Slack - very nice, but sorry: you're centralized

Thoughts on a beautiful commercial chat & collaboration solution

So, after the last Freakshow was a really, really solemn show on the old #IRC, i decided to have a closer look at Slack, it's feature set and also it's policies.

One thing is for sure - slack is a big relief after decades of eye cancer and user experience fails.

From zero, in apparently - astronomically - no time it has arrived where neither ownCloud nor openExchange could reach in more than a decade.But at the same time it fails to address one inevitable feature: Decentralisation.

Slack's 'privacy & security' states:

Our servers are located in Amazon’s AWS data centers. Slack uses four availability zones within AWS’ us-east-1 region, all located in Northern Virginia (U.S.A.)

and

All data transfer is encrypted — whether users are at their computer or on their phone, absolutely nothing goes over the network without encryption. Slack uses 256-bit AES, supports TLS 1.2 for all of your messages, and uses the ECDHE_RSA Key Exchange Algorithm.

So as everybody knows today, this means: data isn't natively encrypted using my own team's key. Your content is technically reachable for Slack itself; in turn also to every evesdropping legislation in the western world.

Decentralisation is so crucial to preserve civil liberties in a digital civilisation, we just shouldn't trust on software that can't be setup on our own servers in the future - at all.

After all that world improvement philosophy, Slack is a commercial player on the US-american market. Therefore, honestly, i dare to call it 'just another walled garden'.