Can you DM a bit more details? Depending on their size and budget, I can help. I can host their own Mastodon/Matrix server for less than $30/month and provide the tech support to the transition.

What type of organization is it? Could they be convinced to provide an alternative in the fediverse?

Arstechnica is doing blogspam now? This is just a repost from https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870.

Also, for the sake of diversity, maybe it would be better to have these conversations outside of /c/technology? The original article has been posted on !climate@slrpnk.net and !humanscale@communick.news, both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic…

I’ll be happy to read your remarkably insightful articles when you post them…

If you are looking for professional hosting, https://communick.com/services/matrix has been around for some years. ;)

If you just want a free, donation-based alternative: I hear good things from techncs.de

There are so many licenses for this model already,

Open Source != “Source available”. The whole point is that distinction is important, and there are plenty of companies now (MongoDB, Elastic and more recently Hashicorp) that are trying to claim to be “Open Source”, but in fact use licenses that prevent redistribution and impose conditions to use, which means that they are definitely not open.

I’m inclined to believe that you havent actually published any OSS yourself .

There you go. You can find projects that I’ve done for myself, projects that I’ve done while working for companies with real open source products, small libraries that were not core to the company and I convinced them to open source…

You know what they all have in common? All these licenses (MIT, GPL, AGPL) adopting allow code re-use, modification and redistribution.

Please stop gatekeeping OSS, it hurts all of us

First: please don’t use the Royal We. It’s a cheap rhetoric trick.

Second: you know what really hurts me. Companies that use “Open source” as a marketing point and to build community but remove freedoms when it’s no longer in their interests.

Windows source code has never been distributed under open source licenses.

Neither has Grayjay’s, which is why it’s important to have a precise definition of what “Open Source” means.

Respecting a license is a choice.

The source code from windows have been leaked a few times already. Try repackaging it or redistributing with modifications, see how far it will go before you get sued into oblivion.

The point is super simple: if the author of Grayjay has any provision in the license saying anything to the effect of “you can only redistribute this under certain conditions”, then it’s not Open source as defined by OSI. You may not agree with it and you might fully support Grayjay’s opinion, it doesn’t change the fact that it. is. not. open. source.

People build on top of each other’s work all the time. That’s normal and good.

If the people selling are passing someone else’s work as their own, that’s stealing. Otherwise, it’s just Free Software working as intended.

If someone is writing software but wants to prevent redistribution, then go ahead and make a license that forbids it. But then don’t get to call it “Open Source” or anything like that.

This person literally IS trying to just be able to start charging money for someone else’s code.

That happens all the time, never has been a problem, and it should not ever be.

Nice, thank you. I’m still fixing some issues with the deployment, but hopefully it will be working soon. Do you mind if I send you a DM when it is ready?

Can you give me an example of subreddits that you still follow? I’m setting up a fediversed instance on alien.top, which would mean that you’d be able to follow/interact with people still on reddit from the fediverse.

Can you tell me more about this? I’m working on a tool that is attempting to help exactly with this type of migration from twitter/reddit to fediverse alternatives, perhaps I could try to set a Mastodon Mirror instance focused on specific twitter profiles.

I have no idea what compromises you are talking about. I have SO, parents and many more, of all ages, abilities and systems having joined XMPP

“Joining XMPP” is a low bar. I’m talking about it having a viable, usable alternative with features that people are used to expect.

You mentioned siskim as the best alternative for iOS which - looking at the main page and open github issues - does not seem to support reactions or group messaging. In 2023, this is not acceptable for anyone but the most hardcore apologists.

XMPP had that …

XMPP had all that, but there was no single application that implemented all of that. What we had was a hodge-podge of different applications, each trying to have their thing built into the standard but not really ever becoming an universal implementation. The fact that you can point to 11 (eleven!!) different XEPs as a response to “media embeds” should be a point of shame, not of pride.

I understand your defense of open standards and I’d love if the bazaar model could’ve worked for XMPP. Unfortunately, it didn’t. It is taking a Cathedral to come up and implement something that is at very least workable in all major platforms and still open for those that want to deviate from the main effort.

Is the Cathedral perfect? No, of course not. No institution ever is. But I can have my wife and my parents install Element on their phones (android or iOS) and be talking with them in less than 10 minutes, but I can not do the same with XMPP without having to accept a huge amount of compromises.

Instant messaging was a solved problem 20 years ago

• Emoji support
• Reactions
• Share location in real-time
• Threads in conversation
• Media embeds

AFAIK, none of that existed 20 years ago and all of that are features that expected of any basic messenger.

how about the implementation not working so well in practice and with enormous trade-offs, and the leader being essentially a marketing agency running for funds

GOTO 1. It’s the best one that we have (in practice) and it’s open source. If leadership ever becomes a real problem, it can be replaced.

Not to dismiss the work of FOSS developers, but siskin seems quite primitive. It does provide the very basic functionality that you could expect from any messenger from about 10 years ago but that’s about it.

For calls to work, you need to use a stun/turn server

I may try to take another look, but I did have a ejabberd server that was passing pretty much all the tests in the conversations suite, but I did not manage to make calls between pidgin and conversations.

Which is kind of my beef with frustration with XMPP. There was never a whole combination of client/servers that would work consistent.

Another way to put it, is that matrix is technically so complex that only a single party can afford to develop and maintain a working implementation.

As long as this working implementation is working and it is open source with some community oversight, I don’t mind having a clear leader in the project. The alternative is this eternal push-pull of forces that we had in XMPP, where we end up with a fragmented ecosystem which is never universally accessible.

whereas failing to update synapse for a matter of weeks guarantees compatibility issues.

Well, yeah… but since when it is a good idea to let a server unpatched/out-of-date in the public internet?

I agree in theory, but in practice my experience with Matrix has been infinitely better than with XMPP:

• There is no decent client for all major platforms on XMPP. Conversations is “good” on Android, but what is its equivalent on iOS? On the desktop, Pidgin/Adium were ok if you wanted just to chat, but audio/video required a lot of work.
• No decent web-based client for XMPP.
• Setting up e2ee is a pain.
• Setting up MUC is a pain.
• To this day I did not manage to set up video chat on my XMPP server, or at least I never found someone on a different server that managed to connect with mine.

Matrix may be technically complex, but at least it has managed to keep its ecosystem together. Whenever I’ve faced an issue with my server, all I needed to do was upgrade synapse. The “millions of users” in XMPP are mostly all on their own silos, while I am yet to have an issue where I want to chat with someone on Matrix but couldn’t because their client/server was not compatible with mine.

There is whole social network built on top of it. https://movim.eu