Unicorns
https://blog.wp.paladyn.org/category/unicorns/
https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2021/01/12/it-is-good-to-be-a-tree/
Who owns 'your' contacts
I am seeing TV advertising for WhatsApp, emphasising how private the message data is, which is probably true, but misleading, as the issue is that people have to share their contact metadata.
https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2025/07/04/who-owns-your-contacts/ suggests #XMPP, possibly @snikket_im
If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, you’re not in busiess — you’re in organized crime.
@mikebroberts For me the issue is that Slack/Discord and the like act, in ecological terms, like an invasive species, such as Ground Elder "It can pose an ecological threat owing to its invasive nature, with potential to crowd out native species." Once they have a foothold they are hard to dislodge.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled ... was convincing internet communities to switch from email lists / IRC / another open standard to Slack / Discord. The latest example of a “it's only free while we say it's free" is CNCF’s / Kubernetes's Slack - https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/communication/slack-migration-faq.md - who it appears have *4 days* to backup their history (for a server with 100,000s of users)
Neither Slack nor Discord are reasonable, serious, professional, options for open community discussion. They are either too expensive, and/or involve inappropriate advertising. And who knows when Discord will start pulling this kind of behaviour, too, requiring large communities to pay?
The problem is today when anyone says "can't we just use an email list?" they are pooh-pooh'ed as being horribly out of touch. Hence why even the linked FAQ describes Discord as the only likely exit plan for Kubernetes. What a mess.
@OpenTech_AUC I suggest investigating #XMPP, but in particular snikket as the Instant Messenger/chat equivalent to WhatsApp. It is fully open source, and built out of standard components. You can run up your own server quickly and federate with all the other XMPP servers. Note that WhatsApp is basically an XMPP server (eJabberd) which does not federate. For a University College running your own XMPP server(s) lets you undertsand IM by doing
How to tell that you're valued as a customer in 2025: if you need to wait 45 minutes to be connected to a representative, you know they're not using an LLM
Really, @EUCommission? It's great that you are here on Mastodon, but why not show it proudly instead of linking out only to those Big-Tech-Silos?
@_elena, me and other people at #pubconf25 thought, you should change that please.
Will you?
@ireneista @contrapunctus @grimalkina @Lunaphied Clicking on the ellipsis at the bottom right of Daniel's post and selecting 'Expand this post' show other replies, but the one from @winfriedtilanus is the most useful.
@adamhotep @snopes rather than using Signal, I suggest self hosting an #XMPP server with accounts for key people. Create a group for sharing MFA keys and keep this sensitive information under your control. If your xmpp server was, say chat.snopes.com, then you can leverage DNS security to have confidential discussions with external people too. See [It is good to be a tree}(https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2021/01/12/it-is-good-to-be-a-tree/)
@ireneista @contrapunctus @grimalkina @Lunaphied There is an interesting thread here on Federated Metadata privacy