It is tech news, but I get you. It’s hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it’s often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you’re looking for.

Having him deliver the “I’ve been here the whole time” would be incredible haha

I didn’t realize Sam Reich’s dad was so cool

Well, here you have a company that fires their CEO for going too much in the direction of earning money.

Yeah, honestly, that’s music to my ears. Imagine a world where organizations weren’t in the business of pursuing capital at any cost.

this is someone manually doing it themselves as a joke to simulate the leaderboard on your myspace page.

yeah haha, the comments on most posts seem relatively positive to me? ironically, this is by far the most negative comment section I think I’ve ever seen here

skim milk

honestly, I want to share this because it’s a super relatable sentiment… but tide pods and coffee creamer aren’t exactly the most relatable groceries to use for it lol

someone pls photoshop this tweet with bread or chicken or something so I can send it to my friends 😅

yeah, I use my start button all the time to quickly open stuff. Hit start, start typing the program name, hit enter because it shows up immediately as a suggestion. super quick with no need to touch the mouse

How many of us are ten year plus users who have just had enough?

I just use both now, honestly. I don’t really use the big subreddits because the users and quality of conversation feel like they’re actively making me dumber… but there are smaller niche communities that don’t really have a viable non-reddit alternative yet, and I’m not willing to let one greedy man force me to give up on a part of my life that I really enjoy.

Hopefully these things aren’t just replaced but one can hope

if you listen closely you can hear the beans coming our way

I’m OOTL and I think I’ll just sit this out.

I’m fully in the loop and it still just makes me think of omg sO teh r4nd0m!! memes from 2005

like, maybe we’ll revisit ragecomics next lol

because we’re taking the internet back to 2003 and that includes omg teh random posts being funny again *holds up spork*

yeah, I had some ones set up like months out, it was always fun getting those random reminders. There’s a similar bot on discord, at least

You can subscribe to kbin “magazines” just like communities from other federated lemmy instances too, so you can view them all through lemmy.world or whichever instance you’re on

Here’s a link to the blocky docs with a little more explanation. The above link looks like it goes to the a docker image posted on the user’s profile… I think? ^I need to get more familiar with docker^

I think the best approach might be general subject-specific instances? Like, video.games with a main games community, meme community, then smaller communities for various games - or sports.social, with communities for each sport.

I feel like we’re going to end up with a particular community on a particular instance ending up as the “default” community for that subject, but it’d probably be better (in an ideal world) to have those on separate instances to maintain some degree of decentralization

I voted for no memes, and I’m really glad we got that, but one thing I want to mention is that it’d be good to have a /c/gamingmemes or something to redirect people to, rather than just a closed “no memes here”. There’s definitely an appetite for that content, and it seems gentler if there’s another community they can be directed to.

(I thought about creating it myself but I’ve never really liked gaming meme pages, so I don’t think I’d be good at hosting one 😅)

I didn’t want to make the post body so long that people missed the link entirely, but for those that scroll straight to the comments and just want a summary, some of my thoughts and some excerpts:

It sounds great in terms of facilitating interactions with people that don’t want to move off their usual apps, but the encryption concerns are pretty valid, though niche, as well. The other thing that I thought was interesting was the big companies (as well as European government agencies) that have already migrated over. One of my biggest concerns with fediverse services is always the difficulty of convincing people to adopt it, so hearing about cases like that is very encouraging.

It makes sense too - if I were an organization representing a sovereign government, I’d hardly want to be beholden to the whims of private corporate ownership. Governments starting to make official statements via social media has always seemed a bit odd to me, and the recent issues with Twitter shuttering public post visibility do a great job in demonstrating the danger of that dependence. If this article were a bit more recent, I imagine they’d go into that a bit more too.

Some excerpts for people that don’t want to read the whole thing (though I’d recommend just doing that!)

The Matrix protocol also supports non-native interoperability through a technique called “bridging,” which ushers in support for non-Matrix apps, including WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Element itself offers bridging as part of a consumer-focused subscription product called Element One, where users pay $5 per month to bring all their friends together into a single interface — irrespective of what app they use.

This is enabled through publicly available APIs created by the tech companies themselves. However, terms of use are typically restrictive with regard to how they can be used by competing apps, while they may also enforce rate limits or usage costs.

_________________

A growing array of regulations, particularly in Europe, are forcing Big Tech to pay attention to data sovereignty, with the likes of Google partnering with Deutsche Telekom’s IT services and consulting subsidiary T-Systems last year to offer German companies a “sovereign cloud” for their sensitive data.

This regulatory push, alongside growing expectations around data sovereignty, has been a boon for the Matrix protocol. Last year, the agency responsible for digitalizing Germany’s health care system revealed that it was transitioning to Matrix, ensuring that the 150,000 individual entities that constitute the health care industry such as hospitals, clinics and insurance companies, could communicate with each other regardless of what Matrix-based app they used.

This builds on existing Matrix implementations elsewhere, including inside the French government via the Tchap team collaboration platform, as well as the German armed forces Bundeswehr.

“The pendulum has been clearly swinging toward decentralization for quite a while,” Hodgson explained to TechCrunch. “We’re now seeing serious use of Matrix-based decentralized communications across or within the French, German, U.K, Swedish, Finnish and U.S governments, as well as the likes of NATO and adjacent organizations.”

Back in May, open source enterprise messaging platform Rocket.Chat revealed that it would be transitioning to the Matrix protocol. While this process is still ongoing, this represented a major coup for the Matrix movement, given that Rocket.Chat claims some 12 million users across major organizations such as Audi, Continental and Germany’s national railway company, The Deutsche Bahn.

_________________

End-to-end encryption is a huge selling point for the big technology companies of today, one that WhatsApp hollers from the rooftops. But making this work between different platforms built by different companies is not exactly easy, and many — if not most — experts on the subject say that it’s not possible to enforce a truly secure, interoperable messaging infrastructure that doesn’t compromise encryption in some way.

WhatsApp can control — and therefore promise — end-to-end encryption on its own platform. But if billions of messages are flying between WhatsApp and countless other applications run by other companies, WhatsApp can’t really know what’s happening to these messages once they leave WhatsApp.

[…]

There’s no escaping the fact that breaking encryption is far from ideal, irrespective of how a solution proposes to reconcile this. But perhaps more importantly, a robust solution for addressing the real encryption issues introduced by enforced interoperability doesn’t truly exist yet.

Despite that, Hodgson has said in the past that the upsides of the new EU regulations are greater than the downsides.

“On balance, we think that the benefits of mandating open APIs outweigh the risks that someone is going to run a vulnerable large-scale bridge and undermine everyone’s E2EE,” he wrote in May. “It’s better to have the option to be able to get at your data in the first place than be held hostage in a walled garden.”

[…]

In many ways, the ground has never been so fertile for Matrix to flourish: it’s in the right place at the right time, as the world seeks an exit route from Big Tech’s clutches backed by at least a little regulation.

and now they’re advertising stuff like subscription tiers and server shops, which makes me feel like they’re using a completely different service than I am