https://toast.al

he/him

  • 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: June 28th, 2020
  • toastal@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?
    2·
    2 months ago

    Like Matrix the clients aren’t all equivalent without feature parity (& no concept of the flagship or implementation client). For desktop, Gajim has the most power user features but issues rendering in smaller windows like a tiling split (& being written in Python has other issues). Dino is feature-complete & calls tend to always work—great if not connected to tons of chats. Profanity is the best TUI which is very fast but usability is really good for some things & really bad for others (like accepting no OMEMO keys). I use all three depending on the environment & task. Android it is a lot clearer where Cheogram takes the cake for me being a Conversations fork but with OLED black support as well as webxdc. For the web, Movim has the best UX/feature set & can be used anywhere a browser can with PWA support. You can also just check to see what provide OMEMO: https://omemo.top/.

    ActivityPub is a JSON-based protocol for seems primarily built for social networks, with the DMing experience normally not being secure or particular fast. XMPP is largely for building networks for passing messages & client presence—which can be extended to support PubSub like MQTT. It isn’t normally built for social networks but Movim & Libervia have extended XMPP to be a social network.

  • toastal@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?
    4·
    2 months ago

    They are both using the exact same double ratchet Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption down to the same problems of other clients keys for haven’t used in a while due to ‘inactivity’.

    The only difference is that XMPP is an extensible protocol where you very much can drop encryption all together if that doesn’t suit your use case for the protocol (such as not chat). However, all modern servers folks actually use for chat comminacations follow with the Conversations compliance suite & OMEMO support is expected in clients—meaning everyone using XMPP for standard coms in 2024 have a good encryption story.

    Matrix’s extensibilty is limited due to the choice of JSON over XML relying on adhoc, stringly-typed message names. Due adopting an eventual consistency model, Matrix server can’t be run on a potato in your bedroom & most folks are relying on public servers rather than the decentralized, federated self-hosted tendency of the XMPP network in practice not just theory. Most users are on Matrix.org or Matrix.org-provided servers syncing all metadata back to a single entity started with funds from Israeli intelligence. If you ask me which one has a better story for freedom, it’s going to be the one that is lightweight enough & designed to be individually-hosted over the defacto centralized option with resource-intensive clients.

  • toastal@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•iPhone users, what's stopping you from switching to Android?
    1·
    2 months ago

    I am not sure why you think this is so bad. You have a way to upload the apps you can’t get on F-Droid (default or by adding repositories (I have microG, DivestOS, Molly, Cheogram repos)). Many apps work fine enough without Play services with microG—except the stupid banking ones that don’t want you to root, run custom OS, unGoogle, or literally do anything with the device you own.

    Personally I hope this is all a stop-gap to Linux phones. I tried Ubuntu Phone last year & while parts of it looked great, the rough edges were apparent—especially the chroot environments for applications not in the Ubuntu store.

  • toastal@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•If there's one thing you want people to learn, what would it be and why?
    5·
    2 months ago

    Digital privacy matters as much as physical privacy & we need to keep the governments & corporations out since they can constantly surveil. Method for doing so need to legal, cheap, & accessible. If decentralization is a requirement, you system that requires Amazon S3 buckets & a beefy VPS are not sufficient when these sorts of things rarely have a technical reason why they couldn’t be democraticized to run from an apartment (why some ISPs don’t let you have an IP (v6 or not) or symetric connections as bits are bits is a different matter).

  • toastal@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•[Serious] What's your hot take?
    2·
    2 months ago

    One of my longer-term goals is to integrate Mumble on XMPP (others have thought about this too) since its chat is pretty shit & needing accounts to join isn’t great but or two good foundational protocols.

    XMPP is better for modularity which is why everything is at extension with means the foundations are simple & easy to implement where you can build something optimized & bespoke on it like Fornite’s coms or Nintendo’s presense. It’s a little harder to understand tho since out of the box you get almost nothing—but the big servers intended for chat like Prosody & ejabberd have sane defaults.

    The centralization you are referring to seems more a client issue since the protocol & servers already ‘do the things’ but it sounds like you want a single ‘app’. For community building where you consider group calls less common, both Movim & Libervia offer more than Element (note the other Matrix clients are lacking feature parity) since they both can do integrated posts like forums—where Libervia supports calendars/events too. There’s no reason a client couldn’t exist with Jitsi or Mumble integration.

    Ultimately use the right tool for you—it’s just nice to dispel myths that Matrix has some special sauce or that predecessors can’t fill the same roles (while also using less resources in all directions).