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.
The “F” in FOSS doesn’t stand for fascism.
@element https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110340953550548309
@aral this looks like a promising solution that might work for some people https://peergos.org/
I haven't fully research it fully but might test it soon.
@aral This is not the case. See https://element.io/en/legal/ethics for the public ethics policy of who we sell to.
@element Bro, this you? Don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining.
@aral Your position implies that the police is an enemy and that states shouldn't have any kind of law enforcement called "police". But can you pledge that you will never, ever call the police, nor expect any police intervention or involvement, no matter what?
States are human super-organisms and their existence is both necessary and unavoidable in our world. And states need a police force to be effective. @element
@aral 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?
@ahltorp @aral @element Personally I think it's a big difference between selling to police, so they can be independent from US oligarchical tech companies, which will give all their data to the fascist US government if asked, and to sell to the Gestapo.
You don't have to agree with me, of course, but I don't see for example my own country disbandoning its police force any time soon, and I'd rather not have them reliant on MS Teams or the like. So imo Element having this distinction is good
@forteller I don’t necessarily agree completely with @aral, but I think Element should be really clear here. They posted a non-denial denial while referring to a policy that suggests ICE would be a welcome customer. I don’t have any other information on who they’re actually selling to, I’m only judging their behaviour.
@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?
@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.
@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 @fuckfetish @element Zulip is a better alternative.
![[object Object]](https://media.mas.to/accounts/avatars/109/287/758/133/964/366/original/0f3099c0adfb36a0.png "[object Object]")
