It’s always a series of extensions nonstandardized but said to all be under the same umbrella. It would be better if these things called a spade a spade & say Markdown-like or Markdown-inspired instead of giving a false sense of compatibility.
You lost me at tea bags. What are you doing‽ Loose-leaf hea is cheaper, easier, is almost always high quality, doesn’t impart a taste of the bag, better flavor on multiple steeps, & isn’t literal trash (plastic ones are real bad for the environment). You get higher quality leaves & now you don’t need to carry around milk or sugar to mask the bad flavor too.
Downvotes here showing it’s controversial, but I am willing to bet these folk have never given AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, & LaTeX a spin in comparison (for ‘real world’ documentation, etc. with multiple output targets) to actually know what they are talking about 😅
There’s also a jillion places to host static sites with less complexity of the code albeit more complexity to get started for many non-developers. The thing is there was a time when high schools everywhere were teaching basic HTML so you could be a part of this new internet thing, but now folks don’t think they can have their own chunk anymore separate from the corporations. You still can but the knowledge seems lost & certain technically hurdles like TLS which I mentioned make it just one step more difficult.
I would be mad if this would be next to fall since I use it. I don’t self-host Matrix since it is too expensive being built on a fundamental ‘eventual consistency’ model mirroring all text & attachments for all users in every DM & room to your storage—not to mention the Python implementation server & even the Rust one use much more system resources than other open chat options. It’s the same for Mastodon specifically too which but Ruby this time—with eventual consistency chewing up GiBs of storage making small players shut down instances. I would not be surprised tho if their Matrix server fell next just based on hosting cost.
Wanting to get folks off proprietary garbage like Slack, Telegram, & Discord was the right idea but moving to Matrix will prove to be a mistake as nodes are too expensive to run therefore leads to the centralization we need to escape. With the poor performance of the flagship Element client too, casual users think it is too damn slow (literally takes 2 minutes to even get to a screen with text in my browser & it isn’t even done syncing). There are more mature technologies with lower running costs that could have/should have/can be embraced.
SSB was killed after it sat behind an about:config flag, then their telemetry (that most power users disable) reported folks weren’t using. But what average users would be using a setting they would need to poke around to find. It’s a real shame too since I want to say it was PeppermintOS that was largely built around PWAs.
Folks literally have no conept anymore that you can just slap HTML on a page. & with the advent of needing TLS, it starts to become more technical than a lot of folks want to bother learning & maintain versus the days of raw FTP uploads.
Markdown is trash. It almost always comes in a fork that is naturally incompatible with other forks & never has the features you need for blogging or technical writing (leading to abuse of the limited features, unsemantic markup output, and/or embedding HTML which is both ugly & also ruining portability to non-HTML targets). This leaves you locked into some specific tool’s forked implementation & never looks good in other contexts. Markdown was also never the only or best option for lightweight markup at any time.
I literally used to say this last decade, but as I grew experienced with more languages/paradigms/systems, it became 3rd best, then 4th, until I realized it actually not really great at anything other than there is an large ecosystem around it (wildly varying in quality). To some that might be enough, & going outside what you know isn’t typically the most wise thing to do, but it’s not particularly simple, or readble, or performance, or composable, or offering great patterns. Anything that used Python in Nixpkgs tend to be the most unreliable software for actually building & using.
Why folks always say this as if it won’t connect to your neighbor’s open WiFi? Some of these are being built with cellular access like those Nspresso machines—or LoRa—so you can’t just not connect it. These devices don’t need any network access.
Would be awesome if they offered an alternative forge & chat so they aren’t locked entirely to proprietary software for communication / contribution. 😔
This was the year I tried out Darcs & Pijul. With conflicts being less problematic & easier to collab without patch order mattering, you gotta wonder why all of this effort is still put into bolting stuff atop Git instead of moving on & helping the tooling in this space.
Second place would be Movim as a decentralized social media platform built atop the XMPP server you are already running.
I had to buy a washing machine recently. I asked if I could get one without the smart features (this was a half joke thinking there was no shot in hell, but at least I got to express disinterest). They looked in the back to find that they did have the previous model. They said it was basically the same but without the smart features—then they said it would still be under the same warranty & would cost me $150 less. I got real lucky that day—& the fact that I need a new TV has caused me dread knowing you basically can’t find ’em anymore.
Buying & steeping loose leaf tea instead of bagged garbage. Higher quality, lower price, actually tastes decent with multiple steeps. If I don’t finish the leaves, I fill the teapot with water to have cold brew the next morning. If you get into it, an electric kettle that lets you set the temperature is essential since you can avoid burning leaves much easier & unlocking more delicate leaves that require lower temperatures. Last tip which should be obvious: no milk or sugar & if you think it tastes bad, why do you keep buying black tea instead of something good?
US has tipping, gerrymandering, male circumcision, & other weird tendencies. Washing your butt with water is even older, maybe even ‘no tech’. Regardless, you owe yourself to install some option for yourself. 😀
It’s always a series of extensions nonstandardized but said to all be under the same umbrella. It would be better if these things called a spade a spade & say Markdown-like or Markdown-inspired instead of giving a false sense of compatibility.