Re: Privacy Respecting Replacement for facebook groups

[quiliro]

Dankon! Thank you very much for this information. It is very useful for
me. The Internet is flooded with information to be used by a web browser,
which is now a universal application installer. I am totally freaked by
that. I like the take you propose: Simple way to exchange files with
versioning on a safe protocol such as ssh or vpn.

On Sun, October 4, 2020 7:02 am, Jean Louis wrote:

>
> Person asked for simple thing, like chat, no big setup, I have
> recommended XMPP, yet friendica on many servers also offer group
> creation. As long as it is hosted by somebody else it is never enough
> private, as server administrators can enter into the data.

It looks good. But there is always the problem of privacy and anonymity. I
guess there are ways to encrypt XMPP and there is Tor for anonymity. But I
am not sure if Tor is very secure. I have heard i2p is more secure. Also,
I have heard of tox.chat . I think the terminal client can be used even
from inside Emacs. I have heard of wahay.org regarding easy p2p encrypted
private (with regards to spying) communications. It looks nice for end
users.

> I have no idea of that software as since 2 decades I am using free
> software, and I do collaborate with many staff members and they
> collaborate between themselves, major communication type we use is
> email and XMPP chat, then comes Mumble voice speech server, that is
> about all. Email we use mostly with encryption.
>
> Tasks and expenses are handeld in Org Mode tables and in accounting,
> such are sent by email semi-automatically to staff members who then
> review the tables and send them back. If I would have real-time
> editing, I would not know who edited what, at what time, which is
> important in editing expenses tables.

[...]

> It is easy to work collaboratively on documents, as that is how
> programmin is done by using various revision systems, which are best
> for collaboration.

[...]

> I would myself, simply setup:
>
> - git or any other revision server
>
> - have staff members learn the workflow of editing and pushing files
>   into server
>
> - using Emacs to do the editing
>
> That can then work for anything, for web pages, new articles, just
> anything. As we are speaking, one person is receiving thousands of
> images over ethernet by simple scp transer, and rotating them, imagine
> if I would be using NextCloud for such task, I would get crazy and
> everybody in team. But using simpler tools which are already there,
> one can collaborate very well.
>
> scp or secure copy from OpenSSH suite is one good system for
> collaboration.
>
> UNIX or POSIX or POSIX-like file systems are good systems for
> collaboration.
>
> File managers today can bind to remote servers over scp/ssh lines,
> that is good system for collaboration.
>
> Installing ssh on server is so much easier than installing complicated
> web based whatever.

[...]

> File system is basic collaboration
>
> NFS and Samba is network file system, it is also basic collaboration,
> mostly inside of local area network, which is used internally.
>
> SSH file system is for collaboration and document management over
> networks.
>
> VPN is used to secure private networks.
>
> Files are edited by text editors and various text processing
> software.
>
> Mounted file systems can be easily accessed by users, edited,
> collaborated.
>
> Revision systems are mostly used for collaboration and editing of
> various files, but are not well known to general public. Yet that is
> most simplest and most safe, stable way for editing files in
> collaboration. Once workflow have been learned, person can perform.
>
> I have staff members who had no previous knowledge of computers. I am
> focusing on their workflow, they learn the workflow well, the can
> perform.

It would be nice to have a manual to mount everything needed in a server
with what you describe and the required setup on the workstations. The
best would be serverless, p2p infrastructure on the style wahay.org has.
No one would need to depend on the internet lords (domain name and public
IP address) or learn how to set up a server. Failing that, the
infrastructure you describe would be nice to set up with a complete guide
(not pieces with links) in order to have an integral and simple
configuration. (Please do not feel obliged to construct it. It is just an
extremely useful thing to have in order to build a simple, yet efficient
and modern technological infrastructure, without the bloat.)