[liberationtech] Time to Switch to Discord & Mozilla Firefox?

[Julian Oliver]

..on Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 12:28:26PM -0700, Yosem Companys wrote:
> Internet Freedom Festival uses Mattermost:
> 
> https://medium.com/iff-community-stories/were-not-a-conference-9cf252199652


Definitely go with self-hosted Mattermost or RocketChat or RiotIM. The former
FLOSS 'team edition' is *astonishingly* performant. I installed and sysadmin a
server with many thousands of members (at risk groups) spanning over 160 teams.
It's extra-ordinarily fast - barely expresses any load on the system, and is
used heavily day in and out.

Discord has among the worst privacy ToS in the chat space, openly presenting
their service as a data harvest for downstream buyers.

"By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with
the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable,
royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce,
modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute,
perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the
Service."

    https://discordapp.com/terms

Discord are actually even worse than Slack as regards our basic rights online,
which is itself quite an achievement. Not sure I can think of a worse partner
for mass team chat!

Cheers,

Julian

> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 12:14 PM Petter Ericson <pettter at acc.umu.se> wrote:
> 
> > On 24 juni, 2019 - axel simon wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 10:17:02PM -0700, Yosem Companys wrote:
> > > > Discord: what Facebook is trying to become.
> > > >
> > https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/how-discord-went-mainstream-influencers/584671/
> > > >
> > > > Why to switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox.
> > > >
> > https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/06/21/google-chrome-has-become-surveillance-software-its-time-to-switch/
> > > >
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > > Discord is interesting in that it's popular and offers people the
> > possibility to have their own community (which they call "server", I
> > believe), but there's nothing free and open source about it.
> >
> > As of this writing, Discord has, as if to prove this point, been globally
> > unavailable due to Cloudflare issues.
> >
> > > Matrix, and its main client Riot, are much more interesting to me
> > currently, as they are (ambitiously) trying to solve multiple problems at
> > once: a modern chat system, with voice and video and file sharing, with
> > end-to-end cryptography, while maintaining a decentralised network
> > architecture so that anyone can run their own instance, join and federate
> > with the rest.
> >
> > Well, to harp on about long lost battles - XMPP did it first. I firmly
> > believe that if all the effort spent on Matrix clients had instead been put
> > into improving XMPP, then it would far surpass the current standards of
> > both. Even so, XMPP is the protocol with several independent and mutually
> > compatible server _and_ client implementations, as well a well-established
> > protocol (and protocol extension process).
> >
> > > Current versions of Riot might not be entirely as slick as Discord, but
> > they are getting better and they are very usable.
> > > Incidently, Matrix has bridges to connect to other chat network (and
> > ideally, bridge them together, hence the name), and can bridge to Discord.
> > So there's a possibility of getting everyone to play nice with each other.
> >
> > Bridging has, time and again, shown itself to be a Much Harder Problem
> > than may be apparent, with massive amounts of boring corner cases and
> > exceptions. We'll see.
> > >
> > > Regarding Firefox vs. Chrome, Firefox has been the only browser (with
> > any relevant market share) that isn't the product of a for profit company
> > for a while. While Mozilla have made questionable descisions at time (and
> > outright mistakes at others), that alone should be a strong argument to
> > consider where one gets their browser from. I recall reading a statement in
> > an article around Chrome's release about 10 years ago by then-CEO Eric
> > Schmidt explaining that at the end of the day, if you want to be able to
> > really control and see what users are doing, you need your own browser.
> > This was when people couldn't quite understand why Google would build its
> > own browser when Firefox had manage to end the Internet Explorer dead lock
> > and they had a good relationship.
> > > That passage really stayed with me (and if anyone were to find it, I'd
> > be very greatful, I can't seem to do so).
> > >
> > > So yes, it's not that surprising that, when push comes to shove, the
> > engineering teams working on Chrome have to bow to the business priorities
> > of Google, the world's (more or less) biggest advertisement company.
> >
> > I'm in complete agreement.
> >
> > > Cheers,
> > >
> > > axel
> > >
> > > --
> > > axel simon
> > > mail/matrix: axelsimon at axelsimon.net
> > > twitter: @axelsimon
> > >
> > > --
> > > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major
> > commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you
> > moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe,
> > change to digest mode, or change password by emailing
> > lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
> >
> > --
> > Petter Ericson (pettter at acc.umu.se)
> >
> > --
> > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major
> > commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you
> > moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe,
> > change to digest mode, or change password by emailing
> > lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.

> -- 
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to digest mode, or change password by emailing lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.


-- 
Julian Oliver
https://julianoliver.com
https://criticalengineering.org
PGP https://julianoliver.com/key.asc
Beware the auto-complete life