sam
1 year ago
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100%
Update: since there are no volunteers to run it / pay for it, and the general consensus has been to shut the instance down, I've gone ahead and replied to the email letting the Lemmy folks that were generously hosting it for us know that we appreciate it but that they can shut down the instance. Thanks everyone for participating and being a part of this community experiment!
sam
1 year ago
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100%
I think the general consensus so far is that the instance should shut down, but there have been a few commenters suggesting that they want it to stay. I tend to think people far undervalue the cost of hosting their own services, so to try and make it a bit clearer if someone did want to keep it up I think they'd need to consider the following factors:
- Multiple people to cover the cost of hosting, this needs to scale with the amount of traffic
- Multiple volunteers to handle operations, this needs to scale with the amount of traffic
- Multiple volunteers to handle moderation and accept registrations, this needs to scale with the number of users
- Someone willing to promote the instance (assuming we want it to grow, this may or may not be the case and it's fine if we want it to just be a small space for a few XMPP projects), this workload will inversely scale with the number of users
- Some sort of governance and accountability model; this would need to scale with the number of users
Some of this we've gotten away without so far, and some of it can start small and scale to multiple volunteers later if the instance grows, but I really think you need a few people on all of them to prevent burnout and keep the community sustainable. I do think there's harm in just leaving the community around to languish: this makes it a target for spammers if it's poorly moderated, contributes to making the network look large but dead (as opposed to small and growing), and, if it becomes unstable, may create a bad experience for anyone using it when it's down a lot and there aren't volunteers to fix it.
If we have trusted volunteers (or maybe we can find a way to hand over the database dump without giving away anyones personal data, reset passwords and purge profiles or something; this is less important to figure out right this moment and we can figure it out only if/when we go to do the handover) for any of this, I think we can probably hand the reins over to them. If not, we can't keep the community going whether people want to or not :)
sam
1 year ago
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100%
I'm not sure; same as anything else, I'd imagine: moderation and ops is probably the most time consuming, then if course the fiscal cost of the server and image hosting
sam
1 year ago
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100%
That requires us to find someone to take over hosting and maintenance, which is what the post was about.
sam
1 year ago
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100%
That's what this post is about; if someone wants to keep it, we can, but it does cost a lot to run services like this (financially, in moderation hours, in operations, in security, etc.) and a lot of people would have to take that cost on. Given that there hasn't been much engagement at all on this server, I suspect we don't have anyone who wants to keep it running.
Hi all, per the discussion in General we are trying to decide what to do with this Lemmy instance. I think that I'm not going to be keeping the Mellium Project on Lemmy either way (of course, other community members are welcome to take over / post about it, I'm not personally very important in this regard :) ), see my post in the discussion thread for why. If anyone else wants to keep a Mellium channel going, let me know and I'll make you a moderator here (or send you whatever assets you need to create a channel elsewhere if this instance gets shut down)
sam
1 year ago
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100%
My personal opinion is that the results of the experiment are that Lemmy is not a good platform for community building. I'm glad we gave it a shot, but I probably won't be using it anymore either way for a few reasons:
- The moderation just isn't very good (we still have Nazi imagery and accounts on the server from the early spam wave with no way to purge them, though they are blocked and can't post anymore but the images and what not are still being served as far as I can tell)
- The UI is generally confusing and hard to use, things aren't logically grouped, etc.
- The federation capabilities don't seem to actually be very good (I'm sure this will improve, but there's other software out there that's good already so if we wanted to try this again I think we should use something else instead)
- Generally buggy/over-javascripty UI
- Generally hard to follow new content on Lemmy: it tries to imitate reddit too much I think so stuff that's "Hot", whatever that means, get surfaced but you have to constantly switch over to a non-algorithmic timeline if you just want to see what you've missed
I'd still like to find a way to build community between XMPP projects, but I've started to think it may be better if projects interact with other existing instances more that aren't focused on XMPP, this spreads the message a bit better. I forget who made this argument early on, so apologies for not letting you know directly, but I think the experiment has brought me around to this way of thinking as well. I will follow up after we decide what to do with a list of possible places that it might be good for XMPP projects to join if I can remember to put it together.
Hi all, It's been over a year and the folks hosting the XMPP Lemmy experiment at community.xmpp.net have asked us to start transitioning it to our own hosting. I'm writing to see what the community would like to do, or if anyone wants to take over hosting? The instance was never very widely used, so I think we can probably shut it down safely as well without too much loss. What do you think?
sam
1 year ago
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100%
Weirdly, my dog does this. The first time I planted potatoes I hadn't checked them yet and one night my dog came back from going outside and dropped a potato in my lap. The next day he did it again and I went out to the garden and found two holes where he'd been digging them up.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
There's also a blog post here: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/cheogram-android-stickers-2023
sam
2 years ago
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100%
If you're in the U.S. you may even be able to get a free (or at a substantial discount) commercial heat exchanger later this year: https://www.hvac.com/resources/inflation-reduction-act-heat-pump-rebates/ Not quite as fun as the DIY version though!
Sopranica
sam
2 years ago
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100%
I haven't had a chance to try this yet, but just downloaded the update. The video really makes it look like a unique way to keep track of them, and I can't wait to see if it works!
opencollective.com
We are excited to announce that the NLnet Foundation will be supporting the development of end-to-end encryption in the Mellium library with a grant from the NGI Assure Fund! We will be implementing the OMEMO encryption protocol and related technologies.
opencollective.com
TL;DR we're looking for a paid contributor from the EU to help with whatever they feel like with whatever flexible hours they feel like working! This is part of a grant application. See the post for more details.
Someone at work was throwing away an old hitch mount bike rack a while back. I hated to see it go to waste, so I built a "hitch" for the wall of my garage:  
sam
2 years ago
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100%
Not that I'm aware of
sam
2 years ago
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100%
I will say that it's worth being careful: there's no option for a backup XMPP account (so your account better have perfect uptime) and I very rarely have incoming phone calls actually work (calling out works, calling in is pretty random, most of the time it doesn't even ring). Also the UI on the client is still pretty bad (especially for group texts, which are almost unusably bad).
All that being said, it's a great service, just know what you're getting into before you make it your primary phone number, it's not nearly as polished as they make it sound.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
It only gets full of memes if that's the culture you create (I hope we won't do that, so far it seems like we haven't). And I definitely wouldn't follow everything on a high-volume chat, when you're on and a topic of discussion you're into starts or you just feel chatty, then you follow along, otherwise it's not necessary. But that's just how I do chat rooms, YMMV.
Do you like #bicycles or #cycling? Do you also use an #xmpp compatible chat service? Join our new group chat at [bicycles@conference.samwhited.com](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join). Hopefully this can become a fun community space to share pictures, post routes, and generally chat about bicycles. [Join us!](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join)
Do you like #bicycles or #cycling? Do you also use an #xmpp compatible chat service? Join our new group chat at [bicycles@conference.samwhited.com](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join). Hopefully this can become a fun community space to share pictures, post routes, and generally chat about bicycles. [Join us!](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join)
cross-posted from: https://community.xmpp.net/post/49428 > Do you like #bicycles or #cycling? Do you also use an #xmpp compatible chat service? Join our new group chat at [bicycles@conference.samwhited.com](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join). Hopefully this can become a fun community space to share pictures, post routes, and generally chat about bicycles. > > [Join us!](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join)
Do you like #bicycles or #cycling? Do you also use an #xmpp compatible chat service? Join our new group chat at [bicycles@conference.samwhited.com](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join). Hopefully this can become a fun community space to share pictures, post routes, and generally chat about bicycles. [Join us!](xmpp:bicycles@conference.samwhited.com?join)
sam
2 years ago
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100%
Oh nice, some of the GSoC projects are really interesting this year!
codeberg.org
cross-posted from: https://community.xmpp.net/post/34677 > For the last few years we've accepted patches on both GitHub and Sourcehut and used Sourcehut for our CI system. We have tried to move entirely to Sourcehut in the past but it ended up [not meeting our needs](https://codeberg.org/mellium/xmpp/issues/51), and we've tried starting our own co-op code hosting, but were not able to find many cooperators who wanted to help (if you'd like to join us and cooperatively host a Gitea instance, [reach out](https://blog.samwhited.com/about/)!). We have been experimenting with mirroring a few of the main repos on Codeberg and using their experimental CI feature, and this has been going much smoother and has been much simpler than the current SourceHut integration. > > With all this in mind, we've decided that the time is right to move to [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/). > > For the time being we will continue to accept pull requests for the main project and a few of the support libraries over on GitHub, and we will keep the main projects CI running on Sourcehut as well as on the new Codeberg CI so that both Codeberg and GitHub based PRs can show the status. However, smaller support libraries that do not receive contributions often will be moved entirely to Codeberg and PRs on GitHub will be automatically closed. > > Eventually, once we are certain everything is working smoothly, the old GitHub repos will be retired and become mirrors on which we do not accept contributions and all Sourcehut repos will be deleted. There is no timeline for this currently. If you would like to keep track of the timeline once we have one, or submit comments or suggestions you can track the issue https://mellium.im/issue/304 > > Some repos are still being moved, but the main project is now on Codeberg and ready to accept contributions. To track the overall migration, see https://mellium.im/issue/301 > > Thanks for your continued support and contributions!
codeberg.org
For the last few years we've accepted patches on both GitHub and Sourcehut and used Sourcehut for our CI system. We have tried to move entirely to Sourcehut in the past but it ended up [not meeting our needs](https://codeberg.org/mellium/xmpp/issues/51), and we've tried starting our own co-op code hosting, but were not able to find many cooperators who wanted to help (if you'd like to join us and cooperatively host a Gitea instance, [reach out](https://blog.samwhited.com/about/)!). We have been experimenting with mirroring a few of the main repos on Codeberg and using their experimental CI feature, and this has been going much smoother and has been much simpler than the current SourceHut integration. With all this in mind, we've decided that the time is right to move to [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/). For the time being we will continue to accept pull requests for the main project and a few of the support libraries over on GitHub, and we will keep the main projects CI running on Sourcehut as well as on the new Codeberg CI so that both Codeberg and GitHub based PRs can show the status. However, smaller support libraries that do not receive contributions often will be moved entirely to Codeberg and PRs on GitHub will be automatically closed. Eventually, once we are certain everything is working smoothly, the old GitHub repos will be retired and become mirrors on which we do not accept contributions and all Sourcehut repos will be deleted. There is no timeline for this currently. If you would like to keep track of the timeline once we have one, or submit comments or suggestions you can track the issue https://mellium.im/issue/304 Some repos are still being moved, but the main project is now on Codeberg and ready to accept contributions. To track the overall migration, see https://mellium.im/issue/301 Thanks for your continued support and contributions!
We previously discussed moving to [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/), and I'm thinking the time is right to make the move from our current GitHub/SourceHut mix entirely to Codeberg. If you have any concerns or comments, now is the time!
opencollective.com
Copied here for discussion among non-contributors: As more people begin to rely on this project I have become somewhat concerned that our bus factor of 1 (ie. "me") is too low. It would be good to find more maintainers or leads from among the contributors who can be given access and continue the project if I become incapacitated or stop working on the project for any other reason. However, there really aren't enough contributions (or contributors who have a deep understanding of the full project) to do this right now, so the first step would be to try and find/engage more regular contributors. Suggestions welcome.
zerowaste
sam
2 years ago
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100%
Oh nifty, I do this when backpacking to keep rice, noodles, or whatever grains and cereals I'm carrying dry, but it never occurred to me that folks might do it at home too! What bottles work/look the best I wonder? On the trail I always used Gatorade bottles because they're a bit thicker walled.
The new [Gajim 1.4.0 release](https://community.xmpp.net/post/10614) has hit the Fedora testing repositories and been submitted to go to stable! You can find it on the testing/feedback server here (for Fedora 37): https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2022-4ed07d1e3f If you'd like to install it, you can run the following: ``` dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing gajim ``` You can also provide feedback by installing the `fedora-easy-karma` package, authenticating with a Fedora account, and running it like so: ``` fedora-easy-karma --fas-username=samwhited gajim ```
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
Right? Can I just sit on my bike and pretend to pedal?
sam
2 years ago
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100%
I created a new Gajim community and cross posted there as well, for future use!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/267805 > Massive update! > XMPP
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
I've been looking forward to the UI overhaul since the office hours demo! I'm looking forward to it trickling into Fedora.
A new initiative from the folks at jmp.chat creates a fediverse compatible hosting solution that eventually aims to integrate with XMPP!
sam
2 years ago
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100%
Welcome, and thanks for the newsletter translations!
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
Yes, I'm aware, but "rarely" is not "never", so it seems worth having them.
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
It doesn't "just" do that, it also makes it easier for the elderly, those in a wheelchair, those rolling a grocery trolley full of bags, etc.
opencollective.com
This thread was pasted to Open Collective and I'd love to get your thoughts there, here, or in the chat room. --- Hi all, I'd like to get a feeling from our contributors about how funds should be used. I've marked several issues as prerequisite to implementing OMEMO recently, and wondered if it's worth allowing part of the bounty to be paid on these blocking issues to try and encourage development on them, or would it be better to save the whole bounty and pay it out to whomever implements OMEMO itself? For example, #292 has nothing to do with OMEMO itself, but needs to be done before any OMEMO implementation is very useful. I'd love to get your thoughts, especially if you're thinking a bout implementing any part of it or are one of the financial contributors to the bounty. If we do want to allocate some amount, how do we decide how much for each issue?
This may not be as amazing if you're not from Atlanta, but someone at the local bike co-op (https://sopobikes.org/) recently came in to paint a bike using MARTA (the local public transit authority; https://itsmarta.com/) colors! I've never seen such a good reaction and I've definitely never seen a bike I wanted this badly! It's just a prototype before doing it to a good frame, so I can't wait to see the final result! It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but even the cable guides are orange, yellow, and blue which I thought was a nice touch. 
lab.louiz.org
This release fixes RFC 3920 session building ([#3468](https://lab.louiz.org/poezio/slixmpp/-/issues/3468)), improves certificate errors handling, and adds an XEP-0454 (OMEMO Media Sharing) plugin. The python cryptography package is required to use the XEP-0454 plugin.
opencollective.com
The Dev Communiqué for April 2022 has been released! Copied below, for your convenience: April continued to be a slow month for Mellium, but never the less we have some exciting updates to report! But first, the stats! - 9 commits to [mellium.im/xmpp](https://pkg.go.dev/mellium.im/xmpp) from 2 contributors - 1 new contributors! - 3 commits to [Communiqué](https://github.com/mellium/communique-tui) - $64.43 in donations towards sustaining Mellium development from 2 contributors ## mellium.im/xmpp The big news this month is the release of [v0.21.2](https://opencollective.com/mellium/updates/new-release-mellium-im-xmpp-v0-21-2), of course. After this **the the work was mostly care work and bug fixes to make sure Mellium remains a high-quality XMPP implementation**. A special thanks goes to new contributor Julien Lavocat who fixed a bug in resource binding when using Mellium on the server! Aside from this a small memory leak was found when establishing connections, the compression package was moved to the new [mellium.im/legacy](https://pkg.go.dev/mellium.im/legacy) module, and an [API was added](https://pkg.go.dev/mellium.im/xmpp@v0.21.3-0.20220426143527-de01e08b48b9/ibb#Listener.Expect) to allow accepting only specific [in-band bytestreams](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0047.html) connections which is needed for protocols that negotiate byte streams out of band such as [Jingle File Transfer](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0234.html). ## Announcements Finally, we have two fun announcements this month! The first is that donations towards the [OMEOM end-to-end encryption project](https://opencollective.com/mellium/projects/omemo) have broken through an arbitrary but fun ceiling and now total over $100 USD! If anyone would like to claim this bounty and has experience with encryption protocols, reach out to us by joining our chat room [users@mellium.chat](https://mellium.chat/) ([xmpp:users@mellium.chat](xmpp:users@mellium.chat?join)). Secondly, we have launched a new federated space for the XMPP community over at [https://community.xmpp.net](https://community.xmpp.net/)! This is a [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/) instance, a federated forum/link sharing platform in the vein of Reddit. If you're not on it already, be sure to apply for an account and join us over on the [Mellium Co-op Community](https://community.xmpp.net/c/mellium) page, or checkout [all the communities](https://community.xmpp.net/communities) and see if any of your other favorite projects have joined! Remember, it's federated, so you can even follow conversations from a Mastodon, Hometown, or other fedi-software or from another Lemmy instance! We hope this space will be a benefit to the broader XMPP community. Thanks for reading, we'll see you next month!
XMPP/Jabber
How google killed xmpp
sam
2 years ago
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50%
I apologize if thatwsas a joke, my bad
XMPP/Jabber
How google killed xmpp
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
This is exactly why we should stop pretending everything is fine and actually try to address the problem of Google doing damage to open ecosystems.
XMPP/Jabber
How google killed xmpp
sam
2 years ago
•
57%
This kind of language is literally what I was replying to. You're not helping, you're just ensuring fewer people use XMPP. Stop spreading fud.
XMPP/Jabber
How google killed xmpp
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
When people say "killed" they obviously don't mean "literally no one uses it". Also no one really cares that Whatsapp or Google are still using it internally. Google did serious damage to the public network and the broader XMPP ecosystem and it's worth acknowledging and learning from that instead of just complaining that someone wasn't absolutely precise in their language. For all intents and purposes, XMPP is effectively dead to the general public. Let's try to bring it back to popular use and make sure Google et al. can't do their "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing again.
TL;DR — please stop being snarky to the OP.
pidgin.im
We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on April 28th, 2022 at 20:00 UTC.
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
When you say "not quite there yet", what issues did you run into?
XMPP/Jabber
*Permanently Deleted*
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
Do you already have a bridge setup and hooked up to your account, eg https://jmp.chat? If you go to add a contact, for instance, it will let you add a phone number and automatically append the bridge address (@cheogram.com in this case)
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
I've been using Cheogram (another Conversations fork that adds features related to telephone dialing and SMS gateways; if you don't use one of those, it's probably not super useful and Conversations is a better choice). I think it's only available on F-Droid, sadly: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cheogram.android/
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
Seems okay to me, but I'd bet existing ones are already established and probably other instances will have a wider user base. But I don't see any reason to forbid it, personally.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
The account applications appear to be working again (or maybe they always were?) but are just a bit slow. Expect registrations to take a few hours before approval. Thanks!
sam
2 years ago
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100%
You can do this, but it's extremely unpleasant in my experience. Their bridges never seem to work very well in general.
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
Quick update: it looks like email confirmations aren't being sent and account applications aren't working. I've emailed the hosting provider to ask for a fix and will update when account registration has been re-enabled.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
That seems to have worked; hopefully you get replies too :)
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
I think they meant that the reference client/server get the new features. You're correct that the other third party clients have the same issue as XMPP where they all implement their distinct subsets of features or take a long time to update. Having the specs in one giant document or in multiple little documents doesn't make much difference there.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
You don't have to build it, shops will service the motor (I'm sure there are some that will service conversions, but I don't know any near me anyways), they may be more efficient (depending on the type of conversion/motor design you get), etc.
I'm with you, I'd do a conversion, but it's something you'll have to maintain and fiddle with where as the store bought ones will normally "just work" out of the box. No annoying rattles, no tweaking the motor position because it's rubbing on something now, etc.
sam
2 years ago
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100%
In my experience this normally means the seat isn't adjusted properly. Get a level and set it to 0° and give it another ride. If it still feels bad, make sure you're sitting far enough back that your arms are stretched out, but not so far that your elbows are locked and that you're sitting on the correct part of the seat. If you walk in most bike shops I suspect they'll fit you for free too.
Asklemmy
sam
2 years ago
•
100%
If you have some technical ability and are on Android I'd setup sshd on the phone (there are various apps to do this easily) and use rsync(1) or scp(1).
If you want something less technical, I use the Conversations app on my phone and Dino on my desktop for chat and sometimes send files to myself. Not ideal, but it does work pretty well for one-off smaller files.
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
This is one of the big trade offs: Matrix has a big VC funded client/server implementation that gets new features right away. On the other hand, because of this it only has a few alternative clients and servers. XMPP on the other hand has a large and vibrant client/server ecosystem, but no single client/server pair that are funded and get new features right away. Generally speaking I think this is a good thing and it's one of the reasons I decided to start doing XMPP development over Matrix development back when I was comparing them initially, but YMMV.
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
The "not actively developed" is wrong too; XMPP is very active and has been for a lot longer than matrix, meaning it generally has a lot of problems solved that Matrix is still working on re-inventing the wheel on.
XMPP/Jabber
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sam
2 years ago
•
100%
XMPP has supported bridges for a long time too (since the early 2000's, at least), for example, jmp.chat runs bridges between it and the telephone network, SMTP, IRC, and probably others that I'm forgetting. Disroot also runs an IRC bridge, as do a lot of XMPP servers.