Sad thing is cheap domains like xyz get flagged a lot for “security”. 😥

You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.

Since Git can already be federated (no MS GitHub required), take a look at Darcs & Pijul for a better version control model based on Patch Theory. Tooling needs help, but fundamentals are sound.

Everything in the XMPP world is worth checking out. Movim is one of the more interesting projects bring a social media option to the platform & pushing boundaries for clients that is cool to see—as well as Libervia for setting up communities.

Not an endorsement of WhatsApp but they aren’t duplicating the metadata everywhere since it is centralized. I believe they run a fork of Ejabberd as well for the platform which is orders of magnitude more scalable & uses less resources than any of the Matrix servers—& they have to me RAM intensive due to how they duplicate that data…

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.

So they have Carbons? Took them long enough.

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 🤢

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.

Good to know 👍‍

Is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id no longer working?

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.

Broke first bone as an adult playing Pokémon Go on release night

Pijul is also worth looking at.

Fundamentally anything with a snapshot-based model is reliant on patch order mattering. As such you always end up with some centralized server. Pijul & Darcs are based on Patch Theory that says if Patch B is applied before or after Patch A assuming there is no conflict or dependence, it should not matter in a communicative way—that is to say the 1 + 2 ≡ 2 + 1. You can avoid a series of conflicts & better support a distibuted/decentralized development model if the order doesn’t matter.

Radicle can do it presently but a lot folks dismissed them since they worked on cryptocurrency stuff independently. Weird thing to be hung up on considering they were separate endeavors, but folks are fickle.

I like hub.darcs.net & smeder.ee myself. Git is overrated.

Programming never needed these sorts of social media features in the first place. Do you part by getting your projects off of Microsoft’s social media platform used to try to sell you Copilot AI & take a cut of your donations to projects with Sponsors.

Tech workers need to unionize

I pay $15 / mo for 600 Mbps symetric in Thailand. But I go off the beaten path with just my cell as a hotspot which is 10 Mbps for $90 annually. I can do almost anything I want with even those speeds—just make sure you are blocking ads (uBlock + DNS) to stop all the sludge from gauming up your pipes.