Privacy Respecting Replacement for facebook groups

Paul Beaudet inof8or at gmail.com
Tue Oct 6 08:59:09 EDT 2020


Another alternative to Mattermost, discord, or Slack is Element/Matrix.
They have free matrix.org servers you can create channels on. The caveat
being that the free servers are slow compared to hosting your own federated
server. Which you can pay for through their service called Modular. Another
con is the concept of "groups" or in the slack world "a collection of
channels", is poorly implemented in the matrix ecosystem last I checked.
Its not like you can send out an invite with all the group's channels
attached, you have to actively promote all of them. Just a couple of
reasons I haven't converted my hiking group from a free Slack instance.

The pros are end to end encryption without much a hasle of using it,
fedaration with other servers, matrix can be "bridged" to other services,
and the ecosystem is completly (permisive) open source to my knowledge.

Not sure about forward and reverse secrecy and how that supposedly works or
doesn't in regards to channels, but its definitely using the signal
protocol for DMs and some modification of it for channels.

Speaking to the social aspect of the problem I think all of the
afformentioned services are more technically interesting than socially
interesting to say it nicely. For my hiking group and the Makerspace in
Manchester, Slack has a slow adoption rate. I don't think its Slack's fault
from a technical perspective. Socially there is friction in adding someone
to a group without them actually being familiar with all people in the
group they might be talking to. Why would you want to socialize with a
group of faceless strangers? Also, what if someone is a slow typist that
can barely interact with people that way anyhow? Text based solutions work
great for us geeks that type for a living, but its realy less appealing for
muggles. These types of "groups" products outside of the geek world end up
getting used for mostly pragmatic anouncements more than anything social.
Like, "where the hike is happening" or "the autobay is being used" or
"Clean up after yourselve's please". These solutions have their value for
sure, I'm just careful to see them for what they are and aren't.

Good luck with your search!

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 11:22 AM Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at hackerposse.com>
wrote:

> On 9/29/20 12:11 PM, Lori Nagel wrote:
> > Hello everyone, I'm trying to figure out a privacy  respecting
> replacement for facebook groups.  I want something that is easy to join,
> (so no requirement that you learn email encryption, system administration
> or anything "hard"  but also something that even Richard Stallman wouldn't
> object to (not that I'm trying to recruit him to join it, just some people
> are really zealots about stuff, if it doesn't have javascript that is also
> a bonus.)
> > I've also considered things like email lists, matermost, irc and forums,
> and I've dismissed them for the following reasons.
> > 1. Lots of people just ignore email thesse days, plus it isn't really
> very real time.
> > 2. irc is just a chat channel, too many bots and while it is real time,
> it doesn't really have any persistance of topics.
> > 3. Forums tend to be too public with just anyone can join it, and while
> you can have private forums or private sections of forums, you need to be
> an administrator to set that all up.  Plus forums tend to have things like
> spralling topics,  and things that either get out of date, or else there is
> no conversation about the subject (thread necromancy vs an empty forum.)  I
> want to create a small group that is highly engaged with the subject,
> chatting everyday etc.
> > 4. Email messages from lists you need to get info from can end up in
> spam if you don't set up email right.  It is too easy to miss important
> messages cause you get consumed with marketing or things you inadvertantly
> signed up for and should not have.
> > 5. Matermost is like discord, but then I would have to set it up, and
> I'm not a professional system admin. If i spend all my time learning
> professional system admin skills, then I won't get to do what I want, which
> is interacting with people.
>  >
>  > Just on a whim I also checked into Dissporia and groups.io, mastadon
> doesn't really have groups yet, and I don't think all the source code for
> groups.io is included.
>
> Somehow there's a lot of confusion about "groups"; people doing a survey
> of social services,
> particular people who don't use Facebook, often mistaken "groups" as
> meaning "what other systems call `lists'",
> which really isn't the case; e.g. Twitter has "lists", which are just
> collections of 1:1 feeds, not
> conversation-topic groups or anything like the "mailing lists" that we're
> relaying these e-mail messages through
> right now. A lot of other systems are based on `the Twitter model', are
> built by/for people who have never used
> an e-mail list, and just don't even understand groups; IIRC there was an
> interesting article I read about this
> sort of mismatch..., I'll see if I can find it....
>
> GNU social actually has *groups*; and if you don't want to invite the rest
> of the world to your groups,
> there are facilities for private groups--both in the "messages posted to
> the group are hidden to outsiders" sense
> and in the "joining the group requires approval" sense (IIRC those are two
> distinct flags that can be used
> together or separately). And it's actually pretty straightforward to just
> set up an entirely private/closed site
> with nothing visible to anyone without a login, if that's what you want
> (it's not clear from your description
> whether you're interested in federation / involving people from elsewhere
> on the internet at all,
> or if you just want a `closed community').
> And GNU social even meets your `even Richard Stallman wouldn't object to
> it' and `doesn't need JavaScript' desires
> (there are some fancy javascript-based front ends _available_ for people
> who want them, like the one that we have
>   enabled by default on <https://nhcrossing.com/>, and that I have
> enabled-but-not-by-default on <https://status.hackerposse.com/>,
>   but "must work fine without javascript" is one of the project's
> requirements for the default UI).
>
>
> XMPP has MUCs; if you're tempted to think of this as "like IRC, just a
> chat channel"..., don't:
> XMPP and its MUCs don't have any of the IRC issues.
>
>
> There are hosting options for both GNU social and XMPP, so that you can
> have them without being "a professional system admin":
>
>         * If you just want XMPP on your own domain, administered by
> someone who really knows what they're doing,
>           the people behind the Conversations and Quicksy apps for
> Android, the XMPP standards-compliance tester,
>           the OMEMO privacy extensions for XMPP), etc..., also provide
> professional XMPP hosting services
>           (and the prices are pretty good):
>
>                 https://account.conversations.im/domain/
>
>         * GNU social can generally be set up on any shared-hosting service
> that lets you run PHP,
>           and there are also actually a bunch of services that actually
> specialize in hosting GNU social specifically,
>           e.g. (I can't vouch for any of these personally, I've just
> pulled this list from a quick websearch):
>
>                 https://www.a2hosting.com/gnu-social-hosting
>
>                 https://www.kualo.com/webhosting/gnu-social-hosting
>
>                 https://www.interserver.net/apps/gnu_social-hosting.html
>
>                 https://www.knownhost.com/gnu-hosting.html
>
>
> I've been using and administering both XMPP and GNU social for years (I
> administer nhcrossing.com as
> a GNU social + XMPP domain for granite-staters, for example), and I'm
> happy to try to help
> people get into them.
>
> --
> Connect with me on the GNU social network! <
> https://status.hackerposse.com/rozzin>
> Not on the network? Ask me for more info!
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