You can’t just “open an issue” if you don’t have a Microsoft GitHub account or live in a region under US sanctions or censorship where you can’t get access to it. These are pillars of sand to build your community on that not only lack freedom for users, but access too & control for your own content + moderation.

Gateways don’t need to be the only answer too—even just mentioning an unofficial space lets those that don’t want their data harvest can hang out together under the same topic but away from those service (even if most of the chat log is public, unencrypted anyhow).

Developers of all folks should know better & know the issues caused by proprietary services. They should not plan for where users are now but where they want things no be in the future but there’s a myopic view of this is where the users are. They don’t even give folks a place to air grievances like you are suggesting.

One of my longer-term goals is to integrate Mumble on XMPP (others have thought about this too) since its chat is pretty shit & needing accounts to join isn’t great but or two good foundational protocols.

XMPP is better for modularity which is why everything is at extension with means the foundations are simple & easy to implement where you can build something optimized & bespoke on it like Fornite’s coms or Nintendo’s presense. It’s a little harder to understand tho since out of the box you get almost nothing—but the big servers intended for chat like Prosody & ejabberd have sane defaults.

The centralization you are referring to seems more a client issue since the protocol & servers already ‘do the things’ but it sounds like you want a single ‘app’. For community building where you consider group calls less common, both Movim & Libervia offer more than Element (note the other Matrix clients are lacking feature parity) since they both can do integrated posts like forums—where Libervia supports calendars/events too. There’s no reason a client couldn’t exist with Jitsi or Mumble integration.

Ultimately use the right tool for you—it’s just nice to dispel myths that Matrix has some special sauce or that predecessors can’t fill the same roles (while also using less resources in all directions).

What does indexing have to do with actually getting to own your data & not participating in corporate-owned social media? If you want to straight hide it all, you would never post it to the internet. Most of us sought the refuge of Lemmy to avoid these platforms & know our post aren’t harvested to profit for a Lemmy IPO.

Recruiters can find you regardless, but also are not very useful for getting a job versus having a network & the cut they take means you get the shaft if hired thru them too. A platform like LinkedIn is drivel that will absolutely rot your mind so it should be an easy skip.

You can easily self-host your static landing pages. There are decentralized (& self-hostable) social media options—such as Lemmy that you are on now. There is no need to involve Microsoft, & these big places like Reddit, or whatever, someone will eventually repost your content if it is good.

Also you code forge itself doesn’t need to be social media web 2.0. You can keep these separate.

You still shouldn’t dismiss these sorts of licenses as “free software” has done an alright job for user freedoms but not getting developers compensated for their efforts—which is why licenses like these pop up sharing the source code, but not letting their work be exploited.

Software making doesn’t need to be social media. Sad are the folks that think everything with an account should be Web 2.0.

I think it is a bit of column A & a bit of column B in the case of defense as we’ve seen other cases of sections of the Nix community vehemently protest certain folks by employer for some political reason or other. But I was more riffing off the parent comment + developer communites in general than the letter specifically as well see this sort of callouts. For instance adjacently, at first blush I could get down with Hippocratic License but you can see how some of these things a really too muddy to be able to exclude entire industries over. It’s tough to handle the introduction of politics into a community, yet often you almost have to at a certain community scale.

Incorrect claim about what? That Apple’s chat system has very minor usage outside the US (+ Canada)? Last I checked, the majority of the population is not American… with my specific phrasing “in practice” holding true. Having a phone & having a computer are two separate things due to Google+Apple’s control. They do not want to let you use the device as a general compute device & almost nobody can use it for general compute so one could definitely prefer one & not the other since they unfortunately, in practice, are two separate categories. You should be able to chat with a phone & without a phone, with a personal computer & without--any platform that requires you must use one or the other is a bad technology.

At least the 10 never had the ability. The 9’s ability was yanked in the middle of its lifecycle. I was 🤏 close to buying a 9 on the 10’s release for a discount & I am so glad I opened a second tab to check what the unlock process would be like before a purchase only remembering not long after release the was an OmniROM version. Additionally I was wise enough to see thru the bullshit department (PR) that the feature would “soon return after maintenance” after the unlock servers had already been down for a couple months. Unsurprisingly they were never brought back online & the unlock app was revoked from the downloads page for the device.

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html#archives_deletion

My email would run out of storage pretty quickly as I don’t self-host email as it serves a different purpose not related to real-time communications for me. I’ll stick with XMPP.

Everything you point to as ‘pros’ for Microsoft GitHub could be applied to GitLab, SourceHut, Codeberg, GNU Savannah, Notabug, Radicle, darcs hub, Smedeeree, Pijul Nest as far as hosting infrastructure where you don’t have to--and with the exception of GitLab being open core & a publicly-traded company, they are open source & not ran by corporations (some as for-profits, but indie, others, as foundations, others as community run). You’re conflating my (and many of our) distaste of capitalism/corporatism by rejecting Microsoft as if it means anti-access or anti-open source/anti-ethical source. Microsoft is 100% an enemy playing the long-con by vacuuming up all these developer adjacent services as megacorporations try to do (see their expanding portfolio of: WSL, Azure, GitHub, Codespaces, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, npm, Teams). I also believe it’s only a matter of time til they pull the plug on their APIs like Twitter & Reddit as the board of shareholders demand preventing migration (just like the “Search” is disabled).

There is also no shame in self-hosting these things & you can start hosting most DVCS with SSH + an HTTP server in front of the code even if it doesn’t have some web GUI to browse files so it doesn’t have to be that complicated. NixOS modules or similar can get you a cgit, GitLab Community, SourceHut, etc. all running without too much effort (services.cgit.enable = true), or forming a local collective & sharing resources is cool too & doesn’t need to be each project self-hosting. You can still have ‘barriers’ like authentication if you need that require agreeing to your community’s terms of service instead of Microsoft’s ToS--which is the system used by KDE, GNOME, & many other big FOSS self-hosted GitLab forges.

I’m also not against rejecting some of the tenets of “open source”--with OSI as its definitional gatekeeper--in favor of the copyfarleft, copy fair, Commons Clause, etc. that require corporations contribute code or finances as I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to say our current systems extract values from the Commons more than adding putting folks in positions of not getting to work on their valuable library that everyone relies on, but doesn’t want to help finance its maintenance (see Babel)… in which case, rejecting the corporations in favor of the Commons could be a greater goal than “open source is actually about”.