Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
I&#x27;ve been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is <i></i>exactly<i></i> the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the point at which I started considering leaving.<p>Using a proprietary protocol that doesn&#x27;t allow any form of federation is an unacceptable way to build a global community. Please consider using an IRC based service for group chat or an XMPP based service where 1:1, history, rapid reconnects, and other more complex chat features are required (yes, if you&#x27;re a dev you have to use XML which is annoying, but overall it&#x27;s a well designed protocol, so get over it). This lets you host your own, and (in the case of XMPP at least) if one person wants to use a U.S. based service and another is in Iran they can just sign up for a Belgian account (or wherever). We can&#x27;t afford to let he internet splinter off into siloed tiers based on nationality.