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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2020

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  • Visibility to who? Normies? Search engines favoring corpo slop? You could make a readonly mirror if felt it necessary (it isn’t). If you have a modus operandi for you product or service, you would be better off choosing tools that align with those ideals. This instead says collaborator privacy/freedom is not our priority & we don’t actually follow our values.


  • toastal@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOpinion on the Matrix protocol
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    5 days ago

    Persistence is for forums. Chat has horrible discovery / search UX which makes it a black hole for knowledge—which is why it should be seen as temporary (I think even Signal sets 4 week expiry as default). Folks often say things the regret 5 years down the line in chat space & that sort of info needs to just fade away than be some target of some weirdo doxxing campaign.

    You know you can have archive management & multi-devices without syncing the entire history right? Some protocols think holding onto the last 20 messages in a new group & the last year of private messages is good enough (can be saved local to the device if desired). Copying the Discord/Telegram/Slack model ain’t it.

    Synpase is the reference server. It’s Python & slow as balls because of it, but the others are always playing catch-up. With Element moving with it & graceful fallbacks not being a high priority, shit just doesn’t work in practice using anything but Synapse / Element since most other users are using features on that setup. Technically having alternatives is not the same as the current situation in actual practice. Even if they can try to hide the some of the perf issues behind these gland concepts like sliding sync, there are literal fundamental issues with how the protocol is architected that a server of hand-written optimized assembly could never overcome—the eventual consistercy is by design.


  • That is nowhere near the mass of the centralized community & the fact it can’t be reasonable ran my medium-sized groups on a budget shows it doesn’t scale right & is not accessible. Sure you can run your own ATProto/BlueSky node if you have $80k USD / mo to host it—it’s technically open source! This is the kinda the same thing… costs too damn much so folks flock to the biggest instances.



  • toastal@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOpinion on the Matrix protocol
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    6 days ago

    Matrix literally syncs the entire data/metadata history to all other servers where someone pops in; chat is meant to have an ephemeral aspect to it. The whole network is de facto centralized on Matrix.org or the servers they host for others which means one org has access to almost everything—like the issue with Signal.

    What’s scary to me is how expensive it is to run this eventual consistency model, which should not be a protocol requirement for this style of communication. It sucks so much RAM, so much storage, so wasteful—which causes medium-sized servers to shutdown on maintenance costs alone which causes more users to leave for the Matrix.org. These are not the characteristics of a revolutionary protocol—revolutionary is users & collectives to reasonably be self-hosting this stuff for their privacy & autonomy.









  • It really provides nothing special of note other than network effect (slow UI, nonrobust CI of YAML spaghetti, pull request model is broken, upselling AI shit in the UX, taking users code with that AI & selling it back to users despite it being our code in the commons, taking cuts from sponsors, etc.), but you can’t shift that without setting a good example—& getting folks to cross out of that closed, centralized, data sucking ecosystem.

    One of the primary reasons for Lemmy’s existence is to get out of Reddit’s walled garden & AI nonsense onto a decentralized platform. Git (& other VCSs) does not have a restriction on centralized nonsense unless you buy into a platform that requires community member give up their data to a US company just to participate. Why would you value one thing for your users then have different values for developers (that are also users)—especially when there are gobs of alternatives? Screw Microsoft on all accounts—historically & presently. There is no reason to treat this like some startup/market thing for engagement when the platform & its core users want a different experience outside of corporate control (but if you must, just make a readonly mirror with issues disabled).



  • Many mail providers give you access to CalDAV + CardDAV which have a wide array of mature technology to sync contacts, calendars, todo lists on basically all platforms. If you move away from Protonmail as primary, you would get access to this normal service as well as being able to use IMAP without paying & using some middleman application just to use email. I do not pay for a lot of services, but I get a lot of value out of keeping email + CalDAV + CardDAV off-premise with the cost of €1 per month.