Dear Stem ladies, What are the best ways to organise a private group of GC women and mitigate the risk of the conversations being leaked, peered etc? Twitter- there is an option for private chat, but it comes with many limitations, ie bans for naughty women etc Discord - never used it, how suitable would it be for a purpose of a closed group?
What are any other ideas? Do you know any githubs of projects that would be suitable? Any open source? I will be grateful for any recommendation 🙂
Thanks for your reply. What a time that we have to burden ourselves with flying under radars 😒
As this is the STEM group, I'd say our best bet is always to self-host, on our own data-center hosted equipment. But it takes plenty of moving parts to make even the simplest of sites useful.
Thanks for your reply, I agree that having an own box is better than using somebodies services in terms of bans etc.
Our next best bet, for anyone not ready to manage all those moving parts is to do so with someone sympathetically aligned with our politics.
Full disclosure, I do business as YMD Partners LLC, provide hosting on a commercial basis to a handful of drupal based websites, have experience with CiviCRM (the open source CRM designed for political organizing), host my own equipment in a rented quarter rack at a local data center which helped me resist an MRA-motivated DCMA challenge to one of the sites I host and am open to a conversation from anyone looking at their options.
I'd give Matrix a try. https://matrix.org/ . Open-source, decentralized, seems to grow quickly at the moment.
The de-facto default client, Element, supports end-to-end encryption and has a lot of paranoid-level verification tools (i.e. if your buddy logs in from a new device, they usually need additional verification before they can access the encrypted stuff). If you and your group have a good understanding of encryption and security, you can make it a very secure setup.
If you have tech skills, Matrix / Element can be self-hosted relatively easily. The advantage is you get your very own server which is hard to take down. Definitely much harder than banning a Discord group :) The disadvantage is you'll have to care about maintenance, updates and backups yourself. (Or you can pay a company to host it for you, but it can get pricey)
Amazing, thanks a lot, never heard of it and will look it up now😊
All the free stuff can be spied on and shut down. That said, if you’re careful you may be able to fly under the radar. A lot of us are using discord for various groups.