Count me as a fervent critic of Hollywood, but the world isn’t binary and (unfortunately) Hollywood hating it doesn’t automatically make it a good thing for the rest of us. Essentially OpenAI, Google and the rest of the pack of thieves are lobbying to establish themselves as the rulers of a lawless world, and everything you already hate about Hollywood (its inordinate amount of power, the bullying of the weaker that ensue, the corruption and politics around it, …) is meant to get back to us, in worse, with new names at the top.

Indeed that would be the end of the copyright law, but only for the oligarchs.

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.

As someone who’s been using ttrss for decades but would be open to trying something new, what would you say is FreshRSS’ killer feature (and missing killer feature) compared to ttrss?

(Not trying to start a flame war, ttrss feels like a finished project, which is not a bad thing, but I think it’s healthy to wish for more innovation in this space)

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.

One of them, for a 50% premium and worse finishing/less robust

Not in the way of ThinkPads being one of the last bastions of laptop durability and upgradeability, though

I’ve compared the two a while ago, seems to me like slightly different takes around the same core ideas. It’s true that a couple of things in Ansel feel more natural, but it’s not much, and it’s probably not worth the risk (AFAICT the bus factor is one, compat with DT isn’t a goal).

Darktable developers pride themselves for their non-destructive processing pipeline and use it as an excuse for how quirky and inflexible their UX is. I believe they are highly competent on the highly technical bits that ultimately very few people see or understand. Personally I can use it to an extent if I unlearn what other software have taught me over decades of UX conventions.

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?

Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that’s not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can’t wrap my head around.

I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.

XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.

You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.

You can host (tens? of) thousands of XMPP sessions on a RPi at the back of your router or in a field hooked to a PV panel and sim card, and none of “the wealthy” knowing or caring about it, though. The difference with signal is that everyone can do that, and everyone doing it expands the network and makes it more resilient for the benefits of all.

How it works (to simplify) is them giving up on matrix clients ever becoming performant and well behaving on handheld devices (because of the absurd complexity of the protocol), and, instead of doing something about that, just decided to shift the client logic onto the server and castrating the clients (esp. for offline features). It’s also good short-term business because it makes hosting Matrix even more cumbersome and expensive, giving a compelling reason for the type of midscale/corporate deployments previously on the fence about their self-hosting costs (due to poor design and scalability) to just pay Element for that (while probably contemplating an alternative future).

Matrix has the tendency to require all participants’s servers to replicate all of the room state (who joined when, who said what when, whose avatar changed to what when, …) practically forever, and is sucking a ton of bandwidth and CPU for the privilege. It’s pretty bad, unfixable, and, if you ask me, over hyped.

Speaking about XMPP, compared to centralized services, at least the “who talks to whom” and metadata concerns in general are partially mitigated by not having all the metadata converge towards a single host, being able to selfhost, and being able to host behind tor/i2p/…

Other options for what exactly? Telegram practically has the same privacy and encryption guarantees as late 90’s forums and bulletin boards. If you want to learn nothing from that, keep using a centralized nonstandard service deprived of end-to-end encryption!

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”.

Would that make a difference?