They don’t package LTS kernels which is pretty concerning—especially if using out-of-kernel modules that don’t always get released in lock step that could leave you with a machine that won’t boot.
Matrix isn’t ActivityPub ∴ not a part of the fediverse
This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.
And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.
Eh, in a myopic sense yes, but folks are using Microsoft GitHub for their CI, issue tracker, forums, kanban, Wiki & so forth. By choosing their Markdown fork, you are locked into that too. Some communities like Elm, Unison, Nix use MS GitHub as your primary community identifier (Elm doesn’t even allow you to create packages on another platform). Many tools only allow MS GitHub single sign on. If you fork off of MS GitHub, in most scenarios you’ll still be required to have an MS GitHub mirror or you won’t be able to submit a pull request as most projects don’t have an alternative contribution channel.
Some of this can be migrated, some of it can’t & the whole time being entrenched in MS GitHub land projects will fear friction & loss of users/contributors if they move (& the platform they would move to likely isn’t offerering anything more than being open source).
So can you just move the code elsewhere since Git is a DVCS? Yep. But projects are more than just the source code.
XMPP & Gateways
It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
So long as you don’t buy into a platform’s proprietary features, you should be able to easily migrate if the basis is on a open technology. For instance, if you are using Git as your VCS, you can rehost it elsewhere easily. If your chat is on IRC and Freenode goes down, it wasn’t difficult to move to another platform as communities did. If you buy into Discord, you’re SoL for porting data out or having an easy way to transition to I different room/server since you have to migrate to a different protocol. If you start relying on Microsoft GitHub’s Issues, Action, Sponsors, etc. then you will also feel equally as locked in even if the fundamental system, Git is trivial to migrate.
That’s adorable
Then you need to meet more communities 😅
Also for the sake of chat, what’s something truly innovative since the heyday of AIM & IRC? There just isn’t many useful bells & whistles to be added in the last decade. The newer XEPs for stickers+message reactions have been out with some new clients picking them up, but these aren’t something fundamentally changing how folks speak.
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toastal
joined 5 years ago
FxOS only targeting low–mid-range phones in developing markets only seemed a bit odd. Basically no one had heard of it & these places largely choose used/old version of premium products to buying budget unless they have to. There was hype in the dev community about getting a B2G device, but there was hardly availability & specs were abysmal for an OS running a non-fast interpreted language like JavaScript. Not only that but the marketing was around openness & developer-friendliness—things average consumers don’t care about (even if they should).
Imagine in a parallel universe where the idea was managed properly & B2G left the phone sphere too—where school kids were required to get a FxBook instead of Chromebooks… 😶