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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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My colleagues and I had set up a nice self-hosted XMPP server which everyone could use to chat in-house without any of the traffic leaving our network. We had it end-to-end encrypted and it was quick and easy. Then management (with the support of a few employees who like hype) switched us to Slack. It wasn't private, it wasn't end-to-end encrypted, all our confidential messages went out to the internet, the boss could technically read anything we wrote, and many people didn't like the UI. Once management got frustrated wit it they switched us to Microsoft Teams. After using that for a year, I miss Slack. Teams is a bloated buggy mess with a UI designed to confuse and no privacy, and it also has all the disadvantages of Slack.
A few of us have secretly switched to Matrix and Element. It's good. Don't tell management.
I guarantee this was a large part of why they forced the switch.
Reminds me of a company I recently got an job interview to (and got declined, but I would've declined anyway).
They were switching around their software every year and are currently in the process of migrating to Teams
@floofloof I would love to move to Matrix/Element but don't know a single person who uses it, so it doesn't seem like it would much benefit me unfortunately. I do still have an account though.
@privsecfoss
Install some bridges. I've managed to remove all those third party chat apps from my devices and just use Matrix to chat to everyone whether they're on Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, etc.
Can hyou point me on some good material to learn about them? I've been reading about those for years but never crossed a guide...
Take a look at this page for someone explaining how they moved from using Discord directly to using it via Matrix.
Thanks, it's very useful, sadly it looks a bit like the stuff of nightmare prone to breaking at the worst possible moment...
It's been rock solid for over three years for me.
My old work actually ran into some issues because they couldn't see DMs/private channels.
Maybe this is a cloud vs. self-hosted thing? It's been a few years since I've worked there though.
In an average workplace that seems like a bit of a losing battle to fight since everyone can message each other on personal phones anyway. But I can see it if it's a workplace that handles sensitive information and restricts the use of personal devices.
My workplace went remote-only. So they don't really stand a chance of preventing us messaging each other on our personal devices. I do try to keep the work machine separate though.
That's honestly a very reasonable ask. Employees should have no expectation of privacy while using corporate owned machines on a corporate owned network. They need to be able to keep tabs on communications in order to ensure company data doesn't leak. It would be crazy to allow people to handle sensitive company data with no oversight.