One of the common misnomers around the migration away from toxic tech stacks is that the options are either 1) services managed by a company or 2) everyone #selfhosting themselves.
There is however an often overlooked 3rd option of community-scaled infrastructure. Here a group identifies their needs, plans & deploys to meet them. Much like a community garden, that infrastructure has people skilled & dedicated to its upkeep in providing for that group, working bees & skillshare as needed.
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Here are some examples of this at work, in this case the Slack alternative Mattermost:
1. Our own instance in DE, used for online training
2. My friend's instance served from under her desk, on which I teach her students in CA
3. An instance in CH hosting thousands of environmental defenders that I deployed
4 An instance we deployed in IS hosting a US immigration support NGO, resistant to ICE warrants
There is no one deployment for all here, each instance meets the unique needs of the group
@xr1st0ph The opsec with Mattermost is great when self-hosted & push notifications running through your own push server. Metadata quiet on the wire & FLOSS (team edition).
Again, we have deployed Matrix for groups, but IME it is a higher risk migration target with more ontraining req. Many are coming from Slack too, so for this case esp MM is by far the smoother journey.
If tech-averse get cold feet they will never move again & stay on US bigtech.
You either listen to people or you lose them
@xr1st0ph I use Matrix every day btw (with Element). As for SSO, we urge groups that choose MM to steer clear of it. Rather 2FA to email, ideally at their selfhosted MTA.
However some employ OAuth2 for auth flow from selfhosted platforms like GitLab, Nextcloud etc. This can work very well.
Julian Oliver
CRS