If we care about the planet & sustainability, we would not be recommending a eventual-consistency model for chat communications. Matrix’s protocol is so wasteful & expensive.
Matrix is centralized around Matrix.org or servers they run tho. Since the protocol is a big data/metadata sync by design & medium–large-sized servers are expensive to run, almost all of metadata is with Matrix.org—of which was originally funded my Israeli intelligence & I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting data out of it to this day.
If they haven’t already, SimpleX registers a URI handler, you could put an ID in a vCard just like your contacts on XMPP show up in a messaging client.
They reason this happens more often with Signal is a) Signal requires a phone number (which is not good for your privacy) b) your contact is more likely to put in their phone number but many forget to add other IM protocols to their vCard & the default contact managers do not make this very discoverable.
In practice Matrix isn’t decentralized in the slightest. Almost every account is on Matrix.org or a server they host. The whole protocol is a data/metadata syncing machine that isn’t good for privacy & is prohibitively expensive to run anything beyond a single-instance since all history of all users in all rooms necessarily needs to be synced onto the server. Many medium-sized servers have shutdown on storage costs & system resource requirements (especially RAM)—which forced its users often to flock back to Matrix.org. This is wild since it is mostly text chat.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
There is compression & then there is whatever mangling Instagram does. But these are things an admin should be able to tweak as the defaults are are just not good enough for photography. You can’t be stripping color profiles, forcing sRGB, & camera data for these contexts—not to mention just trying to get a crisp image. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were using WebP too 🤢
I have waited so, so long. Recently color profile support (ICC) was merged & upstreamed to many repos so I finally reswitched back to Wayland since my colors are no longer broken on my displays.
Good for them but copying the bad parts of Instagram like forcing squares, throwing out image metadata (including license & color profiles), & compressing to hell means it is not the kind of platform I would want to upload my images to.
We could still be communicating cooperatively in a lightweight, decentralized manner had WhatsApp federated with & Facebook reverted unfederating with XMPP. 😥
Before you know it, it will be over a decade post-Windows like me. This week I have been trying to get a Linux phone to a satisfactory state to leave the mobile duopoly behind…
I use Posteo for their low-emission plan using boring technology that just works. 1€ / to is worth it, but I do wish you could bring your own domain name.
Eventually you will find you want a mail provider that just supports IMAP / POP without some paid middleman application just to use you email with certain clients else me stuck on the slow web UI. Luckily there are alternatives.
Luckily most casts are just an RSS feed so you do not need an special tooling. It is a real shame many are putting their content behind walls like Spotify.
I love that the contribute is just a mailto link. I want to see more of this & less “join the Discord chatroom & create a Microsoft GitHub account today”
MS GitHub doesn’t do anything the others can’t besides the social media features which do not need to be so prominent. If you must, it can be one of multiple code mirrors but should not be the exclusive one, or even the primary option.
Matrix is ass. You cannot reasonably scale an eventual consistency model without centralization & it will be a wasteful network like many of the blockchain projects. We already have had IRC & XMPP MUCs for ages that run on toasters & did not need to be reinvented. Chat has its place tho to help steer folks into asking the right questions, but such questions once formed need to be triaged as bugfixes, issues, FAQs, or forum posts to benefit everyone on the discussion.
If we care about the planet & sustainability, we would not be recommending a eventual-consistency model for chat communications. Matrix’s protocol is so wasteful & expensive.