Matrix has gone open core, XMPP is safer

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, open standards with similar or better capabilities already exist. Don’t create another silo, contribute to making e.g. XMPP clients better.

but it taught us that you always want more than one method of contact, as a a rugpull can happen at any time off any whim.

Being on the internet long enough taught me instead (by having seen countless providers rise and fall since the early 00’s) to self-host my comms and prefer open federated protocols. I switched to XMPP, I have no regret, everyone that matters made the move painlessly a decade ago or so.

leftist activism like tiktok

Lol, you might have missed a few news cycles if that’s your take. Tiktok has been well documented as a vector of foreign interference while propping up right wing populist movements.

Isn’t that the essence of the issue, that those models are loaded with biases, that might or might not overlap with dominant ones in inscrutable ways, hence producing new levels of confusion and indirection?

If you have the impression that there’s a dominant, homogeneous “mass” sharing the same opinion, you are right there in the middle of an information bubble and a victim of those “algorithms”.

You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

It’s part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:

• is that thing opensource?

• self hostable?

• does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?

• can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?

• if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?

• is it profitable?

• are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?

• is it at risk of being acquired?

• is it subject to foreign/unlawful interference

Etc Etc

Until i can give a laptop with linux to my neighbour without also needing to also provide support, its not there yet.

I mean, isn’t your neighbor already getting Windows support from his son or nephew anyway? Let’s not pretend that there exists a magical and perfect OS for those who don’t want to learn one. Some learning is required, whichever the OS, and I would be hard to convince that a current preinstalled Linux is more difficult to handle than a current preinstalled Windows.

Windows has for itself that it’s a devil most people know/got exposure to (thanks to Microsoft schemes and monopolistic practices), there is nothing inherently better or easier about it (and arguably quite the opposite).

What I found compelling about the sync is that you can have your other machines’ histories there with you, but in the background, behind a different shortcut, just in case you need to re-run or check that command you ran somewhere else few years ago…

As I said, I haven’t used that yet, but that’s in many ways more appealing than having to SSH onto said machine (assuming it’s even possible).

Thanks

I figured starship.rs but not the CTT part, any pointer to help me?

Been using it for months, haven’t gotten to use the sync yet, my only regret so far is that it doesn’t support case insensitive search which is a pretty big deal for me unfortunately.

What is “old arse” to you might be blazing fast and great for someone else (potentially in a less fortunate area of this world), and besides that, no matter your or my sensobilities, if it works, it works and should be kept that way as long as it has a purpose and the hardware permits it.

I can’t pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn’t really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element’s single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.

Matrix problems become unmanageable at scale, but the effects of the underlying complexity can be felt long before: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07

If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is practically about handing the client state over to the server (what they refer to as “sliding sync”). Realistically, this is an admission that the protocol is too complex to be handled efficiently on the user’s devices. I’m not saying there are not clear benefits (and new trade-offs) to the approach, just that in the grand scheme of things the complexity is shifted elsewhere (and admins foot a larger bill).

Yup, like pretty much everyone else :) https://nlnet.nl/project/XMPP-MLS/

Please, don’t recommend pidgin, it’s a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out https://dino.im/ or https://gajim.org/ if you are more on the “power-user” side of things :)

I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn’t make the cut still applies today. Here’s what I responded to a sibling post: https://programming.dev/comment/5408356

In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won’t disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.