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Comment by tifik | Hacker News Reader

Well I really hope this massively blows up in their face when all of Europe goes to work just about now, and then North America in 5-8 hours. Let's see if we have another Helldivers 2 event that makes them do a hard backpedal after losing thousands of large customers that will not under any circumstances take the chance.

I have a friend with a law firm who just called me yesterday for advice as he's thinking about switching to Slack from Teams. I gave him a glowing recommendation because it is literally night and day, but there is no way in hell he takes any chance any sensitive legal discussions leak out through prompt hacking. He might even be liable himself for knowingly using a tool that spells out "we read and reuse your conversations".

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Personally, I rather liked self-hosted versions of these:

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Out of those, Mattermost was the easiest to setup (just need PostgreSQL and a web server, in addition to the main container), however not being able to easily permanently delete instead of just archiving workspaces was awkward. Nextcloud Talk was very easy to get going if you already have Nextcloud but felt a bit barebones last I checked, whereas Rocket.Chat was overall the more pleasant option to use, although I wasn't the biggest fan of them using MongoDB for storage.

The user experience is pretty good with all of them, however in the groups that I've been a part of, ultimately nobody cared about self-hosting an instance, since most orgs just prefer Teams/Slack (or even Skype for just chatting/meetings) and most informal groups just default to Discord. Oh well.

The problem is not technical, but social with these platforms.

i.e. How do you convince 40+ people from 5 countries to add yet another memory resident chat application and fragment their knowledge to another app/mental space?

This gets way harder as the community becomes more dynamic and temporary (i.e. high circulation like students). I gave the good fight last year with someone, and they just didn't flex a nanometer citing ergonomics of Slack is way better than alternatives, and didn't care about data mining (was a possibility back then) or keeping older messages at ransom.

> i.e. How do you convince 40+ people from 5 countries to add yet another memory resident chat application and fragment their knowledge to another app/mental space?

If it's a company, you can just be like: "Hey, we use this platform for communication, you can log in with your Active Directory credentials."

It also has the added benefit of acting as a directory for every employee in the company, so getting in touch can be more convenient than e-mail (while you can also customize the notification preferences, so it doesn't get too spammy), as opposed to the situation which might develop, where some teams or org units are on Slack, others on Teams and getting in touch can be more messy.

If it's a free-form social group, then you can throw that idea away because of network effects, it'd be an uphill battle, same as how sometimes people complain about people using Discord for various communities, but at the same time the reality is that old school forums and such were also killed off - since most people already have a Discord account and there's less friction to just use that.

Either way, I'm happy that self-hosted software like that exists.

> If it's a company

That's a big if, and the answer is "No" in my case. If it was, that comment wouldn't be there.

It's not a "social group" either, but a group of independent institutions working together. It's like a large gear-train. A lot of connections between small islands of people. So you have to work together, and have to find a way somehow. So, it's complicated.

> Either way, I'm happy that self-hosted software like that exists.

Me too. I happen to manage a Nextcloud instance, but nobody is interested in the "Talk" module.

Surprised you didn't mention zulip: https://zulip.com/

We use it and wouldn't trade it for any of the alternatives.

Also is easy to set up and has Jitsi Meet integration and feels 10x more snappy than Slaaaaack.

That's a lovely addition, thanks! I'll have to try it out as well at some point.

Yeah my lawyer friend is worried he might even lose his license over this. It's gonna be very interesting seeing how legal departments react to this.

If you disagree with practices like this, mention this to your legal.

But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem?

Also, is Teams (and other messengers) any different?

Defaults matter!

Just look at how much Apple and Mozilla get from Google by having their browser as a default (ca. $20,000,000,000 and $400,000,000 IIRC per annum).

Or look at how many people rejected the tracking prompt displayed for FB when it was added to iOS (+70%).

> But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem?

This thinking is the problem. "Oh, we just added your entire private/privileged/NDA/corporate information to our training set without your consent. What's the problem?"

Opt-out must be the default.

Edit: By "Opt-out must be the default." I mean: no one's data must be included until they explicitly give consent via an opt-in :)

Especially since once it has been trained, it is in the model, and I am not aware of any way anyone has discovered to later remove from the model single or selected training data points, except for re-training/re-learning the model. So basically the crime might already be done.

But I also know that so many businesses are too sluggish to make a switch and employees incapable of understanding the risk. So unfortunately not all of Europe will switch away. But I hope a significant number gives them the middle finger.

There's something called "machine unlearning" being worked on to address these issues.

This doesn't mean that I support Slack or any opt-in without consent training model. On the contrary. I don't have any OpenAI/Midjourney/etc. account, and don't plan to have one.

> Opt-out must be the default.

Don't you mean opt-in must be the default?

Or am I misunderstanding the concept of opt-ins :P

Opt-out by default = Opt-in.

Opt-in by default = Opt-out

Opt-in is "I agree to have my data included"

Opt-out is "I don't agree to have my data included"

Exactly! Allowing access to your data should only be opt-in

Worth noting: This is a legal requirement in Europe

The GDPR mandates that consent is given affirmatively, with this kind of "oh we put it in the EULA nobody reads" being explicitly called out as non-compliant.

You can opt-out by manually writing an email to them. The process matters.

They could make it even better, like requiring signed/certified physical mail /s. Or fax...

:-D

The way to opt out is by contacting support,in an era where opt ins and outs should be handled by a toggle button.

Either they don't expect many people to wish to opt their slacks out, or they're aware of the asynchronous friction this introduces and they don't care.

Do they discard everything processed so far every time someone opts out?

and how does that even work? Slack is a chat app. Does everyone involved in the chat need to opt out for it to be meaningful? What about bots?

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