There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

From that quote I took “that salmon is ok, but this dish that it’s in is overall good”.

What do you mean by Phase 2?

There’s some stuff about the roadmap for most of this year: https://blog.beeper.com/p/state-of-the-app-spring-2023

I think we need to separate the system from the product. With Reddit they’re the same, with a single owner. With Lemmy/ActivityPub, just like with email, there’s an underlying system that nobody owns. It’s an ecosystem of pieces created by lots of different people.

It is a good thing that people are building products on top of that. Some of them are FOSS and some of them not. As long as no-one gets too much control of the underlying system then that’s great! Users retain choice and can choose FOSS apps if they want, or they can choose something like Sync.

I agree it would be sad if the only apps were paid, but I think a mix is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

It’s great for a server system but I find it less great for a desktop environment. Hardware support take longer to get to the kernel, UI improvements take longer to get to the desktop etc.

You’re going to hear a lot of recommendations, but I strongly suggest going with Fedora for your first distro. It’s the least pain to get up and running with a modern, performant, up to date distro.

Ubuntu these days is its own little corner of design choices, Arch is designed to need configuration, Debian is a (purposefully) a bit slow to keep up. A lot of people say good things about Linux Mint, haven’t used it myself but have used Fedora for years (including at work) and it’s rock solid without much faffing.

Proton is a fork of Wine. It was created by Valve and they have done amazing work getting it to support basically everything. It’s made the steam deck and amazing machine.

Do you have a citation for this? It conflicts with what I know about GDPR.

Mostly GDPR encourages companies to delete personal data they were holding once they no longer have a legitimate use for it. There is a rule where you can demand your data be frozen if so that misuse cam be investigated and in that case you’d be right. But in general companies can and should delete personal data.

It’s more limited because it’s just WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram but Element One does the same thing (and no waitlist): https://element.io/element-one

I use it and it’s great - it’s “just” a paid service that runs on a Matrix server with the relevant bridges running. This is actually the same technology underneath that Beeper is built on (Beeper uses all the matrix bridges to do its work).

The term “user” has some implied level of technical skill (or lack).

If have to use the binocular microscope and soldering station at work (as I did for headphones last month) then I don’t count that as “user replaceable”.

Yeah, after I started using Sync and they did the redesign, desktop browsing felt so slow. Even old.reddit felt clunky compared to Sync.