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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I guess this can be useful for large-scale public communities but as far as I know Slack never explicitly supports this use-case (and lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features, etc).

For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue.

Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling and so are the reasons to pick it over its competitors (and they don't even focus on the few reasons that do remain!).

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>For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue.

What makes you think any given organization is a corporation?

I'm currently in 13 Slack organizations, and only 2 of them are companies. Slack is widely use for collaboration in co-ops and closed communities.

>Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling

Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox.

1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

> Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox.

IDK. With safety angle, maybe. But Slack is the opposite of "Healthy Internet". It's a corporation that wormed its way into companies and communities alike, by doing "embrace, extend, extinguish" on IRC to gain initial organic marketing from naive techies. And they've paved the way for Discord making so many good communities no longer accessible.

It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.

the idea is to add a safety control for preventing harassment to a hugely popular communication medium, not to promote a company.

> It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.

they're probably ok with that. can't please em all.

> the idea is to add a safety control for preventing harassment to a hugely popular communication medium, not to promote a company.

They're not doing the adding, though. But I guess it's different if you knew before that Mozilla was involved in this space. I didn't, so it got me by surprise.

That said... it's also good free marketing for Slack, because I for one though they're mostly dead already, and that outside of corporate space, everyone ditched them for Discord long ago.

I don't think the association between Mozilla and Slack is as strong as you think. They aren't collaborating with Slack, they are pressuring them to add this feature. If their goal is to make the web better, pushing for companies that control a significant portion of online communities to add safety features like this is actually a decent act.

Slack really shouldn't be supporting this feature. The large scale communities using it won't pay a single cent and are basically just freeloading off their freemium model.

It's also a bad idea because Mozilla Firefox has less users every year, and currently floats at about 3.5% marketshare, give-or-take .5% by source and margin of error. Also, ~90% of their income is from Google, for being the default search engine (an obvious conflict-of-interest they are unable to resolve).

Of course, when you are relying on Google to keep the lights on, it's probably not the best idea to give your CEO over $5.5 million / yr. compensation [1], one of the highest paid nonprofit CEOs in the US. It's also probably not the best idea to focus on advocacy instead of trying to make the core product more competitive. Otherwise, one morning Google might just decide that it's too insignificant a market share to matter, or decide that Firefox is finally small enough they can finally kill it without upsetting regulators, and Mozilla would be dead overnight.

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

Yes. As a multi-decade Firefox user who does donate to FOSS projects, I don't bother with Mozilla since they seem determined to spend it on everything except actually writing a browser. And if I wanted to donate to an organisation that actually advocates for digital rights (rather than being more interested in clutching pearls about how random communities moderate themselves), I'd go with the EFF or ORG

> as far as I know Slack never explicitly supports this use-case

It’s widely used for open source communities, eg:

https://kubernetes.slack.com/

> lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features

This is the whole point of the OP; adding missing features for this usecase.

> For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue.

Disagree. My employer's slack has about a million members. I don't collaborate with all of them. Speaking for myself, I would be glad of the opportunity to mute or block some of them.

HR's job is to protect the company, not the employee, so I would not expect them to help except in cases of extreme harassment. And even then, self-service tools that do not make you a target of further harassment are a foundation of public social networks. Why not private social networks too?

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