Internet companies usually have clauses that they can terminate the agreement at any time for any reason, including “because they feel like it”. They usually don’t have to tell you why, either.

Same deal with all the “licensing” things and “digital goods ownership”. In two words: you don’t.

But it’s been that way for ages.

Let’s be real here: They are trying to create a “platform”^TM and “ecosystem”^TM to later wall off, embrace, extend, extinguish or otherwise enshittify.

There is no actual problem they are solving.

It’s venture capital bait.

https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol#abstract

It said “cheaper” not “energy efficient”.

Wings are easy, jet engines are hard.

Besides, if you can do it with an electrical locomotive on the ground, the energy conversion to electricity of a power plant should be better than the energy conversion of a jet engine from fuel to movement.

So imo, cheaper seems plausible, energy efficient is a maybe.

That’s not good, but it’s not like we can switch to a more secure alternative. ;)

Oh sure. They could do this. But they don’t.

But there is absolutely no way to verify what they are doing, no fear of getting caught and thus there is no incentive to behave with integrity.

At least my state of knowledge is that this: https://reproducible-builds.org/ isn’t fully functional and even if it were what HP does on their machines is closed source stuff.

And even if there were companies or organizations that are big enough to enforce transparency, like a big multinational or a government, there will be plenty of cases where smaller companies with sensitive data can’t, like doctors offices or independent lawyers.

It is way easier to charge for a “data privacy” subscription tier and then still just not honoring the wording of that, than to actually put in the effort.

If anyone seriously believes HP will develop two copies of operating software, one with “send everything to HP” and one without, they are delusional.

It may very well be that there will be a contract saying something completely different than what is happening in those machines.

…and whose fault is that, private publishing industry? Hmmm? Who didn’t invest here?

Also #politics for allowing it to happen of course.

Yes, but I don’t think it matters. It’s not hyper specialized yet, but the initial problem of “there are no users” is gone. I don’t think anything can stop the fediverse now. The protocol is just too useful to not support.

Not sure about unsung, but definitely heroes in my book.

And to be fair, this Orwellian oversight could be a good thing. Literally over the last few weeks, we’ve witnessed a huge manhunt for a guy suspected of being involved in a chemical attack. At the time of writing, he was last seen on the Victoria Line. So if this AI technology had already been rolled out across the Tube network, it could have conceivably been possible to find him before he had even left the station.

But what makes the tech powerful is also what makes it scary.

Really. Ya think. What gave it away.

You know what this feels like? It feels like this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.

programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose?

No, this instance is federated and not a traditional forum.

A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support

No, it’s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and it’s also fine if it takes a while. And it’s also fine if the question goes unanswered.

imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?

Yes. Because it is functionally no different than a forum main page where so many new topics get created that questions people don’t get to get buried. And also, I’ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didn’t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have “solved” that.

To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, can’t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesn’t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. “matrix automation” “element bot”. E.g. this is a very poor collection: https://element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.

But let’s say all of that exists and works.

What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?

I think we’re talking about different things then. I don’t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities I’m a part of. Because I’m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if it’s not a total replacement.

As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?

This is inverted. I don’t need to defend why the platform I’m on is good, (it’s not), you need to explain why forums are supposed to be better (they are significantly worse).

Documentation belongs on a dedicated website, Issues belong on some gitlab or something instance. If I have a question, I want the answer reasonably quickly or I’m just not going to use the software you’re providing. If I’m nice, I’ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didn’t work.

Forums serve no purpose anymore.

Right now, I’m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms I’m interested in.

The people in this thread are open source power users who don’t get and don’t want the features that discord offers. It’s no surprise you’d rather have your forum back. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work.

Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don’t lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:

https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/

That is true, nevermind me.

This is a good post, but I’m not sure it belongs in technology. Hmm.

Eh. It’s a bit more handwavey than that. It’s whatever you want it to be.

Virtual reality was supposed to be simulated, but “actual still science fiction” levels of simulated. seamless 3d environment, intercepting nerve signals to look and intuitively control an avatar or ready player one had a haptic suit.

AR stems from that and was supposed to be “the real world, but cyber”. Or “VR, but with real world elements”. In the novel “virtual light”, it’s supposed to overlay that “datasturce of cyberspace” on the real world. Even then it was never really clear what purpose cyberspace as a 3d world would have, what data looks like or should look like, and what the advantage of that visualization would be. Or why would rather see that than what the world looks like.

Mixed reality is also that. Imo. It sounds the same to me too.

The whole thing is like hand gesture control. It looked great in minority report, but we had it since one of the 2010s xboxs and it went absolutely nowhere.