I know what you’re referring to, and I agree it’s likely off-putting to many, but not agreeing with the developer’s politics is on an entirely different level compared to suspecting a platform may be developed and compromised by state actors.

Agh, you’re quite right. Thanks for correction. I crossed my wires and misremembered how it worked after reading this article about it a while back. Edited my previous comment to reflect that.

I suppose in theory that shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem, though in Matrix’s case it’s a big roadblock, as the main Matrix server hosted by Matrix themselves has unfortunately become the defacto main server that most people use, which means not federating with it massively reduces the ability for someone to just be able to seamlessly hop onto your server unless they too are on one of the smaller, less popular servers.

In the example given in the video, it would likely be a bit of a deal breaker if you met someone in an online game somewhere, and then invited them to your self-hosted Matrix server, only to discover they are on the main potentially israeli intelligence-tied Matrix instance, meaning you’d have to explain they need to create an account elsewhere to be able to join your instance. It would be pretty awful UX.

There is no known state or corporate connection to Lemmy or Piefed, unlike Matrix.

I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure.

It’s not insecure. The origin of that myth is this blog, however the creator deleted a response left by one of the OMEMO developers, which explained that the newer versions of OMEMO were essentially open betas, and that when a final stable release is made, only then should the client developers implement a newer version.

You can read a longer response I left in regards to that here, if you’re interested.

there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented.

The Movim client is installable on all platforms as a PWA, which prevents confusion. But if you use other clients, it is true that they have differing feature support.

heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none.

Movim is that client. It supports Group voice/video calls and screensharing w/ audio share (a recent addition, which currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio). Sure, it’s not a native app, but neither is Discord (it’s just another Electron app).

We need a federated solution now, otherwise we’ll all just hop to another centralized platform with all the pitfalls that brings.

As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general.

As the video mentions, it’s worth some inconvenience for the privacy, and currently there is no other federated Discord alternative besides XMPP and Matrix (and matrix has way too many issues to even consider, IMHO).

The community adopting Movim or supporting it with donations and bug reports will help it develop and become more polished, and there are efforts to standardize a common XMPP package platform to make deployment simpler and easier. The entire landscape for Discord alternatives all have their downsides, XMPP is the only current option that could become a long-term, permanent solution.

French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private usage. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into

I wouldn’t put any stock into that as a metric of if it’s safe or not, since France was happy to buy a contract for Pegasus, another Israeli surveillance software adopted widely by EU governments such as France, Germany, and Spain.

EU governments were also happy to adopt Microsoft products despite the security implications, and even way back in the 80’s used Promis, which had a known US/Israeli backdoor in it (there’s a really great documentary about Promis on netflix, surprisingly, though I’d recommend sailing to watch it, yarr).

movim is a huge PITA to deploy yourself (especially in a container… you’re basically on your own at the moment)

Yeah, hopefully the dev or the community work on making it easier to deploy in a container at some point.

but it seems like it’s trying to appeal to discord users,

It is! But that focus is somewhat recent. The dev recently started a funding campaign to accelerate development, and just landed channels with rooms last week, so it’s still rough around the edges, but the pace that they’re implementing this stuff is impressive. They’re later going to work on having drop-in voice rooms as well.

EDIT: changed to more accurately represent how Matrix operates.

The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially spreads copies of unencrypted metadata to every instance participating in those rooms, So it’s federated, but difficult to actually keep metadata from being spread around even if you don’t federate with the main Matrix server, if any server you do federate with dies, it’ll get spread there. You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all, which defeats the purpose.

As an alternative, Movim, which uses XMPP and is also federated, does not spread meta data around like that.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.

The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative, at least not for Discord as it is used today. As a smaller self-hosted option that is just for use between a friend group, it’d probably be fine. It just won’t be able to replace the exact use-case of Discord, such as allowing for easily bringing new randos you meet into a call without them having to sign up to your specific server.

The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP, IMHO. Or Fluxer, if they eventually can enable federation.

I think it’d be better if we stuck with Movim instead, which is already built on a proven scalable and most importantly federated back-end (XMPP), and also already offers text, group audio and video calls, screensharing w/ audio (have to use chromium based browser for now to stream the audio), and even some pretty decent encryption.

It’s our most promising Discord alternative out of many.

It’s less hidden for admins. Whenever we click on a user’s profile, there’s a button that can take us directly to their individual mod-log history, which can help us quickly see if there’s a history of AI or bot spam behavior that was spotted by other admins/mods.

Also did you mean “bot scrapers”

Agh, auto correct got me. Yes, I meant bot scrapers.

As for the robots.txt v2 idea, I’m not sure that would be very effective or popular amongst admins, as I think most would prefer not to give it any data if possible, and even with reduced rates, there would probably still be enough bots and queries to present a significant issue.

I think there have been some experiments with ‘trapping’ bots in a recursive loop that they don’t realize is a loop, and therefore can’t escape, but I’m not sure how effective those have been.

The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.

We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.

They’re just dogpiling on the same things that all those other technofaschist companies are already lobbying for (and thus would also inadvertently benefit from), which AMD absolutely does not need to do. They would still be extremely profitable if AI was more regulated.

They’re donating directly to MAGA Inc., that’d be like donating to the Nazi party because they ‘had’ to ‘stay competitive’

Companies can, if they have any morals or ethics whatsoever, choose not to directly fund Fascists, that is ALWAYS an option. They are choosing increased profits at the expense of us all, and the deaths of the marginalized targeted by the current regime.

Donate to PostmarketOS so they can support more phones and polish it up. It’s based on upstream Linux, and once polished would give us a true and permanent alternative.

USSR

famously super chill with calls for worker democracy, with super democratic and worker controlled councils that… Ultimately had to listen to the Supreme Soviets. Nice.

Both the USSR and China have had more democracy and more workplace democracy than any country in the Western sphere of influence ever.

Hm…

Hmmm…

https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

“Billionaires are actually good as long as China controls them!” The conclusion of that article even says that it’s good to ‘make room for the hyper selfish so that they don’t leave China and cause brain-drain’. Like holy shit.

The ML countries are the only countries that have ever done anything remotely successful in breaking from global imperial capitalism

By… Becoming capitalists. Very 4D chess.

I know anarchists think everything can be prefigured, but anarchists are wrong.

Thank goodness you’re here to inform all us Anarchists how wrong we are. I’m sure we’d all be lost without your help.

Although it’s all borrowed money so it doesn’t matter to them…

Right, and they tend to convince investors to give them more by the amount of users adopting and using the product, which they can then extrapolate out with wild projections to convince venture capital to give them even more investments.

If more people abandon it entirely, the less venture capital they may be able to entice into their trap.

Unless that AI is hosted locally and only trained exclusively on public domain or GPL code (AFAIK, no AI model like that exists), it’s both unethical to use, and potentially corrupting the code-base with proprietary code it copied from somewhere else.

If a developer uses an AI hosted in a datacenter, then every use of it encourages the waste of water and fossil fuels to run the datacenter, it encourages the more to built in vulnerable neighborhoods where they can’t do anything about the pollution they generate, and it enriches the pocketbooks of the techno-fascists that run those datacenters.

In all the time the USSR existed, and in all the time that China and North Korea have been Marxist-Leninist spinoffs, none of those countries ever gave workers control of the means of production.

Billionaire CEO’s own the factories in China, and the people still there still live under the boot of capitalism, doing work for the very capitalists who they supposedly are fighting against.

Self-preservation in this instance means ML’s not dismantling the state and distributing power after they successfully gain control of the state.

They always preach this idea of them having control over the state is temporary, and that eventually they’ll give power to the workers, but in every case, they end up just being authoritarian dictators forever.

I’m not sure how specifically that would be an issue for the cybersyn concept, as that would, I assume, mostly be a way for communities to show what they have in surplus for others in need, and what they require for themselves. In a gift economy, there’s not much incentive to game that, AFAIK.

As those problems apply to the food-bank option: As much as I personally dislike crypto currencies/blockchain ledgers, it is an example of a (poorly) decentralized market-like system, though it happens to almost always be used for scams in our current society, due to profit motive.

If the food-bank fake money option was to be employed, it seems like it’d be possible to develop a method that is able to keep track of who bid on what, and who has what available each day through a decentralized fake-money system without the obvious downsides of crypto currencies (As an example, there would be no reward for keeping track of the ledger, so no one would have any incentive to create giant computer farms). And like the food bank system, at the the end of each day, it could redistribute all spent funds across the participating federated communities:

For Feeding America, an important wrinkle was a clause that redistributed to all members the sales proceeds at the end of each day. At midnight, any fake money spent on a given day was split up and returned to food banks. That went a long way toward assuaging disappointment a food bank might have felt after losing out to a higher bidder, as everyone benefited from the higher price paid.

However, it’s possible that a market-style system may not be ideal, even under a gift-economy, it’s just one potential idea.

As for:

Not to mention how to solve the multiple identity problem of federated systems.

I’m not sure how the multiple identity problem would be an issue in a federated system, could you elaborate on that more?