Unhappiness is treason.
Please report to the Housing, Production, Development, and Mind-Control department for adjustment.

Have a nice daycycle.

Instant Messaging seems to be stuck on using someones server to communicate, where we need a good way to cross communicate across different networks and businesses and not just pay the same guy for all chatting services.

This, for me, is a major appeal of Matrix. It works a lot like email in that you can have a login on someone else's big server, or you can set up and run your own server and have an account there, but messages can be exchanged between different servers just as with email.

XMPP (Jabber et al) also works that way, but seems to be less popular these days.

I'm guessing it's also the free-to-download "only for personal use" version as well, which is probably another reason they were all sharing one password.

It seems like the solution is pretty obvious and largely already developed.

No doubt Twitter will be adding ActivityPub federation and RSS feeds in the next week or two and this project will be complete.

Right?

(Hello? Anybody?...)

Leaving aside any issues of the people and organizations involved and the violations of terms-of-use etc...

Maybe, just maybe, if ISPs and carriers would get off their [fornicating] [butts] and make IPv6 available everywhere, IP addresses wouldn't be such a scarce commodity that there was an incentive for bad actors to fraudulently hoard them.

I'm guessing Matrix doesn't have a big marketing budget, since it seems like it gets left out of "these are alternatives to the Big Proprietary Instant Messengers" articles, or if it *is* mentioned it's described incorrectly (last article I saw that mentioned it claimed you had to pay to have your own homeserver instance, what the heck?)

Functionally, it's more or less like XMPP except based on HTTPS/JSON instead of Raw-TCP-Sockets/XML. You can even run your own instance and still have it intercommunicate with people on other instances. Not only is there a fairly wide selection of client software to choose from, there are even multiple, independent (and interoperable) server projects to choose from. End-to-end encryption works.

It's seemed weird to me that it doesn't get more attention when the subject of instant-messaging comes up, especially on "technology"-themed sites.

https://matrix.org/

I [insert profanity here] hate these things.

I seem to often run across projects that sound potentially interesting, but (as it appears in this case) if I want to know what the heck they're really doing there's either a site with a handful of graphics and maybe an incomprehensible diagram or two with some marketing phrases, or a source-code repository. If I wanted to know what a "pod" is and how it works, I have a choice between Inrupt's awful brochureware site where I can watch vague buzzwords zoom in and out of view as I scroll down the page, learning pretty much nothing more than I would if it was a single line of text saying "our stuff is cool. It will totally solve problems and stuff.", or I can go dredge through source-code and see if I can figure out how it works.

Is there any mid-level explanation of what the heck they're trying to accomplish, somewhere, between "it's totally cool, Mr. or Ms. CTO, you should totally demand your sysadmins and developers start working on it!" and "here is some source code, go write something"? Are these "pods" just data structures that I can move from server to server if I want to self-host? Does it only contain identity data or any arbitrary stuff someone might conceivably want in there?

At least they didn't try to shoehorn "blockchain" in there somewhere this time (as far as I noticed, anyway).

Messaging could do with less dependence on single monolithic central servers for everything.

Well, sure, if you want to slum it with the .commoners.

All the *cool* kids are on .qg and .xn--h2brj9c now.

For those who have not yet had their Recommended Daily Allowance of Useless Knowledge:

Only about 1/3* of humans actually produce methane[1] - the process is dependent on a specific class of microbe (methanogenic archaea) which *most* humans (about 65%-75%)* don't have in their guts (but cows do). Bovine digestive systems also spend a lot more time fermenting, so you get a lot more methane even compared to what you get from humans who do host methanogens in their guts.

The long fermentation time also gives their gut microbes time to produce lots of amino acids and fatty acids and vitamins, which is why cows can grow so large and strong on even an all-grass diet. Cows are basically walking alchemical factories that magically transmute the nutritional equivalent of wet sawdust into steak, cheese, and more cows.

There, that should be enough Useless Knowledge to get everyone through the next few days.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

* - Okay, apparently prevalence of methanogens in humans seems to vary from study to study, but still it's only *some* humans and not all.

Hypothetically, it sounds like bcachefs will have most of the same features of btrfs, but has a leg up on btrfs for reaching "maturity" as it's largely based on the already-mainline-and-stable "bcache" code in the kernel.

I keep watching for it to hit the main kernel, which ought to happen Real Soon Now.

https://evilpiepirate.org/git/...

Meanwhile, I've been using btrfs on a lot of my systems for quite some time now, haven't experienced a major problem with it in years. Admittedly, these days I'm mostly using it just for the inline compression.