[Festival] IFF's now on Slack!

[Ximin Luo]

On 27/10/15 11:36, Jillian York wrote:
> On 10/27/15 11:27 AM, holger krekel wrote:
>> Is it a good idea to tie the "internet freedom" community to Slack
>> Technologies, a large for-profit highly venture-capital driven company
>> in silicon valley?  And to help their marketing by advising people
>> to shout "i want to be a slacker"?  Centralized easy-to-surveil 
>> communication systems are the problem, not the solution in my view.

Thank you holger for making this point. I was going to myself but wondered if anyone gave a shit...

> Is it a good idea for the "Internet freedom" community to take US
> government funding? Is it a good idea for us to use Twitter? I'd argue
> those are far worse things than Slack...
> 
> Sorry, but your argument is overwrought and unnecessary. You don't have
> to join the Slack channel. And you certainly don't have to interrogate
> the organizers of the conference publicly because you've got a
> holier-than-thou attitude about which tools are best.
> 

Why this reaction? There are different reasons for taking govt funding and using twitter, than using Slack.

Government funding: hard to market "internet freedom" in current economy, need to get shit done regardless, need to get paid.

Twitter: reaches a wide range of people, good for publicily.

What is Slack good for that IRC doesn't provide? Formatting and smileys are more important than running your own infrastructure, depending on 3rd parties that don't respect you, who don't release their source code, and have a crappy history of protecting their users' data?

(I also support trying out things like Mattermost, if other people want to play with that.)

We make compromises working in this world whilst trying to achieve our principles, but we must *never* forget the fact that these are *compromises*. Don't let those things become a norm in your head.

And this is not about having a "holier-than-thou attitude". Remember that from the point of view of the rest of the world, the entire "internet freedom" community has a "holier-than-thou attitude". holger was in no way insulting or aggressive.

X

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