Given the recent revelations about FarceBook, giving them any sort of endorsement in the FCC process is not only damaging to the credibility of FCC, it’s the ethical equivalent of encouraging people to swim in a shark tank.
These are all proprietary platforms, which require people to run proprietary JS on their own computers to use them. Fully free code, federated replacements for all of them are ready to use:
- FaceBook: The Federation (Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, SocialHome)
- Slack: Matrix (like a federated, web-native IRC, plus native support for voice and video)
- MeetUp: GetTogether (fairly new project but basic functions are in place, and they plan to federate using ActivityPub
While we’re on the subject, the same is true of GitHub, and all the same features are offered by GitLab, but without the proprietary JS.
If FCC, the people mentoring free code developers, don’t use free code software where it exists, why should anyone?
BTW As I’m new here, Discourse wouldn’t let me provide more than one link (sensible but frustrating), so I’ve put up a linked version of this comment on my own wiki.
EDIT: So I just got up to Exercise #17 and it’s encouraging me to use Google fonts, despite the fact that this creates a totally avoidable dependence on a third-party site owned by a country well know for user surveillance. It even says on that very page that it will break your site for people in countries that block Google. I also see that the FCC site has prominent links to Medium and YouTube, two other proprietary walled gardens. I look forward to helping the FCC community choose user-respecting replacements for all these platforms, and change the exercises to stop promoting them.