings, cyber criminals, and millions of nerds the world over have used IRC to communicate on a daily basis for decades, so there's quite a track record.
Users join a single node (centralized) but that node is part of the wider IRC network (decentralized).
Openfire is good to explore features with/PoC, and there are lighter daemons to go forward with.
Plenty of negativity around XMPP, I think it’s fundamentally a legacy hate for XML but we’re all good at DOM and namespaces and schemas now if we use JS or Golang anyway. XEP database is worth a browse.
You also can't prevent users from 'archiving' (deleting) any channel they have access to.
Overall it feels like I was being firmly nudged towards the paid hosted version.
(Disclosure: I work with okTurtles)
The biggest problem would be lost data, if the anti-spammer cleanup process doesn't back things up and they don't have a good way to recover. But you'd think they'd be happy to get back a paying customer.
Non-paying customers, on the other hand... just how much effort are they worth?
From what I've seen on Twitter it looks like Slack is asking people to email them so they can figure out what is going on and if they did in fact err in closing accounts. We'll see what comes of that, but it feels a bit premature to say that they've just cut people off and that's the end of the story.
You don't know the full story to these cases, you don't know what the person was doing/sending for fact. All we have is a shaming event posted on HN or reddit etc. Not saying the companies are right here, but you are considering things to be fact based on one side of the story and generally no actual facts beyond someone's statements. Someone stating something doesn't make it a fact, it is an opinion, proof is much different.
I have heard this about Stripe many times saying they shut down accounts, or Square as another example. I had my own situation where Square held up a little more than 20k in payments until I proved some details about my business. I did what they asked and had my money released in 24 hrs because I was within the terms of service and I had facts. 9 out of 10 times when people have these issues they are outside the terms of service or are playing loose with facts.
There are exceptions of course too, myself and many others have posted proof/facts around Paypal's deceitful practices of holding money even when you are within the terms of service and have called them ahead of time as required for certain events/transactions.
Also, just as a note, sometimes companies must act based upon legal situations and do something that they normally wouldn't. This happens more often in the U.S. when a company is dealing with foreign individuals or companies and not its own citizens. This is similar to any other Country and their governments enforcing their laws/rules, except at least in the U.S. there generally is some court involvement which provides some checks and balances.
I'm generally concerned if someone tells me not to worry.
But dismissing using quality tools because you read on some forum that a few people had their accounts disabled can just create chaos for your own teams. You have no clue what the facts are, and if you base doing business solely off subjection and hearsay you won't be in business long. Although, somewhat ironically, I do feel a healthy level of paranoia can be positive because it makes you ask more questions.