Yes, the eventual consistency model works more like a blockchain. Sliding windows are only hiding this fundamental flaw of data usage. It has an advantage against censorship, but it isn’t worth it & chat is better treated as ephemeral than permanent (look at how much info is lost behind proprietary Discord communities).

My uploads folder is mounted with noexec. It’s easy to set your storage usage & upload quotas in Prosody or Ejabberd.

They are called gateways https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/

You can do basically everything except multiuser encrypted calls (we use Mumble for this anyhow). But even then Jitsi (& proprietary Zoom & WhatsApp) are built atop XMPP for the backbone of their protocol using XMPP to negotiate connections before handing off for calls.

You can also choose to use technologies that aren’t such resource hogs. The eventual consistency model of Matrix alone & storage costs causud many medium-sized operations to shut their doors. Distroot.org for instance had to move to XMPP to deal with costs—& I have personally seen others.

https://joinjabber.org/

Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.

The default links many folks/projects share specifically log you into Element & on Matrix.org as well which advertizes more folks to be on that centralized node. Furthermore, Matrix provides hosting for some of the other big servers as well even if they are not using matrix.org in the address.

WhatsApp runs on unfederated XMPP; why not just run your own decentralized XMPP node?

You say this but Matrix is largely centralized so it would be easy to get the biggest node to comply. Servers are quite costly to run too which is a big problem.

NixOS is a bear to set up, but it is easy to keep it running for ages since the config is declarative & irons out configuration differences better than other OS since you config will refuse to evaluate.

I am thinking of moving to SailfishOS next year if my LineageOS phone keeps acting up.

GNU parallel

I laugh that the app from my bank throws an error saying all third-party keyboards are malware & unsafe.

I use AnySoftKeyboard still since it has a ton of keyboards & features (tho autocorrect needs improvements).

Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.

I would like to lose the Android phone soon. Signal will not work without an Android/iOS primary device.

But also… Signal requires a phone number for signup where a lot of countries require a passport to get a SIM (unique identifier that is easy to track you). The service is centralized so there is no sort of self-hosting option. There really aren’t alternative clients (not counting mere forks) you can rely on (this helps with the double ratchet encryption of clients with XMPP & Matrix losing keys) unless you go the gateway/bridge route—where the Electron desktop client is pure ass cheeks. Historically they have a big gap in commit history—we can assume there was some sort of CIA/FBI plant. They refuse to use a self-hostable MQTT/XMPP/UnifiedPush option for notifications meaning that the notification data timestamps always flow thru Google & Apple servers. And I am still salty the mobile clients removed SMS support which made it so easy to recommend to family in the first place.

Mumble is perfectly fine for low-latency VoIP for gaming—I think it was the first to even use the Opus codec everyone uses now. Mumble uses a ton less resources than an Electron app. You will want your main chat on another protocol, but this is hardly a barrier.

I use XMPP whenever possible. Requires many fewer resources to run on just about any hardware & I can hand out accounts if needed.

I don’t care for the centralized or de facto centralized alternatives. I regret along with my uncle convincing family onto Signal several years ago.

No it doesn’t. You can resale GPL & you can even ask money just to get access to the source code & still comply with the license. You can host it without sharing anything (AGPL), & apparently you can train a LLM model on it which can then regurgitate the code which also apparently seems like it will be legal.

I would like to see what would happen if copyfarleft & post-open source licenses had more uptake.

It’s tangential, but Mumble is still good for voice only chat. Rarely do we find video to be useful or necessary with a lot of collaborative tools showing multiple cursors per users & programs like Upterm that allow sharing a terminal session.

The generation where I did not have adult responsibilities to prioritize