toastal

Ungoogled*

Or XMPP or IRC or Mumble …all of which have clients that will consume less resources on your machine

I mean we already had the universal protocol last decade in an extensible markup language, but the next generation decided we needed to rewrite everything in a JSON schema that isn’t as easy to extend as XMPP. It’s federated/decentralized, has many chat clients, some social media + community managing platforms (Movim & Libervia), used for video conferencing (Jitsi & Zoom), negotiation matchmaking for games (most of them), displaying friend roster status updates (Nintendo, & many other systems). This would have (& can still be) the dream instead of needing to reinvent everything.

Worth reading: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

OAuth or SSO is not the same as communicating over the same protocol. You can also log in with Google, Facebook, Apple, GitLab, Microsoft GitHub, & others on different platforms as SSO options… clearly these are not the Fediverse.

Being federated isn’t the same as living in the same Fediverse. You can upvote a Lemmy post from Mastodon since they both use ActivityPub but you can’t do that with a Matrix account. There are a couple of different ActivityPub-like generalized protocols out there, but none of them are near the size of ActivityPub & Lemmy is ActivityPub so for all intents & purposes for this conversation the Fediverse here (& most places) is ActivityPub. Matrix is on an entirely different federated network & they aren’t related.

You can use its underlying ejabberd, Prosody, or other server for chat. Most modern clients offer OMEMO, OTR, PGP for client-side encryption (end-to-end implies the servers don’t/can’t do anything here)

Matrix isn’t ActivityPub ∴ not a part of the fediverse

Jitsi is built atop XMPP so you have a general purpose chat server already on the system.

Movim v0.28 released within the last 24 hours. It has a web UI (that is optimized for both large & small viewports), E2EE via OMEMO, OTR, or PGP (but users can choose native clients if they wish). With the NLNet funding they are extending to full video conferencing + compatibility with the Dino native GTK client. Subjectively, it looks pretty sharp for a web client. You can also use it to share ‘posts’ for announcements & public feed aggregation—something a group chat should never be used for (announcements & other long-term messages get lost in the black hole search can’t find & unreleated posts all around it with messy-to-follow threads since this sort of content isn’t supposed to be chat).

It’s not quite as easy as services.movim.enable = true for NixOS but the NixOS module isn’t far off once an XMPP server has been selected with optimized defaults beyond standard setup—& the option I would personally recommend for self-hosting as declarative config is easier to work with in the long run, but there are non-Nix options. Being PHP, it’s fairly performant as well as not being built on some space-wasting, RAM-sucking ‘eventual consistency’ model that will cost you out the ass (which is Matrix, by design). The front-end, being mostly vanilla JS, is not using some heavy, bloaty framework. This will meet all your needs & not require expensive hardware host even on an old laptop at home or part of a multi-purpose server (does not need dedicated hardware).

A US corporation cornering the market then charging their own fees to use the service (surfing & scraping are basically the same action)? Never seen this before. Sounds uber evil—I couldn’t airbnbelieve it.

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.

Great to know. I saw it missing from the support table & just assumed that was that.