I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.

It’s scary to see the UK going down the same steps as the US. It’s like we’re sleepwalking into it, having seen the effects, without really acknowledging what’s happening.

Australia strikes again with some awesome psych rock!

It looks like The Thing found a Blåhaj to me!

Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

The export function doesn’t include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

• Matrix
• Signal
• XMPP
• Zulip
• Stoat
• Rocket.Chat
• Mattermost
• Discourse

Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn’t come across it before and it’s pretty nifty!

Thanks for the reply! It’s good to know that it’s working in a similar community.

I’ll give it a few more days to make sure there’s a chance for people to object, and I can always stop if it causes problems once I start doing it, but so far it’s looking like it might be a good thing to try.

While I’d much rather see drivers go flat out all the time, I don’t think this will be a problem.

There were always reasons for drivers not to push as hard as they can - be it the super delicate pirellis, or saving fuel when refueling was a thing. WEC also has long stretches of lift and coast, and it doesn’t really impact the racing.

Ultimately, a casual fan will see that one car is going faster and another is going slower. It doesn’t really matter why. As they watch more, they’ll organically learn more about the constraints the drivers operate under.

As far as redevelopments go, it looks ok to me. Liverpool Street is my least favourite of all the big national rail stations to interact with currently - it feels cramped and worn down. It doesn’t feel like a heritage site when I interact with it.

I bought someone I fancied 99% chocolate as a joke. After a year or so, we got together. I opened the cupboard one day and saw it there, unopened. It came upon me to eat it :)

I love dark chocolate and until that point I thought the darker the better. Since then, I realised that I top out around 85%.

I really like the solo from 01:19 to 01:37.

I didn’t listen to much grunge or metal before, but this community is gradually drawing me in :D

Ok, I know this is crazy, but I’ve had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn’t breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as “no thanks”, and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

Although I don’t believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It’s probably one of the few things I’ve remembered verbatim for so long, and it’s completely useless :D

For me, the problem is not all screen time, but big tech proprietary software companies. I don’t support regulating screen time, but I do think governments should regulate big tech companies harder, while investing in free software - that genuinely serves user interests and has no incentive to be addicting or harmful - as an alternative.

Big tech explicitly tries to keep people addicted, whatever the consequences. They don’t support user agency. Even if you want to make Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc. less addicting, you are limited to a “show less like this” button that probably does nothing. On iOS and Android, companies abuse the notification categories, and yet there’s no way to filter out keywords or work around this, despite the widespread abuse of user attention.

If everyone had full control over their own (or their child’s) devices and algorithms, I doubt there would be such a backlash against technology as a whole. But, despite all the bad the techbros are doing, technology can be so empowering when it serves the users. To regulate screen time seems to me to treat the amazing parts of technology the same as the worst parts.

I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.

That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.

Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.

The person in the video shows this graph, or a very similar one.

She highlights the different categories between swimmers, fliers, runners and vehicles.

Then, she reveals the “human on a bicycle” entry on the graph and says that humans on a bike are much more efficient than anything else.

I was rooting for Ben and so sad that he lost! Kinda funny that the clouds once again contributed to his downfall.

I liked that we were able to see Adam and Sam strategising how to cut up the map before they arrived - followed by what they did in reality. And the endgame was really exciting throughout. It’s not often that the stakes are so high and the editing was great!

When it cut away from Ben’s final cardpull, I wrongly assumed it must be a mega curse that won him the game and got really excited. it didn’t cross my mind that they would also cut away for a time bonus.

I just miss ad-hoc commands, which Fluux already does. I’d prefer libadwaita as well, but having a way to config my IRC transport on the go is great. Gajim mostly works on the phone, but now as well as Fluux.

That makes a lot of sense. I hope it works well on the phone!

Pretty sure there’d be a community fork pretty quickly, as this is already one of the clients with the most clean UI.

Yeah, in fairness I’m probably overreatcting a bit. One of the things I really like about XMPP is the diversity of stakeholders and developers. I would be really sad if that went away.

The client looks good. Having an SDK to bridge between the XMPP world and UI world makes sense to me. It’s a direction many projects are going in.

I’m frustrated that they require a CLA that allows them to relicense the project. I don’t want to contribute to a project where one player gets more power compared to everyone else. As far as I know, no other developers in the XMPP world have the same dynamic.

I’m really happy to see that they shamelessly ripped off discord. We saw with bluesky that having an ultra-familiar UX is a big advantage.

For mobile linux, I’m going to stick with Dino. I like that it is lightweight, natively supported and integrates well with the rest of the system thanks to libadwaita.

I’m disappointed that contributors have to sign a CLA that allows them to relicense to proprietary licenses. So, all the power goes to them.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).