I am just thankful so far that Signal has let WhisperFish exist as an alternative—even if it goes against what they say—which gives me an alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.

DeltaChat literally turns email into something more akin to chat mostly by just changing the UX. Matrix is less like chat tho & more like editing a document & syncing changes with someone but this is besides the point…

Lemmy would have the exact same issue if 90% of users were on Lemmy.ml or servers they hosted, but it is fairly distributed & not as heavy to run (nor does it have some startup mentality behind it trying to ‘disrupt’ chat by inventing new words like “bridges” instead of “gateways” & so on to put off casual users from the scent that chat has a well-worn path development for decentralization since the ’80s)

It takes 2 to tango. It’s like trying to send an email from a self-hosted email server without following all of Google’s rules/guidelines… which means you won’t be able to send a message to most (sadly). Most folks are either on Matrix.org or a server they host in practice… you alone self-hosting will only help if you only communicate to folks also doing similar… to which if just one user from Matrix.org (or a server they host) joins your chatroom, then literally everything that is being & has been said in that room will now be synced to Matrix.org by its protocol design. With the expense it takes to self-host Matrix for a community, almost all medium-sized communities had to drop it on RAM & storage costs alone which caused most of those users to move to Matrix.org. You can run a single-user host with some efficiency, but most users are not technical enough for this. The only option to use Matrix & keep costs down is to unfederate… at least with Matrix.org (& servers they host), but that now defeats a huge part of the argument those saying Matrix is federated/decentralized.

It isn’t decentralized in clients or servers either. Almost all servers must run Synapse which is resource intensive but actually has the features folks expect as the de facto reference server & Element is the only viable client considering most users will be using Element-exclusive features like threading, polls, etc. where protocol hasn’t done a great job of providing a progressive enhancement approach to its features & so folks on alternative clients straight-up just don’t see / can’t interact with this stuff.

The accessibility to small–medium-sized communities matters if you want a healthy federated/decentralized network …but luckily there are alternatives.

AFAIK, chat.mozilla.org was set up on modular.im, now element.io, which if it still using the same host, is owned by Matrix.org. So even using a different host means Matrix.org might still have your metadata.

You’re always here to talk to sense into the folks :)

OMEMO is a mixed bag. Some clients are still preferring older versions that aren’t the best for security & almost every client does a bad job explaining that new keys are being used need to be verified… Gajim only recently gave a decent in-client pop-up for it, but it’s doesn’t work all the time. That said, this is basically the same issue Matrix has in the space. Both are based on libsignal if not outright using it, except Signal gets a point of privilege in basically having just one client …one that must be on Android/iOS according to their statements… so they can do a ‘better’ job managing who, what, & how many keys are being used. Many XMPP clients will recommend blind trust by default just because it can be a real hassle to deal with multiple clients & users coming back to less-often-used devices. There have been proposals to fix it, but I haven’t seen anything really take off (meanwhile considering just using the PGP encryption option as less flaky).

It’s worth following the project but it’s a bit too new & the funding aspect leads me to question how it will work in the long run (& being written in Haskell is neat, but boy does it have a lot of churn & maintenance issues in its ecosystem).

Matrix is centralized too in practice … & syncs even more metadata than Signal so I wouldn’t call that an upgrade—especially when you see how slow the clients & servers are.

Matrix.org is centralized like Signal (you can say Matrix is not centralized on paper, but in practice this isn’t remotely true). Both are stockpiling metadata in the West… what’s worse is Matrix’s eventual consistency model means syncing metadata to all servers is a by-design requirement (& also why all servers & clients are slow). There are options like Snikket to take all the hard parts of self-hosting out of the equation, but finding someone you can trust to host a server might be worthwhile. I would be wary of anything centralized.

I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.

I really wish Arcan were further along.

Sad thing is cheap domains like xyz get flagged a lot for “security”. 😥

You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.

Since Git can already be federated (no MS GitHub required), take a look at Darcs & Pijul for a better version control model based on Patch Theory. Tooling needs help, but fundamentals are sound.

Everything in the XMPP world is worth checking out. Movim is one of the more interesting projects bring a social media option to the platform & pushing boundaries for clients that is cool to see—as well as Libervia for setting up communities.

Nail on the head… it isn’t about one particular service or protocol but the philosophy of federation

Not an endorsement of WhatsApp but they aren’t duplicating the metadata everywhere since it is centralized. I believe they run a fork of Ejabberd as well for the platform which is orders of magnitude more scalable & uses less resources than any of the Matrix servers—& they have to me RAM intensive due to how they duplicate that data…

No.

It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.

Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.

Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.

Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.

& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.

The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky

If we care about the planet & sustainability, we would not be recommending a eventual-consistency model for chat communications. Matrix’s protocol is so wasteful & expensive.

Matrix is centralized around Matrix.org or servers they run tho. Since the protocol is a big data/metadata sync by design & medium–large-sized servers are expensive to run, almost all of metadata is with Matrix.org—of which was originally funded my Israeli intelligence & I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting data out of it to this day.