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Comment by pyrophane | Hacker News Reader

This is yet another good reason to prefer decentralized networks. When Slack or Facebook or whomever agrees to block someone there is no resolution other than appealing to a company with a closed decision making process, something I don't think any of us really want.

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This is especially scary with SSO systems. Google/Facebook blocks your account? Guess what else you can't log into.

Its interesting to imagine what would happen if google blocked you from captcha.

Yep. Going to go ahead and throw Matrix/Riot out there as a great alternative.

Which platform would be better today from practical standpoint? for a remote team of developers. Matrix?

Matrix is the protocol, Riot is a Slack-like implementation of the protocol: https://riot.im/

You can use the default (free) Matrix homeserver with Riot and you'll basically have a free chat system without any setup (besides installing the client).

I've been using Riot for a while now, and while Slack does seem a bit more polished, having client-side encryption for all my messages gives Riot the upper hand: I don't worry about sending passwords or sensitive info as much as I do with Slack.

Modular.im is their hosted product. Much cheaper than slack as well.

I thought it was kind of expensive at first but then I saw the price of slack. ~$1.50/user/month seems very fair when you see what slack and email cost per user

the new redesigned UI is at https://riot.im/experimental/

you can participate in the discussion at https://riot.im/experimental/#/room/#modular:matrix.org to understand more if you want.

I pretty much gave up on Matrix after the following exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8697151

Perhaps I am overreacting, but that sort of attitude on matters core to basic privacy in the post-Snowden era seems both problematic and incurable.

Matrix E2E encryption is opt-in per room while its support is in beta, with the intent to have on by default when it's out. https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20170910-2110

It is planned to make riot enable encryption by default when it is fully stable but I totally understand why the protocol would allow it to be disabled. Matrix is about more than instant messaging and there are possible use cases where you may be using it for something that needs no e2e. Maybe you are using it to control the lights in your house and you want to write an SQL script that can read the commands sent to your light over matrix and tell you how long they were turned on for last month. You can't do that if the commands were e2e encrypted and you gain nothing by encrypting them.

Yes, you are overreacting. Perfect is the enemy of good. Encryption is not so easy when you have a room with potentially hundreds of users, each with many devices, and you have to safely share keys between all of them. I'm using it, and even in a 1 to 1 chat it can be a burden. They are working on it, and it will be default once it's out of beta. But there are reasons why you may not want to use it. And that's a personal choice that people should be allowed to make. Would you also disallow public rooms? Or bridges into non-encrypted services?

I care about encryption, you care about encryption, and they care about encryption. "Giving up on them" and saying their attitude is "problematic and incurable" is hurting, not helping.

Yup, you’re overreacting, especially given I wrote that >4y ago when we hadn’t even started implementing E2E encryption. Nowadays it’s almost complete and as others have said we will be turning it on by default for private comms in the coming month(s). (There is little point in E2E for a conversation which is public and being indexed by Google etc). Some deployments already have E2E on by default in fact (eg the french government deployment).

Anything I consider important that I post online is pretty much public. I also wrote private messages on Facebook, but I didn't upload photos or text posts that I didn't want the world to see. For that kind of stuff, encryption is just a giant waste of resources, in my case, so if I ran mastodon on my server, I would be glad that I can turn that off.

I still fell victim to apparently being reported as non-human (after 9 years of using FB with over a hundred RL friends and former class mates, many photos of me, real name from day one, and so on), and while I could send a photocopy of my ID to Facebook, as a matter of principle I didn't and won't, not without even having the right to confront my accusers. For all I know, they're bots, at best some people who didn't like a comment I made on some article -- and from the accounts of others, even showing your ID doesn't mean you won't get fucked over in a similar way again. There is just no real recourse, so why even start jumping through hoops, I'm not going to be party to normalizing that nonsense.

I also don't believe in technical solutions to social problems. Encryption gains me nothing in a world where my neighbours just shrug when I get carted off for having using encrypted communication -- or get booted off Facebook -- so that needs to be "fixed" anyway, and should it ever be, encryption would be something that protects you against criminals and assholes, not something that protects you against big brother. IMO it's lethal to assume it ever could or should. It's something we can and should use on our way to social solutions to social problems, but not something to rely on. I know that many people in other countries or very different circumstances NEED encryption, so they should have it, and I might use it out of solidarity and to give them cover even -- but that won't fix the problem anymore than Napster fixed the music industry.

We use Mattermost at my company, which works well for us and is entirely self hosted.

Seconded. I like controlling things myself and hosting them myself. Nobody (um, but AWS, our ISP, our DNS registrar, ARIN, oh and heck tons of others) can shut me down now.

> Nobody (um, but AWS, our ISP, our DNS registrar, ARIN, oh and heck tons of others) can shut me down now.

But in theory all of those can be replaced, a site that was recently in the news for being kicked off Godaddy, Google, tucows, Cloudflare, the Russian media watchdog, namecheap, DreamHost and a ton of others. Today its online using a Chinese based provider.

But yeah, if SV takes a disliking to you, it can be a right PITA to find some where to get back online.

But you are right, Someone somewhere has to host you and/or provide you with services (even if you self host) you are still dependant on to be able to stay online.

I'm still hoping they'll implement an SMS gateway. If Matrix could replace Google Voice too, that would rock my world.

There is one. I'm using it, it works, but it's a little buggy: https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix. I haven't been able to ignore my message app and trust the bridge 100% yet.

I'm hoping to spend some of my christmas break contributing some work to the project. I agree, bridging SMS into a chat service that you can use from anywhere is a killer feature.

If you do make any updates, feel free to throw them into the This Week in Matrix room which may catch some more dev's attention!

https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org

Awesome, will do!

Why is this a good reason to prefer decentralized networks? Slack is a tool for employees at a company to communicate with each other. At some point those communications need to arrive back at a server that lives inside the boundaries of a nation state that is one of the world's major economies. Most of the major governments of the world work together to regulate the worlds networks. But even if that wasn't true, what would you get by trying to leave the networks? Are you trying to evade the law? If so, why? If you don't like the law, you can always lobby to change it, but there will always be laws. You can and should work to make the laws better, but still there will be laws, and we all gain some benefit from living in a society with laws. Or if you disagree, what do you think the alternative is?

If you are not US based, you may want to trade and work with us-embargoed countries. Especially as the embargoes may come and go unpredictably as US foteign policy gets increasingly erratic.

This event made me realize I needed a good independent backup solution for Slack. I bought some tool to do it daily locally. I'll be able to move on to an alternative like Mattermost if the need arise.

What are the decentralized networks one should give preference to?

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