Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday July 09 2017, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the slack-off dept.

Benjamin Pollack has blogged about why he hates the proprietary chat tool, Slack, which competes with IRC. He covers six points as to why you should too:

"Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life."

[Ed. addition] I had troubles accessing the site, even wget failed to download anything... but lynx.exe on Windows 7 Pro worked on the first try!?! For the curious, here are the six points from the blog post alluded to above:

1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and time-insensitive communication
2. It cannot be sanely ignored
3. It cannot be sanely organized
4. It's proprietary and encourages lock-in
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
6. It encourages use for both business and personal applications


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Monday July 10 2017, @03:56AM (1 child)

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Monday July 10 2017, @03:56AM (#537018) Homepage

    See also my essay from a FL/OSS project perspective: http://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html [pdfernhout.net]

    Key points:

    As a summary, the main issues in using Slack for free/libre software projects include:
    * Proprietary vs. Free; free alternatives exist like Mattermost and Matrix.org and others
    * Sending the wrong message about free software communications out of convenience
    * Reduces interest in free software and public standards for communications
    * Changeable Terms of Service
    * Arbitrary termination of access possible with no archive
    * Online requirement to access your previous messages
    * Retrieves contents of all URLs you include in a message by default
    * Centralizes communications in an unencrypted form
    * Could inject malware, advertising, or disinformation from the central hub
    * Privacy policy does not seem to prohibit much data mining
    * Inappropriateness for large communities (design, limits, costs, privacy, archiving)
    * Your messages may become controlled by a purchaser of the Slack company
    * Standards like email or IRC unify, but services like Slack fragment the global free software community
    * Matrix.org looks like a better choice of standard to support

    Some of these issues also apply to any organization choosing to use a proprietary centralized third-party platform for communications. Others are perhaps ignorable by some free software communities (like data mining risks if they work completely in the open anyway).

    These issues imply some principles and rules for free/libre software projects, which ideally:
    * should use free software tools even if such tools are harder to use at first and need investment to make them better
    * should expand to cover new niches when feasible
    * should promote other free software projects and open standards, not proprietary ones
    * should not ask users to agree to arbitrarily changeable terms by third-parties
    * should not be at risk of having all their communications made inaccessible
    * should support off-line browsing of their works
    * should not access the content of URLs passed around except on request
    * should be decentralized as much as reasonable
    * should reduce the risk of single points of failure in society
    * should use tools that respect privacy
    * should use tools that can scale easily, cheaply, and which can support public archives
    * should not put users at risk of having arbitrary new third-parties control their content
    * should support unifying standards
    * should be on the lookout for emerging free technologies and standards they can build on

    Now, not all free/libre software projects might follow all these rules and principles, depending on how much they are works of expediency versus works intended to support a free/libre culture. For example many FOSS projects use proprietary IDEs or use things like GitHub issues or JIRA (proprietary services). But the further free software projects get from these sorts of ideals, the more problematical the situation becomes.

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
  • (Score: 2) by Bobs on Monday July 10 2017, @06:40PM

    by Bobs (1462) on Monday July 10 2017, @06:40PM (#537251)

    Thanks for the pointer to Matrix: looks promising and I will check it out in more detail.