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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

Your selling points are the opposite of Discord and Slack's selling points. Slack login is entirely corporate controlled. Discord just works with one login across communities. These products are not popular in spite of their terrible privacy patterns, they are popular because of characteristics that intrinsically have terrible privacy patterns.

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I think they are aware. Let the corporate crapsters do their thing and let us have our thing. To me, a community that relies on discord or slack is a red flag. I would really like something like this to become the default instead. Long live irc!

> To me, a community that relies on discord or slack is a red flag

In which sense?

I boycott both tools, but there are many respectable communities relying on them (unfortunately).

To me, particularly in the FLOSS sphere, it belies a certain level of amateurism. Particularly when it is the primary method of “support”. As a place of community, it is fine enough. As a place for technical questions? Stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and grow the fuck up. Especially since it makes indexing these solutions nigh impossible, even within the Discord app itself, meaning any effort put into fixing them is meaningless.

So what should they use instead?

For support, ideally something actually indexed like Github/Gitlab. I don’t want to have to use their Discord to sort through hundreds of questions that failed to get answers to finally get to the one solution I need, when on a git site I can simply search the issues and find X solution away from all the chaff, since they’re all labeled as “duplicate of X”.

Indexing is still a problem for social servers as well, but unfortunately there are no alternatives. The only current solution is to use bots to upload archives of public channels to say the Internet Archive.

g0v is full of a lot of heavy hitter hackers that run a lot of their own software (including the full gamut of federated software), but a slack server is maintained because that's how the "normies" commonly interact with g0v as a community. Not everyone in the community is an engineer or technically savvy, and unfortunately a lot of these tools really aren't noob friendly. Yes, even IRC.

Getting someone on the g0v slack is as easy as giving them a link. The entire experience is straightforward from there.

Maybe one of the federated softwares is to that point and I don't realize it, I deploy a lot of federated software but I haven't done a chat application in a long time.

> Let the corporate crapsters do their thing and let us have our thing.

I think this just cannot work if this is called alternatives. GauntletWizard wanted to specifically point this out: it's a mistake to think that the core functionality of slack and discord is just chat rooms & messaging, their mechanisms that implies terrible privacy are part of the core, and you can't expect users to dissociate messaging from the rest and call it a replacement.

+1 for having «our thing», but promoting it by bogus comparison or replacement is setting it for failure.

Nothing about this is IRC. It is undoubtedly sacrificing a lot of things that the vast majority of people look for in multiplayer notepad, for properties that are sought after by privacy wonks. Mind you, IRC barely if at all addressed these “concerns”.

Irc? That privacy nightmare giving IPs?

You can hide it from other users by using a cloak (which some servers enforce on all connections), if that's a concern (but I don't think it's much of a concern). If you want some anonymity from both the server and users you're probably already connecting to the server from Tor (or maybe a VPN if it's blocked). OTOH discord is difficult/impossible to use from Tor Browser due to phone number requirements on suspicious connections and email verification when changing countries, which sucks.

Yes, and on top of that i don't have to use a javascript enabled browser or some proprietary app, instead i can chose between many minimal and foss irc clients.

Discord is centralized which makes it safer than self hosted solutions

LastPass is centralized, which makes it safer than self-hosted sol.. oh, well, never mind. :-)

Context matters.

Chats/voip when self hosted are more dangerous to its users. I know it from experience.

Would should people who want to have productive group chat with privacy use then?

Any client/server based app for a company-controlled replacementt The server manages rights and auth.

Anything that accept OIDC or is federated for the second.

Matrix doesn't totally fit the bill yet, but zulip does, so that's what you should install.

But the one that surprisingly seems to be the best is probably email. We don't have the proper MUAs yet, but deltachat (https://delta.chat) shows that there is no reason for us to be limited to decades-old paradigms and should reinvent ourselves.

What is a MUA? All results consider it "makeup artist."

"Mail User Agent". The name is a parallel to browsers who also are called "User Agents"

Thanks. Offtopic, but this is the second time in a week the person who answered my question gets downvoted (if that's what the reduction in contrast of your post indicates). I'm not sure why that's happening.

Why can't the login be corporate controlled for Quiet?

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