I've been experimenting with the Git bare repository method and I think it solves all my problems! Thanks very much. If I run into issues again, I'll for sure check out GNU Stow.

It's not an obscure feature, it's very standard amongst the non-federated chat messengers. I want it because I don't want to worry about chat logs on other people's machines.

https://petition.parliament.uk/

Why use change.org versus the Government's official petitions page, where they have to respond if it receives over 10k signatures or debate it in parliament if it receives over 100k signatures?

I actually looked into Conduit and considered using it rather than Dendrite because development is way more active (and I also prefer Rust to Go).

For now though, going off of the README, it looks like it's still behind Dendrite in terms of stability. Hopefully they don't, but if Matrix continue to not touch Dendrite and Conduit overtakes it in terms of stability, I'll probably switch over.

Thanks for the link! Yeah I assumed they were busy with the other stuff, I'm more curious why Matrix thinks that's the better route to go down now rather than actually finishing Dendrite and then working on P2P etc, especially considering iirc they've said most the difficult parts of the spec are already implemented in Dendrite.

I haven’t read all of this, but why do they insist on using Google? Analytics that are disabled by default and non-Google would probably be fine.

Is it something inherent to Zig that makes Outfieldr faster, or is it just written well? I don’t know much about Zig

This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse.

and this website helps them

That looks like exactly what I want, thank you! Do you know of the ConBee is open source?

Keybase

My website weighs around 2kB and is written in pure HTML/CSS. You can check out the code on my GitHub

I don't even see this as a purely negative thing. Discord is already trash, Microsoft buying it means either

1. They mess it up, like they do with almost everything, and its obscene dominance comes to an end, or
2. Nothing.

There's even a part of me that could see them open sourcing it/parts of it, now that they "love open source". This would of course be a part of a calculated play to stifle the rise of alternatives like Matrix. We're already seeing a gross trend of developers using Discord as their project discussion platform, and it would be in Microsoft's interest to try to maximise this as much as possible, keeping them in a centralised walled-garden under their control.

I read the posts he linked to, damn. From noticing a tiny bump in February 2020 to having a ~1 year life expectancy in March 2021, that's awful.

Why in gemini and not on the web?

Because the web sucks. Web technologies are in general horrible to use, build with, etc. Drew DeVault has written a lot of posts about this that I like, i.e. The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers and Web browsers need to stop.

I myself plan on writing my own post on this too. But for now, like I said: because the web sucks. And because the way Gemini is designed, so much of the garbage that makes the web so suck-y is impossible.

I updated this morning and it's been great. The RC period was long but it looks like it really paid off.

The throw from top of mid is consistent but as you said requires two smokes (and takes a lot longer).

Yeah that smoke from T Spawn is better than others but I can’t even get it to be 8/10.

I’ll probably stick to the smoke from top mid, but even with the cross smoke in my experience it’s too easy for a CT to shoot into it and grab a kill.

Greatest success I’ve had gaining mid control has been directly challenging the CT AWPer in mid (which is still difficult since afaik CTs get there first).

Delta Chat does look really cool. Like you said, it’s client (testing on iOS) is nice. It’s a shame their desktop app is Electron though.

Element the client is garbage, I was talking about Element the organisation formally known as New Vector, who develop and maintain the Dendrite homeserver

Wire was mentioned in this thread. It transferred ownership (which in itself was shady) and its new owners are shady too.

recently went down half a day

It was more like ~3 days

Not well versed in this, so this may be inaccurate, but the other issue is that the Server relies on and uses other AGPLv3 software (e.g. storage-service), so if they want to use the latest versions of each they also have to release all the latest changes to the server under AGPLv3 (which is why Google avoid AGPL like the plague).

I linked to that thread in my post

Hydrogen, while not stable yet, will hopefully be much more useable over slower networks including Tor: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

I have a lot of thoughts about this but don't really have the time to reply.

All I'll say is that I hope you're following Element's progress with Dendrite closely. I host my own Dendrite server and it is much more reasonable in terms of resource usage versus Synapse, and it hasn't even had any resource optimisation features implemented yet.

You say you disagree with the default clients idea, but why?

At most it is a branding/marketing problem

I don't know why you're so dismissive of this issue. I feel like you're framing me as if I'm anti-XMPP when that isn't the case; on the contrary I use XMPP and am a Prosody server admin. The reality of the situation though, like I've said above, is that next to nobody uses XMPP, even in tech communities. At this point "branding/marketing" could end up being the be-all and end-all of the entire protocol.

As for the other two points: that is both false and outdated.

You've misinterpreted my comment. I am very well aware XMPP has and has had e2ee support, the issue is that XMPP clients never have this switched on by default, in my experience (which was testing every XMPP iOS client there is, the platform most my friends use).

The legality of this is unclear. If their silence on this topic isn't because they're trying to do their best Apple role-play (which is most likely, imo), the cynic in me says it's because they acknowledge they should publish the source ASAP in compliance with the AGPLv3.

It's not about instances, they're pretty much equal in that regard. There are two main issues with XMPP:

1. Clients. There is no "default" or "reference" client for XMPP, whereas there is a cross-platform one for Matrix (in the form of Element). This has several implications, but the most important is that for the non-technically aware (which is the vast majority of people I talk to), it is easier and reassuring to use "the" Matrix client. The more important implication to me is on e2ee. Conversations started in Element now enable e2ee by default. In contrast, every XMPP client I've tried (on Linux & iOS) does not.
2. Message history. Matrix and XMPP differ a lot here, and it's why the Matrix homeservers are much more resource hungry than XMPP servers. When I use Matrix, I get message history on each device. This is a critical feature for those I want to move from Whatsapp and the like. This is not the case with XMPP.

Last time I looked into Session, my conclusion was that its background was shady enough that I'd never use it.

p2p solutions would be great. The team at Matrix have demonstrated p2p over Matrix (using the Dendrite homeserver) so hopefully that also becomes more accessible at some point.

Wire was pretty good, true. I used it a bit, but chose Signal because Wire (similarly to Matrix, for now) doesn’t encrypt any/most metadata, whereas Signal encrypts everything and always has.

And like you said, it’s since been sold to an advertising company. Not sure if that’d even be possible with Signal since it’s owned by a non-profit (admittedly not always the case, I guess it could have been possible when they were still OWS).

In both cases, their centralised nature means changing ownership can be devastating (like in the case of Wire). This is why I believe Matrix is the future. Its community is much healthier and active in the development of the ecosystem (3rd party clients, bridges, they actually accept PRs, etc...)

Brave is Chromium. Using it directly benefits Google, this is enough to stay well clear.

As others have mentioned, they have shady ties. Just stay away, imo. There is no reason to use Brave.

Sidenote: A breadtuber I really like uses brave, so Brave can’t be all that bad?

Many people — including plenty of those who’re good with technology — are very naive about this topic. A breadtuber using it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

A few years ago (2017?) I decided I would move messenger apps. The aim (and what I’ve achieved) was all my messaging going through a secure, private app.

Signal was never an option.

In 2017, Signal really was the only option. Element (Riot, back then) was really bad and didn’t feature e2ee (which only got enabled by default last year!). XMPP was and remains difficult to use (not even many people here use it, how could I expect “normal people” to use it?)

I made the choice to use Signal, and I don’t regret it. I only regret that it has taken until now that we are starting to see a glimmer of a real competitor, in the form of Matrix. But a really competitor to Whatsapp and the like, back in 2017, just didn’t exist outside of Signal.

You're right, I can (and will) do that. I guess you're right, it isn't that big an issue, but it has delayed me setting up a Prosody server for now, which is annoying.

This is pretty nice. One thing I noticed right away is that it's not running natively under Wayland. Is there a way to force it to do that?

edit: figured it out. it uses SDL2, which the arch wiki says requires SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. seem to be a couple bugs when it's run under Wayland through!

Oh okay, I'll check that out.

I did ask the Prosody chatroom about my situation, and they said it was still possible, even without having control of the root domain's certificates. I think it's possible to have multiple certs per domain. But like you said, it'd require the DNS validation method (which isn't that bad).

I use floccus and Nextcloud Bookmarks. It's like Pocket but everything is self-hosted, free/libre software, and private.

Yeah, I don't, which admittedly is annoying in this case. But on the whole it's not a big deal imo.

Yes I could do that, but it would require each connection to be processed by nginx on my server, which I don't want. The only reason I use GitHub Pages for my website is because I don't want my website to have anything to do with my server.

Matrix supports it both via SRV records as well as via well-known delegation (the latter of which is preferred).

But IMHO handing over the root certificate to github pages is not the greatest idea anyways.

It's not really "handing over", I never dealt with them at all, they're generated by GitHub with Let's Encrypt automatically.

Why not just set up a redirect for the Github page and put it on a subdomain?

Not sure what you mean?

My current issue with setting up Prosody is with delegation, i.e. having usernames like sseneca@example.com rather than sseneca@xmpp.example.com, even when the server is actually hosted on xmpp.example.com.

My problem is Prosody requires the certificates for the domain you're identifying as -- so in this case, example.com, not xmpp.example.com. But I already host something at example.com, and I don't have access to its certs (it's on GitHub Pages). Matrix homeservers OTOH only need the certificates for matrix.example.com, which in my setup makes it significantly easier to run.

damn, the farewell video is pretty emotional