https://joinjabber.org/

Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.

The default links many folks/projects share specifically log you into Element & on Matrix.org as well which advertizes more folks to be on that centralized node. Furthermore, Matrix provides hosting for some of the other big servers as well even if they are not using matrix.org in the address.

Patch Theory operates under the premise that patches commute & order should not matter until there is a conflict. Git will throw fits if you pull in a patch at the wrong order giving you a different snapshot.

Probably the most notable modern video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XQz-x6wAWk

WhatsApp runs on unfederated XMPP; why not just run your own decentralized XMPP node?

You say this but Matrix is largely centralized so it would be easy to get the biggest node to comply. Servers are quite costly to run too which is a big problem.

I ‘forgot’ it on purpose.

The compatibility with Git means it is ultimately shackled to the design decisions fundamental to Git which require hacky workarounds. The maker of Pijul has pointed out some of the fundamental ways it can never handle patches is the manner of Darcs/Pijul, but I am not in the position to pull some of these quotes.

I would rather see revolution over evolution, & the weird ties to Google & hosting the project Microsoft GitHub rub me wrong.

Darcs came out in 2003—Git in 2005. It was novel at the time compared to the alternatives. Darcs started as alternative to CSV & Subversion, not Git. Unlike Git it works on patches, not snapshots which has advantanges in merge conflicts.

Darcs is sort of like Pijul before Pijul. It is a little slower, but might not even affect you at your project size, but what it has instead is a longer history with more tooling & support—on the CLI, support from package managers, forge options. It ends up being my preferred option just for this reason even if Pijul has better performance, handles binary files, & the identity server is novel.

I support reconsidering Git VCS hegemony. Darcs & Pijul too for DVCS.

Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.

I would like to lose the Android phone soon. Signal will not work without an Android/iOS primary device.

But also… Signal requires a phone number for signup where a lot of countries require a passport to get a SIM (unique identifier that is easy to track you). The service is centralized so there is no sort of self-hosting option. There really aren’t alternative clients (not counting mere forks) you can rely on (this helps with the double ratchet encryption of clients with XMPP & Matrix losing keys) unless you go the gateway/bridge route—where the Electron desktop client is pure ass cheeks. Historically they have a big gap in commit history—we can assume there was some sort of CIA/FBI plant. They refuse to use a self-hostable MQTT/XMPP/UnifiedPush option for notifications meaning that the notification data timestamps always flow thru Google & Apple servers. And I am still salty the mobile clients removed SMS support which made it so easy to recommend to family in the first place.

Mumble is perfectly fine for low-latency VoIP for gaming—I think it was the first to even use the Opus codec everyone uses now. Mumble uses a ton less resources than an Electron app. You will want your main chat on another protocol, but this is hardly a barrier.

I use XMPP whenever possible. Requires many fewer resources to run on just about any hardware & I can hand out accounts if needed.

I don’t care for the centralized or de facto centralized alternatives. I regret along with my uncle convincing family onto Signal several years ago.

Sailfish OS supports Sony Xperia 10s… you get a headphone jack & a microSD

Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.

Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.

No it doesn’t. You can resale GPL & you can even ask money just to get access to the source code & still comply with the license. You can host it without sharing anything (AGPL), & apparently you can train a LLM model on it which can then regurgitate the code which also apparently seems like it will be legal.

I would like to see what would happen if copyfarleft & post-open source licenses had more uptake.

It’s tangential, but Mumble is still good for voice only chat. Rarely do we find video to be useful or necessary with a lot of collaborative tools showing multiple cursors per users & programs like Upterm that allow sharing a terminal session.