[Festival] Slack alternatives (and why IRC is butts)

[Griffin Boyce]

Hi all,

   What strikes me is that all the options out there are all very 
slightly broken in some way.

   Slack is really nice, but there are definitely barriers for most 
netfreedom peeps.  On the one hand, the interface is very intuitive, you 
can create private discussion rooms for individual teams/topics.  On the 
other hand, it's a walled garden, JavaScript is required to use the 
site, the code isn't open-source, and they don't support content 
encryption-at-rest by default [1].

   I agree with Meejah that Slack is likely not an ideal spot for the 
IFF, because we'll blow through the free tier's 10k message limit pretty 
fast.  There's a similar FOSS project called Mattermost which could be a 
reasonable Slack alternative for a project like this.  However, the IFF 
is *not* a "large open-source project".  That really implies that most 
people using this 1) know enough about IRC to protect themselves (more 
on that below) and 2) that they want something that is basically just 
text [3].

   I'm on a few projects that use Slack [2], and it works pretty well.  
The upside is that it logs everything, so if you want to remember what 
someone said during a meeting or about a topic, you can just search for 
it.  This is also the downside, as various discussions happen 
organically (on IRC) that really shouldn't be logged.  Incidentally, 
*everything* on IRC is being logged by someone.  Everything.

   IRC has major problems.  There's the usual problems with misunderstood 
tone and lag, and the security problems around having IP broadcasting to 
∞ people if you don't have Tor or a VPN enabled.  (And if you do have 
Tor enabled, some nodes are blocked, some nodes are overloaded, so you 
might miss out on the conversation).  IRC is safest when run several 
layers away from your actual computer, which is the greatest indictment 
of a service I can give.  I would be happier with IRC if the meeting 
rooms were privately hosted, with cloak on by default, but I'm a 
notorious IRC hater ;-)

   Jabber solves some of the problems that IRC has -- your IP address is 
not visible to other users by default, you can create discussion rooms 
with varying levels of privacy, and you can open registration to the 
general public if you really want to.  Anyone with the technical 
know-how to run a secure <service> should feel free to set one up for 
the IFF community for everyone to play with.

   Email should not even really factor in as a realistic option IMO.  
"Email as secure communication" is a fallacy and we all know it [4].

   Overall, the silo-ing can be pretty intense with any of these 
solutions.  Slack helps bridge the gap, but not if a large subset of 
participants refuse to use it.  I could say the same about any of these 
options, for sure, which is why it's important to come to a real 
understanding about needs on all sides rather than say "just use IRC" 
etc.

best,
Griffin

[1] (a project is underway to change this)
[2] People are paying about $40/month for me to be in their Slack 
channels. The cost adds up fast.
[*] IRC is so ancient that there are logs reporting the 1991 Soviet coup
[3] Yayyy, text. Can't get enough of that unformatted text with no 
images and rudimentary categorization.
[4] http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/imc/2015/papers/p27.pdf

-- 
“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
― Salvador Dalí