he/him
Gemini has accessibility & bandwidth problem. HTML is a more accessible format & HTTP offers compression. Add that Gemtext has too few ‘elements’ for technical writing or even basic blogging & I don’t think it should be seriously considered for anything than a novel toy.
GitHub isn’t open source
This needs to be repeated for those in the back that still didn’t get the memo. You do not need to use Microsoft products, especially if your goal is free, open, and/or ethical software.
Similar can be said of Guix
Haskell devs like to write code, not maintain it. A bunch of libraries get written, but get abandoned shortly after for something new & shiny.
China, IL would be on my list
One important thing K-9 does that this doesn’t: realese on F-Droid.
What is this? At least provide a repository like DivestOS… while you are at it, get the code for the free software off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub.
Why tho? The logs give you information & progress. After boot you don’t even see it.
I honestly wish Android booted like this.
Meanwhile folks I work with Linux is basically seen as a must (if not specifically NixOS). You are on your own if you want to use OSs that don’t work well with Nix since there is too much value in immutable builds to warrant supporting your proprietary setup. Most ended up switching to or getting a second laptop for Linux.
I use the note to self capability of my XMPP server to send a message to myself for these sort of one-offs. I would never want my data in the hands of some proprietary service if I have the option—sharing data just to yourself on these services also means it is Big Tech’s data now too. All of the XMPP clients are super lightweight.
Bigger cases, I will use scp, rsync, or magic wormhole. Or just using removeable storage.
Well, we start be organizing the folks of Lemmy to understand the values of the old protocols instead of trying to chase the shiny new ones. “Ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
The web client is serviceable.
There are advantages, but I think a lot of folks are tracing trends in this space (including trying to copy Slack/Telegram/Discord rather than be better or strip the bad parts out). Newer ≠ better.
If you’re the type that that doesn’t like the kind of energy wasted for cryptocurrencies, you will be suprised that the eventual consistency the whole network is copying all message, all attachments of all users per host. This is also why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a new room or freshly launch an app as all of this syncing needs to happen. This also causes the self-hosting to be priced out as medium-sized (in terms of users) or low-spec hardware cannot keep up with neither the CPU/RAM nor storage space required to maintain a node on the network… which is pretty wild for mostly text in 2024. This causes folks to host their own single-user instances, or in reality almost everyone flocks to Matrix.org or a server Matrix.org hosts (or unfederates only serving to those on the host which is one way). With all of this centralization, almost all metadata ends up in the hands of Matrix.org (maliciously or not) due to the design of the protocol needing to have the entire history of everything. Copying Slack/Telegram/Discords UX in this sense was not the best call. Eventually consistency does add a resilience & uptime guarantee, but technically I don’t think those cost outweigh the benefits in most cases.
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is important, but it’s not always required. Many rooms are purposefully public so IRC(v3) fits most basic needs (tho I am not a fan of needing pastebins & separate image uploads). In the case of these encryption algorithms, almost everything is using the same double-ratchet encryption seen in Signal for DMs (provided you can verify there isn’t a backdoor via source code availability). If you need more features like E2EE or reactions or threading or pasting source code, XMPP is & has been the gold standard. It treats chat as ephemeral (while still having history, archiving, & no need for bouncers) where missing an old messages isn’t seen as the end of the world. Important, long-lived announcements & information should be in the Atom/RSS feed, mailing list, or forum (or Movim if you want this task on the XMPP network via PubSub) as these are the proper platforms for these tasks (we know how horrible searching a massive chat room is UX-wise… it’s basically gone in many cases, & in the case of proprietary systems is in a literal knowledge black hole). XMPP was built to run efficiently on machines from last decade so it is just as lean in both clients & servers now saving you money, data, storage, battery.
SimpleX is a project worth following, but I am not too sure how it handles ephemeral vs. eventual consistency & it is also far too new to have multiple clients & a proper decentralized community. Maybe this will come with time, but I am only keeping tabs on it for now.
Using proprietary chat apps like Discord, Telegram, Slack, LINE, Meta’s WhatsApp / Messenger. Still judging on apps that require a SIM & mobile OS (like Android) primary device like Signal… or an expensive chat protocol like Matrix.
Hosting your code & bug tracker with a propietary forge like Microsoft GitHub when you say you support open source—but don’t even bother to apply the same mentality to your own project.
…Oh, the question was “secretly”.
Vista all over again?
Monospace support for abugidas & abjads is pretty horrible
Similarly I learned to properly type (which means using your pinkies) with Dvorak back in 2007. I stuck with it since anything is a gain beyond QWERTY & _ on the home row helps with programming & config.
If you haven’t learned to touch type, you may as well use a layout that is gonna strain you less in the long run.
Not just community managed but operated as a non-profit. Codeberg won’t be scraping your deleted history to train their LLMs that they will sell back to you unlike Microsoft.
I am still convinced Git is overrated & overly complicated—and it is a shame all of the decent forges (even basic ones) are all built around Git.