I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there's some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I'm forced to use Element X, because I can't even log in with Element.

It's disappointing, but there's a ton of issues that aren't so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I'm not sure it'll ever get there.

Posting from another thread:

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

It wasn't just "I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree", it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.

my view of homeless people changed forever when I learned that more than half of them were foster kids who aged out of the system and were left with no family or resources.

Jesus, that's dark.

That’s not what this is. It’s more of a feed aggregator / reader with social features, framed as a browser of sorts.

The main thing it’s used for is feed curation and content discovery. You can basically use anything with a feed as a source, then aggregate and filter things.

It’s kind of like a news reader version of Yahoo Pipes almost.

Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.

It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

Let me think...

• Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
• Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
• Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
• Wordforge - federated novel-writing
• SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
• GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.

It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.

It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.

Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.

While I think you're correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.

It's one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I'm trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.

But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you're connecting to a global network that has:

• Hate Speech
• Targeted Harassment Campaigns
• Child Pornography
• Extreme Gore and Violence

Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say "you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it's reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core."

Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says "Hey, this thing doesn't actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion". To me, that's fucking insane.

It's technically possible, just really, really hard. One example of a successful migration was the transition from calckey.social to firefish.social. It was a massive, extremely difficult undertaking, though.

A big problem involves how user identities are tied to instances. If there were a way to decouple that, I think a lot of the pain goes away.

Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.

Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.