Jajcus

But e-mail is sent from one entity to another, through servers providing service for one or the other party. Most of Lemmy and Mastodon activities are publicly broadcasted and can be received and collected by any federated server.

Google was quite 'involved' in adding voice chat integration to XMPP. They seemed to be pushing their solution as an 'industry standard' (which would be great), but they have never even provided proper specification and were breaking things that were already agreed on. This actually slowed down the process and ended with a few unofficial incompatible extensions for voice chats.

Also the very foundation of XMPP protocol ('XML streams') was quite unfortunate choice making implementations difficult and inefficient. I know that, because I have implemented three different client implementations, each time fighting XML parsers to do what XMPP expects (which is not what XML was designed for). And each extension to the protocol made things more complicated and more verbose, which didn't made adding features like voice chat any easier.

I don't have anyone on Matrix to talk to, so no reason to try it.

That works only when people are ready to question their opinions. Many are not. The 'why' question does not seem to make sense to them – why ask for reasoning, when we know 'the fact'?

The only meaningful 'why' in such situation may be: 'why I am still talking to them?'

That is why Ukraine can get it cheaply.

I was quite involved in XMPP, not from the very start, but quite early. At first its biggest strength were 'transports' – gateways to other, proprietary, instant messengers. Having a Jabber (that what it was called there) account allowed one to talk to ICQ and AIM users. This is what pulled first users and allowed the network to grow. The protocol being open and network being federated appealed to various nerds, for whom it became the IM network of choice. Especially when they could use it to talk to friends and family on other networks.

I wrote a Jabber transport for the most popular instant messaging platform in my country. It become a 'must have' component of any Jabber/XMPP server here. And some major local commercial internet services would start their own XMPP services – finally they had some means to compete with the monopolist. For me it was my '5 minutes of pride' – my little piece of open source software would be used by thousands of users, though most unaware of that. I have also wrote a Python library and a text client for XMPP.

Then Google joined and Facebook started considering it. It seemed like XMPP will become 'the SMTP of instant messaging' – the real standard which will end closed proprietary communicators. But things didn't go well. Google would often ignore the agreed protocol, change it a bit, while still declaring full support. XMPP development would slow down, as everybody wanted the protocol to be agreed with Google, but Google just made some small improvements on their side without sharing details or participating in building XMPP specifications.

Federation with Google would become more and more unreliable. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. Google Talk, GMail Chat, Hangouts seemed to be the same thing and not the same thing at the same time it was a mess. Then Google pulled the plug. Then every smaller commercial providers did the same – there was no point in keeping the service when more than half of the contacts disappeared.

I felt betrayed by Google (it really felt like a 'non-evil' corporation back then). But that was not what killed XMPP for me.

I would have less and less people to talk to via XMPP, not just because of Google. Other networks my Jabber server was linked to become more and more irrelevant (anybody using ICQ, AIM or GG now?). Nerds that used XMPP left it because of loosing contacts in other networks, or just moved on to Discord (yeah… nobody seems to notice it is proprietary too). I would still use XMPP for family communication, but there was the spam…

Oh… the spam. I would get over hundred of messages (or contact requests), mostly in Russian, offering me bitcoins or cracked software. They would come from many different accounts and domains. Often from 'legitimate' XMPP servers. And there were no means to reliably block it. The XMPP protocol had no proper means to handle illegitimate traffic. XMPP servers and clients had little spam-fighting measures. The spam made XMPP unusable for me, so I shut down my server too. I guess that could also be a major reasons for some commercial services to de-federate. I think USENET was killed by spam and no effective moderation too back in the day.

Then my wife convinced me to bring it back. XMPP is again and still my primary communication platform for family chat. A private server with four accounts. Practically blocked from outside. We use it because it proven to be the most reliable thing and independent from the big corporations. Even Signal was inferior to that (no proper desktop/web clients, sometimes messages would be delayed even by hours, then it even stopped being convenient when they dropped SMS support).

That is not easy. Linux is about having full control over our own hardware. Client-side anti-cheats are about preventing user of having full control of the system.
Especially the kernel-side anti cheats rely on kernel not being controlled by the user.

Linux is a general-purpose OS, and that is generally a bad choice for safety-critical real-time applications. And it is not something that Linux can just be adapted for – the biggest problems are: the kernel is big and the code is complex. Anything added do Linux to 'solve that' would just make it even bigger and even more complex. And removing stuff for kernel would just make it worse general-purpose OS.

The solution for proprietary RTOSes used there would be to create a new, open-source one. This should be doable as those are small and simple by definition (to some extent – only as simple as they can be for given task). I guess this will happen one day, though it is harder for it to happen naturally, as that is not something hobbyists would do for their own needs in their own time and that is usually what starts an open source projects.

On the other hand – Linux can co-exist and I am sure it does co-exist with those specialized RTOSes. I would assume that even on a Boeing airplane there are many Linux instances running… or even Windows ones.

Photos already took place of another application killed by Google. It can be killed again.

Even toasts are much better when made from actual bread and not this thing.

Then people who still prefer Reddit to Lemmy could do the same to us and would be totally justified. Do not make internet even worse than it is now. You don't like a service – don't use it. Do not make it worse for everybody else.

But the posted link is http:// not https://, so browsers will mark it as insecure.