Mastodawn

so apparently if a company goes to Slack and whines “our customers are able to communicate without our direct personal approval and we don’t like it”, Slack will say “you’re so right king” and assign that company exclusive admin control of a user community without asking or even warning the community? https://hachyderm.io/@binford2k/113307917523904182

Ben Ford :grinchsmile: (@[email protected])

Hi everyone! I just wanted to give you a heads up that Perforce has forcibly seized control of the #Puppet Community Slack. They've banned me and removed the Community team and all moderators. This means that there is currently no spam or harassment moderation. It means that the community no longer has the ability to limit monetization. And it means that Perforce has direct access to your account info and no longer needs to go through the Community team when they need sales and marketing leads.

Hachyderm.io

cibyr Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea why am I not surprised?

CyberFrog Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea very cool & normal slack, epic

Damiano Gacík Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea This is a really troubling situation. I'm a bit shocked. If they now have full control over Slack and user data, it could lead to privacy issues and spam. I hope the community finds a way to maintain its independence and transparency

Andrea (Drea) Tamar Pinski Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea This and WP issues definitely show issues with open source projects which are supposed to be open but really driven by corporations. Oh throw in Mozilla in there too.

doertedev Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea isn't everyone in discord already anyways?

abadidea Oct 15, 2024

@doertedev well based on the very post you're replying to I'm going to say: trivially no

PirateRo Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea slackers!

Edvin Malinovskis Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea how long before their new community slack is taken over the same way? 🤨

James Henstridge Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea I'm kind of curious whether Slack was charging anyone for the Puppet Community instance.

If Slack was providing the service gratis, then it is indeed weird that they'd transfer control.

If Puppet had been paying for the instance, then the Slack terms of service would appear to say they own all the data there and have complete control. It's a dick move to remove the community moderators, but it also seems a bit naive to assume this couldn't happen.

The Turtle Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea for years I've observed that the easier you make it for people to hear from other people, the more you realize they don't want to.

@0xabad1dea yet another reason to migrate from Slack to a more ethical platform. Centralized walled gardens create problems, not solutions.

John Maxwell Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea That's pretty much Slack's business model.

Naomi P Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea @mhoye Nominative determinism can’t really be a thing, right?

Perforce = by force

Infosec V'ger Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea @mttaggart @binford2k this would not have happened on IRC.

abadidea Oct 15, 2024

@andrewdwilliams @mttaggart @binford2k also wouldn’t have happened on the pony express, I don’t see how that’s especially helpful

Infosec V'ger Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea @mttaggart @binford2k My point is that maybe we shouldn't be using non-open platforms like slack and discord for everything under the sun.

abadidea Oct 15, 2024

@andrewdwilliams I understand but IRC is the worst alternative conceivable. The usability is absolute worst in class, it is highly vulnerable to network hiccups and also so notoriously easy to abuse that it’s trained up several generations of script kiddies. It is the simplest thing that could work in 1988, not a serious communications platform for general usage.

@0xabad1dea @andrewdwilliams 100% 👌

Erin 💽✨Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea @andrewdwilliams projects like Ergo implement IRCv3 features that do a lot to tame it but fundamentally your rubbing up against the fact that the ecosystem is calcified

Peter Bhat Harkins Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea @andrewdwilliams Along those lines, I run a ~750 person IRC channel. I recently collected up notes on IRC that largely ended up being a fresh look at the problems with IRC that I have gotten used to over the decades. Maybe it'd be helpful to you the same way, Andrew.

https://push.cx/discord-vs-irc-notes

Discord vs IRC Rough Notes

Garrett Wollman Oct 16, 2024

@0xabad1dea @andrewdwilliams At work we used XMPP/Jabber for maybe a decade, but eventually the Apple fanboys forced us to replace it with Slack "because there are no good iOS clients". The only upside to Slack is that it's hosted (and paid for) by someone else, so we can discuss network outages on campus while we're working from home.

ShutterBugged Oct 15, 2024

@andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @mttaggart @binford2k

To offer IRC to a Discord (or slack) user is to offer FreeDOS to someone using windows XP. IRC might be open, but it's useless. It does not cover maybe more than 5% of what people need. Until a competitor comes along that can match the proprietary offerings on features (the Revolt crew are trying), proprietary solutions will continue to reign supreme.

For a detailed examination, see thread: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199104168870444

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian: (@[email protected])

to be honest, my thoughts on IRC are too long to write about in microblogging. i think the whole concept of an "IRC network" is obsolete. Matrix's "spaces" are kind of an acknowledgement of that reality: Discord's "servers" are the jurisdictional boundary that people actually see. at the same time, Matrix invested heavily in that complicated federation protocol which makes doing things like "i want to defederate matrix.kiwifarms.cc" difficult to accomplish. to "save IRC," i think that IRC pretty much needs to be thrown away. so many assumptions made by its model are destroyed by things like CGNAT. what we need is something modern which can provide a UX similar to Discord, while providing nomadic identity.

Treehouse Mastodon

Taggart Oct 15, 2024

@developing_agent @andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @binford2k I'll also just note that "openness," while great, does not protect against mad kings—as WordPress is so painfully finding out.

ShutterBugged Oct 15, 2024

@mttaggart @andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @binford2k And Freenode before them.

LisPi Oct 15, 2024

@andrewdwilliams @binford2k @mttaggart @0xabad1dea Or at all, really.

Arguably we also shouldn't be using anything server-centric either. The server should at best be high-contribution peers/nodes that are entirely optional.

atsuko Oct 17, 2024

@andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @lispi314 @mttaggart @binford2k 2 cents about IRC experience i had.

OpenStack was using it for communications even when it was big, alongside with maillists, and Gerrit as a forum to ~~discuss~~ nitpick the blueprints.

It wasn’t amazing but it was working for geodistributed community of big companies and individual contributors; enrolling all the contributors to any commercial chat platform would be kind of disaster. Also, moderation and community operation is almost impossible on public servers, but there are numerous hosted servers providers.

With this said, I’m really interested in the root causes of IRC repulsion.

@yottatsa @andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @lispi314 @mttaggart I personally still use IRC regularly. And part of this new slack will be its IRC/Matrix/Mattermost bridge so people don't have to use the slack client itself.

kepstin Oct 15, 2024

@andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @mttaggart @binford2k it depends on the server ownership, but this could absolutely happen on IRC. There's certainly examples of network operators doing channel takeovers - it's not the same circumstances, but freenode took over ownership of a bunch of community channels in its later days for the sin of saying they were moving to a different server, for example.

@andrewdwilliams @0xabad1dea @mttaggart funny you say that. Freenode seized our channel when we set up a #Libera alternative.

Mx. Aria Stewart Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea Geezus

Random Damage 🌻Oct 15, 2024

@0xabad1dea wait, people use Slack for non-company-based communications?

abadidea Oct 15, 2024

@RandomDamage mostly ones that started before discord became a well-known alternative, yes.

Mark Wyner Won’t Comply

So…microfascism.