PS. With all the Discord stuff, in case you wonder why you never see me promoting Matrix, it’s not because it’s a usability nightmare (which it is) but because it’s made by the kind of people who’d be happy to call ICE a customer.

@fuckfetish @element There used to be Mattermost but I just took a look at their site and it looks like they’ve gone full “military fuck yeah”.

This is what happens when people believe the “we care about human rights blah blah” bullshit of open source enterprise software corporations. The hint’s in “enterprise software” – that’s that they’re about, nothing else.

@aral @element “no, there are no backdoors” is rich coming from the protocol whose previous end-to-end encryption implementation was effectively a no-op and whose current implementation leaks almost every bit of message metadata and is notoriously unreliable on top of it

@aral This is not the case. See https://element.io/en/legal/ethics for the public ethics policy of who we sell to.

@element @aral this is just a page that says “unable to decrypt message”

more seriously, instead of giving a generic “this is not the case” in response to aral’s post that included receipts of the partnerships you’ve entered, are you able to confirm in writing that you will not provide services or technology to ICE or its affiliates? if one of the American police departments you have partnered with has become affiliated with ICE, have you done anything to end that partnership?

@element @aral in the context that these are public institutions and that you’ve been very public in supporting them with partnerships and technology: are you able to show me a case where an organization you partnered with violated items #5 or #6 in the link you posted and forced you to end the partnership?

@aral no?

@aral @element

I suppose in order to care about usability you have to care about people.

@element @aral come on guys, I gave you such a softball with this one. I didn’t even talk about how your stated ethics are neoliberal claptrap desperately searching for a non-paradoxical definition of a good cop who can never exist.

all you gotta do is tell us explicitly you won’t work with ICE and give us an example of the consequences for a public institution that violated your ethics policy.

yes you can share that exact information; you’re receiving public money for your services.

@zzt @aral @element
what beter alternatives do you recommend? I'm looking for something in addition to signal, that doesn't run on big tech infrastructure.

@Tamtam @aral @element none unfortunately. somehow, software as an industry is incapable of making a chat protocol worth a damn.

@zzt @aral @element
That's a pretty big gaping whole opposite a pretty big demand.

@Tamtam @aral @element yes it is and it’s extremely depressing that we apparently can’t do better than this

@zzt @aral @element
what's the crux? we see all kinds of genius open source solutions cropping up, what's the thing about messenger?

@aral Note how @element is not saying what ”is not the case”, while linking to a page clearly and explicitly stating that they’re selling to ”police”.

@zzt @aral @element "No backdoors are included, because none are needed."

@element Bro, this you? Don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining.

@ahltorp @element Oh it’s ok, they only sell to white fascists apparently.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al What is exactly your problem here? Matrix is an encrypted messaging standard - as a maintainer of an Internet standard quite natural to sell consulting services to commercial clients, including your government. This is exactly the same case with HTTP or SMTP, which are widely used by governments and law enforcement, so why single out IM?

@element@mastodon.matrix.org

@kravietz @element Yeah, the path to fascism is paved with one “quite natural” after another.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al

Don't you think you've gone a bit too far with your chain of extrapolated fallacies? You've build a whole chain of hype that goes from "we offer paid consulting to corporate clients including governments" through "we sell to ICE" up to "we only sell to white fascists". Since Matrix is mostly used by edu in Germany and gov in France, how did you make this "white fascist" extrapolation, granted that plenty of government officials in Europe are black or of other non-white origin, e.g. minister Sarah El Haïry, Rima Abdul Malak or Fadila Khattabi in France?

@ahltorp@mastodon.nu @element@mastodon.matrix.org