@mallaidh At the last company I was at they used IRC, but at the time I joined it was SaaS supplied as some contracted out thing. Occasionally there would be some server snafu and the IRC would stop working, throwing all the things into chaos. There would be fraught support calls to the SaaS provider and sometimes the system was unreliable for multiple days at a time.
My comment when I realized this was going on was something like: Come on, we're all hackers of one flavor or another. How hard would it be to set up a local IRC server on the company LAN and run it ourselves? Then at least if there's a problem it can be fixed much more quickly. I estimated that it would take me a couple of hours at the outmost, based upon the setup I already ran at home.
They did eventually do that, although I don't know whether my complaints were causal in the process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 this hackernews thread about a slack downtime is both a riot and aggravating because of how helpless almost everyone acts in response to centralized services failing. there's just no conceivable way that management could change over to internal IRC, or that any alternative to slack exists. only one person suggests using talk(1) to solve the problem, while others make claims such as ircd setup requiring "rare expertise"
just cracks me up that the vaunted capitalist enterprises and venture capital "hackers" are so terrified of setting up an irc daemon for a local network
Picard woke up on the bridge. “How long?” “25 minutes, sir.” “...extraordinary.” And he told them of the lifetime he lived on bulletin board systems, how real it seemed. They found only one thing on the probe: a Commodore 64.
@therealpennyfortheguy That was quite cringeworthy. It's going to take more than tears and some hand-wringing to deal with the divide-and-rule tactics of the police state.
@insom @clacke @msh @jordigh In the 90s, and maybe up to the mid 2000s, it was reasonable to assume one computer per household as the typical situation. The problem which webmail solved was dealing with multiple computers while maintaining a single identity.
@therealpennyfortheguy I liked Lessig when he was doing creative commons stuff. Building out the digital commons is a counter-hegemonic project. But trying to become president isn't. Presidents, kings and other such people are more of the same. Concentrated power always creates evil outcomes of the unchecked ego. Changing the future isn't as easy as appointing a new king.
"It was bitterly ironic that at the very moment the state mounted a comprehensive attack on working-class power, identity politics was parsing the working class into ever more fragmented subgroups. Though identities obviously matter very much, they cannot combine into a new politics because their essence is their separateness. Something else is needed to bring them together in a broader, more integrated, and more coherent politics, something beyond the particularistic concerns of both identities and unions. That 'something' is class."
@jordigh The way I think big companies might try to disrupt the fediverse would be to run their own instance and then provide some tangible reason for users to join - such as paying them to have ads appended to their posts or implementing something like a basic income for all users supported by ads in the stream. Once they gained critical mass they could then embrace and extinguish the protocol, as they did with xmpp.
@clacke @msh @jordigh I used gmail for five or more years, even though my previous mail client had more features. The advantage was that when using multiple machines I didn't need to transfer the data. Once I was running my own mail server though this was no longer a problem, but being blocked by dubious blocklists remains an issue.
@msh @jordigh gab and minds and what-have-you are just trying to be Another Twitter (even though Minds is free software), but Mastodon adds real value because it puts an accessible face on the Fediverse instead of trying to be another silo.
I'm really glad to see there are hundreds of instances, showing that even if non-siloed networking may be confusing to newcomers, and even though the Mastodon name as used in the official messaging confuses the software, the network, and the flagship instance, the community gets it.
But e-mail absolutely provides a warning about the dangers of federation. You mention hotmail and rocketmail, but that was already the first wave of centralization. In the early 90s we got our mail accounts from our ISPs.
The wave happened because of webmail. It was so convenient to use, even though a real IMAP desktop client had better functionality. I am an old grumpy man, but I mainly use webmail, and the one from Big No Evil at that.