Totally agree there and they actually talk about that in the post:
> Finally: we’re painfully aware that none of the Matrix clients available today provide a full drop-in replacement for Discord yet. All the ingredients are there, and the initial goal for the project was always to provide a decentralised, secure, open platform where communities and organisations could communicate together. However, the reality is that the team at Element who originally created Matrix have had to focus on providing deployments for the public sector (see here or here) to be able to pay developers working on Matrix. Some of the key features expected by Discord users have yet to be prioritised (game streaming, push-to-talk, voice channels, custom emoji, extensible presence, richer hierarchical moderation, etc).
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).
At least you can self-host matrix and messages are end to end encrypted, unlike IRC.
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
Practically speaking, I would just ignore this requirement. The UK government has no jurisdiction on this side of the pond.
That's assuming UK authorities can even identify who is operating the Matrix instance. At the very least this assumes that a warrant is served to the registrar and/or the owner of the server/VPS in the correct jurisdiction, and that obfuscation measures were not taken by the operator. All of this will probably go nowhere.
I'm sure your server will be fine. Now if you put up a big declaration like that on your website, some bureaucrat might just decide to pick on you when they get the chance like France with Durov.
You can try to self-host. Neither Synapse nor Dendrite is in a good state for running a server. I tried Dendrite for a while and it was always playing catchup to Synapse, despite being the supposed successor, and is now not even under development? I can't even tell what's going on over there.
Anyway, my main experience of Matrix is "failed to decrypt message". It's... not great. I wish it were better.
You did it wrong. The correct approach is to flip a coin and let it decide between tuwunel and continuwuity, then self hold that until it dies along with its database format
There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.
OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.
E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]
Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.
Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.
I use link [1] all the time. It comes pre-compiled for many Linux distributions but not installed by default. And yeah like I said it needs cipher updates like was recently performed in OpenSSH. HN has a handful of cryptographic nerds that could update OTR in their sleep if they so desired maybe even rewrite in Rust but being cryptographic nerds they probably have no need. If the same is true with cryptographers as is with car mechanics and plumbers they probably only use plain text as mechanics have broken down cars in their yards and some plumbers have old leaky pipes due to burn out.
As a mechanic-minded person, all the broken down junk i plan to fix someday has no bearing on the state of the tools i actually use day to day
(In my case, all the old broken guitar pedals and vintage computers littering my house have no bearing on the state of my workstations and gigging setup)
- notes left there for work, family organization, etc basically things for which an email is "too much" but a small scrap of text seen by some serve the purpose well
- calls, whether audio-only or audio + video
For social use, I see Lemmy or Nostr/Habla more than Matrix. But for all of this, there's a major lack of a single app that is easy go install-able, pip install-able, or cargo build-able without a gazillion dependencies and a thousand setup problems, to the point that most people just choose Docker, using stuff made by others that they know almost nothing about because setting up and maintaining these solutions is just too complex.
IRC is also most commonly used for open servers where anyone can join whenever they want to without as much as needing to register for an 'account'! You just pick a nickname out of thin air and off you go.
In that kind of environment, end to end encryption really doesn't add value.
You verify identity over the now-encrypted channel, just like SSL should have done 30 years ago but refused to for doctrinal reasons. And in the (frequent) cases where you don't actually care about the other party's identity you just don't verify it at all.
Are we talking about with OTR? You're meant to verify fingerprints out of band as usual. Without, I guess you check if they've authenticated to nickserv if there are services. Or do your own checks or heuristics.
I had to look this up on Wikipedia and remembered this is the 19 year old UNHRC. They have never been objective in regards to the Middle East conflict.
Distros are struggling with the amount of packages they have to maintain and update regularly.
That's one of the main reasons why languages built their own ecosystems in the first place. It became popular with CPAN and Maven and took off with Ruby gems.
Linux distros can't even provide all the apps users want, that's why freshmeat existed and we have linuxbrew, flatpak, Ubuntu multiverse, PPA, third party Debian repositories, the openSUSE Buildservice, the AUR, ...
There is no community that has the capacity to audit and support multiple branches of libraries.
I paid for Mozillla Pocket Premium and they canceled their product within a few months, did not properly open-source the server, did not export my "permanent library" and refunded 6$.
As the websites in the "permanent library" are partially offline, that data is now lost.
No thanks, not buying again.
I suspect that they don't actually maintain the permanent library, but rather a formatted view of the content that used to be there. Some of the sites I have the URL saved have transitioned to paywall and/or merged, goes offline or disappeared for some reason, so I can't actually read many of the links I exported from it. Though for the one that actually catches interest, I'll look for it in archiving service, but it's a tiresome work to search for it one by one.
I still don't get over the fact Mozilla bought it and shattered it less than a decade later. Perhaps it doesn't make enough "impact" to justify their time and resources, and if this behavior subsists, I would be more discouraged to give them money ever again.
The permanent library was strange. Not very transparent what happened there. I am still shocked they did not invest in the original idea (tag and archive web page), but instead tried to build another content stream with recommended articles and such.
A forever home for your collection. Pocket becomes your permanent library—so even if a page you've saved is taken down, you'll still have a copy of it in Pocket
That's what I paid for. I trusted in Mozilla being open and allowing me to take my data with me. This is worse than Google?
These protests are organized by conservative organizations. They represent the big farms and the export industry. I'm not sure why the "World Socialist Website" thinks this is some grass root resistance to austerity politics.
> The coalition in Berlin will stop at nothing to suppress this movement and defend the bankrupt capitalist social system against any opposition.
Actually, the government already gave into some of the demands of the protesting, subsidies-receiving land owners.
But well, maybe that's because the "World Socialist Website" has their own Putin-politics to push:
> This is underlined by the brutality with which it is fuelling the punitive war against Russia in Ukraine, supporting the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza
Both the left and the right in Germany are pro putin. DACH countries have a peculiar relationship with Russia for some reason. Switzerland and Austria being quite favourable despite their “support” for Ukraine. Austria being the worst.
An article in a Trotskyite paper is like a church service in that there are parts of it that change and other parts that stay the same. Both do it because it is good pedagogy, but introducing a bunch of unrelated points just gives the critical reader opportunities to find refutations.
I was very happy that peace activist Howie Hawkins in the U.S. denounced the Russian invasion from the very beginning. He travels with a crowd that doesn't like NATO in a rather reflexive and dogmatic way which I would not be so opposed to so long as Russia could prove NATO was unnecessary through its actions.
Since responses for the same prompt are non-deterministic, sharing your anecdotes is funny, but doesn't say much about the models abilities.