I heard a lot of slack accounts has been closed down today. I was wondering if there's a decenteralised alternative to it?<p>I also saw a post in HN that MailChimp suspended accounts without prior notification. What's with these tech companies and closing accounts? It's scary.
I think you'd really like Matrix. <a href="https://matrix.org/blog/home/" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/blog/home/</a><p>Riot is a decentralised team messenger built on top of Matrix. <a href="https://riot.im/app/#/home" rel="nofollow">https://riot.im/app/#/home</a>
IRC was and is the best alternative for Slack. Private IRC servers are easy to install and you can create a federated service with multiple of them. There are many great web or mibile clients as well as desktop ones.
My favorite slack alternative is Zulip; IMO it's got a much superior model; it's as much a real-time forum as chat. It makes threads first class citizens rather than the ugly hack they added in slack.<p>And it's open source, so it's decentralized in that many people host their own. It's not federated though.
What about IRC? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat</a>
I’ll eternally plug XMPP.<p>Openfire is good to explore features with/PoC, and there are lighter daemons to go forward with.<p>Plenty of negativity around XMPP, I think it’s fundamentally a legacy hate for XML but we’re all good at DOM and namespaces and schemas now if we use JS or Golang anyway. XEP database is worth a browse.
Last time I looked, Riot, Mattermost, Friends, and Rocket were good options. This post compares five alternatives: <a href="https://blog.okturtles.org/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-alternatives/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.okturtles.org/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-al...</a><p>(Disclosure: I work with okTurtles)
I remember reading about XMPP several years ago and how it was going to be a universal chat protocol that was also decentralized. I think Facebook and Google chat implemented the protocol at one point
We've been using Rocketchat at my work for some months now after moving from Slack and it's served us well. It's self-hosted and even feels a bit like Slack to use.
Cabal [1] might be of interest.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/cabal-club/cabal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cabal-club/cabal</a>
Haven't used any of these, but this is what a quick Google turns up:<p><a href="http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/" rel="nofollow">http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/</a><p><a href="https://rocket.chat/" rel="nofollow">https://rocket.chat/</a><p><a href="https://mattermost.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mattermost.com/</a><p><a href="https://zulipchat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://zulipchat.com/</a>
For "what's with these tech companies and closing accounts?", blame spammers and scammers. They're generally cleaning up fake accounts, and no filter is perfect - real accounts will get caught in the net. Blaming conspiracy and oppression is shortsighted. The best protection is to make sure there is no way anyone will confuse your account with spam or scam, and the best way for that is to be a paying customer, rather than a free user.
I wouldn't worry about this seriously. Do companies shut down accounts, yes. Do they do it poorly sometimes, yes. Should you always make sure your business is protected against ANY third party service you use, yes. Does that mean you should avoid using these services, no.<p>You don't know the full story to these cases, you don't know what the person was doing/sending for fact. All we have is a shaming event posted on HN or reddit etc. Not saying the companies are right here, but you are considering things to be fact based on one side of the story and generally no actual facts beyond someone's statements. Someone stating something doesn't make it a fact, it is an opinion, proof is much different.<p>I have heard this about Stripe many times saying they shut down accounts, or Square as another example. I had my own situation where Square held up a little more than 20k in payments until I proved some details about my business. I did what they asked and had my money released in 24 hrs because I was within the terms of service and I had facts. 9 out of 10 times when people have these issues they are outside the terms of service or are playing loose with facts.<p>There are exceptions of course too, myself and many others have posted proof/facts around Paypal's deceitful practices of holding money even when you are within the terms of service and have called them ahead of time as required for certain events/transactions.<p>Also, just as a note, sometimes companies must act based upon legal situations and do something that they normally wouldn't. This happens more often in the U.S. when a company is dealing with foreign individuals or companies and not its own citizens. This is similar to any other Country and their governments enforcing their laws/rules, except at least in the U.S. there generally is some court involvement which provides some checks and balances.