Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I dislike discord. Not just because of the discord -> degeneracy meme, but because so much tech specific knowledge is now hidden in a generally unsearchable archive where the only way to find it is BY joining and searching various discords. At least forums have a single post buried in the google archives from 15 years ago. With discord suddenly a huge amount of information is gated, and short of 'joining the community' it's impossible to locate the information now.
A problem that took me two days to iron out could have been done in 15 minutes if I simply remembered that Discord = information. However, my general use of discord means that connection in my mind doesn't take place.
I don't dislike the way Discord works; we really needed a replacement for IRC, as not everyone had the chops to run a bouncer and keeping a record was a big issue. Discord has the nice effect of mixing multiple types of communications people could want to have together in a semi-coherent structure.
I am a disappointed though that the solution we ended up going with was a centralized private company, instead of an open protocol. But Matrix is a mess.
It was broken by design.
People think federation is a feature for some reason, but the only people it helps are not people you should ever empower, because it allows them to bully you across instances for the crime of not sharing the same killfile.
"Federation" as far as the client sees it is just managing multiple accounts, which doesn't tilt the playing field in favor of the bullies.
Oh yeah, and the server needing 2GB of RAM to run is absurd. We accept that from clients, but when it's the server it's an entirely different story and makes it even more difficult to run.
"Federation" as far as the client sees it is just managing multiple accounts, which doesn't tilt the playing field in favor of the bullies.
Don’t these two paragraphs conflict?
And Matrix appears to have open federation, but can’t you just create your own insulated private swarm of Matrix servers like IRC networks?
The point of federation is that you use the same one. So, for instance, if Reddit was my homeserver and I wanted to post to TheMotte's Matrix instance, I'd be [redacted]@reddit.com.
The problem, then, is that if you don't like that homeserver I can't use my main identity to talk here, and it's a single point of failure to only have a single account on an instance that doesn't belong to me (in which case it's "banned for coming from an instance that doesn't answer to you").
Messaging about trying to appeal to users that were on the run from overly-censorious website operators that their selling feature boiled down to "more hassle and still just as much censorship" was the opposite of a good plan. This would have been fine in the early '00s where culture war hadn't yet come to the Internet for cultural reasons, but it's not the early '00s any more.
Of course you can- Pawoo and Gab are the largest such isolated instances, though as I understand it, that's more "most of the network has them blocked".
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