

I am just thankful so far that Signal has let WhisperFish exist as an alternative—even if it goes against what they say—which gives me an alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
he/him
I am just thankful so far that Signal has let WhisperFish exist as an alternative—even if it goes against what they say—which gives me an alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
DeltaChat literally turns email into something more akin to chat mostly by just changing the UX. Matrix is less like chat tho & more like editing a document & syncing changes with someone but this is besides the point…
Lemmy would have the exact same issue if 90% of users were on Lemmy.ml or servers they hosted, but it is fairly distributed & not as heavy to run (nor does it have some startup mentality behind it trying to ‘disrupt’ chat by inventing new words like “bridges” instead of “gateways” & so on to put off casual users from the scent that chat has a well-worn path development for decentralization since the ’80s)
It takes 2 to tango. It’s like trying to send an email from a self-hosted email server without following all of Google’s rules/guidelines… which means you won’t be able to send a message to most (sadly). Most folks are either on Matrix.org or a server they host in practice… you alone self-hosting will only help if you only communicate to folks also doing similar… to which if just one user from Matrix.org (or a server they host) joins your chatroom, then literally everything that is being & has been said in that room will now be synced to Matrix.org by its protocol design. With the expense it takes to self-host Matrix for a community, almost all medium-sized communities had to drop it on RAM & storage costs alone which caused most of those users to move to Matrix.org. You can run a single-user host with some efficiency, but most users are not technical enough for this. The only option to use Matrix & keep costs down is to unfederate… at least with Matrix.org (& servers they host), but that now defeats a huge part of the argument those saying Matrix is federated/decentralized.
It isn’t decentralized in clients or servers either. Almost all servers must run Synapse which is resource intensive but actually has the features folks expect as the de facto reference server & Element is the only viable client considering most users will be using Element-exclusive features like threading, polls, etc. where protocol hasn’t done a great job of providing a progressive enhancement approach to its features & so folks on alternative clients straight-up just don’t see / can’t interact with this stuff.
The accessibility to small–medium-sized communities matters if you want a healthy federated/decentralized network …but luckily there are alternatives.
AFAIK, chat.mozilla.org was set up on modular.im, now element.io, which if it still using the same host, is owned by Matrix.org. So even using a different host means Matrix.org might still have your metadata.
You’re always here to talk to sense into the folks :)
OMEMO is a mixed bag. Some clients are still preferring older versions that aren’t the best for security & almost every client does a bad job explaining that new keys are being used need to be verified… Gajim only recently gave a decent in-client pop-up for it, but it’s doesn’t work all the time. That said, this is basically the same issue Matrix has in the space. Both are based on libsignal
if not outright using it, except Signal gets a point of privilege in basically having just one client …one that must be on Android/iOS according to their statements… so they can do a ‘better’ job managing who, what, & how many keys are being used. Many XMPP clients will recommend blind trust by default just because it can be a real hassle to deal with multiple clients & users coming back to less-often-used devices. There have been proposals to fix it, but I haven’t seen anything really take off (meanwhile considering just using the PGP encryption option as less flaky).
It’s worth following the project but it’s a bit too new & the funding aspect leads me to question how it will work in the long run (& being written in Haskell is neat, but boy does it have a lot of churn & maintenance issues in its ecosystem).
Matrix is centralized too in practice … & syncs even more metadata than Signal so I wouldn’t call that an upgrade—especially when you see how slow the clients & servers are.
Matrix.org is centralized like Signal (you can say Matrix is not centralized on paper, but in practice this isn’t remotely true). Both are stockpiling metadata in the West… what’s worse is Matrix’s eventual consistency model means syncing metadata to all servers is a by-design requirement (& also why all servers & clients are slow). There are options like Snikket to take all the hard parts of self-hosting out of the equation, but finding someone you can trust to host a server might be worthwhile. I would be wary of anything centralized.
I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.
I really wish Arcan were further along.
Nail on the head… it isn’t about one particular service or protocol but the philosophy of federation
No.
It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.
Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.
Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.
Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.
& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.
The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky
XMPP for reliable, lightweight, & stable. SimpleX is a project worth keeping tabs on as well.
In practice Matrix isn’t decentralized in the slightest. Almost every account is on Matrix.org or a server they host. The whole protocol is a data/metadata syncing machine that isn’t good for privacy & is prohibitively expensive to run anything beyond a single-instance since all history of all users in all rooms necessarily needs to be synced onto the server. Many medium-sized servers have shutdown on storage costs & system resource requirements (especially RAM)—which forced its users often to flock back to Matrix.org. This is wild since it is mostly text chat.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
Linux is awesome
& so are you ^🥁 1, 2, 3, 4… 🎸^
There is compression & then there is whatever mangling Instagram does. But these are things an admin should be able to tweak as the defaults are are just not good enough for photography. You can’t be stripping color profiles, forcing sRGB, & camera data for these contexts—not to mention just trying to get a crisp image. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were using WebP too 🤢
I have waited so, so long. Recently color profile support (ICC) was merged & upstreamed to many repos so I finally reswitched back to Wayland since my colors are no longer broken on my displays.
Many mail providers give you access to CalDAV + CardDAV which have a wide array of mature technology to sync contacts, calendars, todo lists on basically all platforms. If you move away from Protonmail as primary, you would get access to this normal service as well as being able to use IMAP without paying & using some middleman application just to use email. I do not pay for a lot of services, but I get a lot of value out of keeping email + CalDAV + CardDAV off-premise with the cost of €1 per month.