Matrix the protocol & its blockchain-like eventual consistency model is incredibly expensive / wasteful to run since it requires duplicating all data to all servers for the entire history. Matrix uses so much storage & RAM on a machine. Medium-sized servers regularly close their door due to costs—which further pushes users to the de facto centralized hub in Matrix.org (or servers they host for others) which basically has a copy of all metadata on the network (scary since it was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence … so one might assume they still have access to that data). If a system isn’t accessible to a run for groups on a budget, it isn’t radical/revolutionary.

If you don’t care about the centralization or E2EE, IRC/IRCv3 covers all the bases. If you want decentralization with more features, XMPP + OMEMO + MUCs, covers the rest. Neither of these are resource hogs while having over a decade of extra stability. Matrix 2 is just trying throw a rug over the problems of eventual consistency—but under it is a fundamental issue to the protocol.

Haskell devs like to write code, not maintain it. A bunch of libraries get written, but get abandoned shortly after for something new & shiny.

Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.

Why tho? The logs give you information & progress. After boot you don’t even see it.

I honestly wish Android booted like this.

There’s also a jillion places to host static sites with less complexity of the code albeit more complexity to get started for many non-developers. The thing is there was a time when high schools everywhere were teaching basic HTML so you could be a part of this new internet thing, but now folks don’t think they can have their own chunk anymore separate from the corporations. You still can but the knowledge seems lost & certain technically hurdles like TLS which I mentioned make it just one step more difficult.

It’s great to see this project still chugging along. I tried it on an old phone & it worked, but it would run into readonly filesystem errors after a few hours of usage. I never got to figure out why since I ended up actually needing to use the phone while mine had broken so it’s LineageOS for microG now.

Didn’t watch the video, but… Traffic is often already encrypted with TLS or other encryption & you don’t have to use the ISP for DNS. This would cover a lot of the data you would be discussing. Instead if using these advertized commercial VPNs you are giving the data to those corporations instead which is hardly better in many cases—luckily most of your traffic is encrypted with TLS & you don’t have to use them for DNS …which takes us back to the previous statement for concerns.

There’s still value in VPNs for a several online activities (censorship, piracy, activism, etc.) & threat models to certain folks, but assuming the ISP is the bogeyman in most common scenarios for non-niche use cases is incorrect—but it isn’t how these commercial VPNs are selling themselves. If the ISPs possess the ability to break TLS encryption we’d have bigger issues to worry about & VPNs wouldn’t help. I would assume the video goes in this route but chooses the clickbait title for views.

Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.

And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.

Maybe you don’t want the banking corporations to know you purchased lube & a ham sandwich. Inb4 some goober says tap-to-pay with Google or Apple, which now lets the banking corporations & big tech know your purchase history too.

Cash is a great.

I mean yes you reduce your privacy by interacting with Microsoft GitHub in general, but posting your Nix config to the public isn’t much of a privacy concern since you shouldn’t have any plaintext secrets anyhow as a best practice since it would be compiled into the Nix store. There are a couple of different ways to encrypt secrets, as well as just not committing private *.nix to a public repository.

You could also launch directly to big picture mode for a “console” PC