Judging by the screenshots there are better looking IRC apps, but fine 🤷

Please PM me about it.

Maybe just a hint to get you thinking out of the box, but cat doors really don’t need to be at ground level. They will happily climb somewhere to get in and out.

The one in the OP afaik in Canada the imperial core 😏

I think you should find a smaller, well moderated instance and show it to your parents first. If they consent with her signing up to it, it should be fine and generally speaking there is no practical way for instances to check the age of their members anyways.

Tumblr is being reworked to have a Wordpress backend right now, and Wordpress already has well working ActivityPub support, so yes, Tumblr will very likely happen once they made the switch.

I suspect the technical debt in Tumblr was larger than expected when the first announce federation support, and now it became nearly a full rewrite, which takes time.

The most they can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.

Na, they were quite explicit what their plan is: they realized that there are interesting “content creators” on the fediverse, and that many other “content creators” are eying the fediverse and similar platforms as a way to have more control over the platform they use. And ultimately users will follow the creators, once the creators are sufficiently fed up with being taken hostage by facebook etc. So they are willing to let the creators switch to the fediverse, but want to retain the users as ultimatly that is where their revenue is coming from via advertisement and data harvesting.

I highly recommend you read up on history. For most of humanity’s existence we lived in small relatively egalitarian groups were people depended on each other for survival.

Your “always” is a very recent state of afairs and also not universally true even today.

Ok, sorry, didn’t get around writing something on the weekend, and I will need to keep it short now as well.

The issue was primarily caused by a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire) in combination with some odd errors in the fallbacks that I can’t fully explain.

So basically our ISP is not assigning a completely fixed IP (it would cost 20 euro a month extra and we would need to switch to a business contract for it), but during the first 3 years of operation the IP they assigned only changed 3 times or so. Recently however they started to reassign a new IP more often, and annoyingly they assign a temporary IP first and a few weeks later apparently switch it again to a more permanent one in a different subnet.

We had this issue a few times in the last months, but the dynamic DNS of IPfire always caught it within a few minutes and thus is wasn’t a major issue. But before I left on the work trip I updated the Firewall software, which caused the IP to switch to the temporarily assigned one, but again the dynDNS updated everthing within minutes, so I assumed everything was working fine.

However when the ISP randomly switched the subnet again, some still unkown bug caused the dynDNS to fail and the few failsaves I had in place to inform me about IP changes also didn’t work, which led me to assume there was a hardware failure in the firewall and thus no way to fix it remotely.

But a few days after, I recieved an automated email from one of the services we host, which made it clear that outgoing connections were still working and thus we started to investigate how to find an alternative way to get the true IP of the server. Ultimatly my friend resorted to port-scan approximately 500k IPs in the subnet we knew the new IP should be at and we found 20 or so IPs that had ports open for a XMPP server and thus were potential candidates for our server. Luckily it was among them and thus we were able to manually update the DNS entries and restore service.

There are some lessons lerned from that, especially that the dynDNS of IPfire seems unreliable and I already have some plans to switch to another software for that, as well as add additional out of band notifications on IP change.

In addition we will try to find a cheap KVM to install on the main firewall that is connected on a seperate IP to be able to connect to it directly and reboot / troubleshoot it more easily even if the main connection is lost.

Last but not least we are experimenting with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS which might allow more stable connection and the same VPS could be used to host some vital services like the XMPP server that thus would remain accessible even if the main server goes down (however since accounts are linked to the Lemmy database, this is a bit tricky and likely needs some partial database replication on the VPS or so, as otherwise there is no way to log in when the main server is down).

Most of these improvements will only happen once I have physical access to the server again end of July, but for now the service seems stable and hopefully we will not run into other issues until then.

It’s not any worse than the differen’t feature support levels of different Matrix clients. But especially on Android, XMPP has nice modern clients with all the features you would expect, including a/v calls and reactions/stickers.

The main issue right now are up to date Windows desktop clients, but on Linux desktop there are some good options.

We run the latest beta.7 on https://photon.slrpnk.net/

There is: XMPP 🤷

There is not much they can do about it short of shutting down the entire server. Due to how matrix functions internally any sufficiently large federated homeserver replicates most of the entire network.

It is a bit counter-intuitive but restricting new signups will not help them much. The way the matrix protocol is designed, i.e. replicating everything on every server, means that clients connecting to their server have only a minor impact. As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver their costs will stay high and there isn’t really much they can do about that other than shutting it down entirely.

Face recognition might be usable to spot agent provocateurs at protests but can be a double edged sword.

LLMs seem pretty useless to me and generative content AI seems to have very little utility as others here already said.

Deltachat works ok for 1:1 chats and small groups. It is totally unsuitable for large public channels as it doesn’t really have a concept of group chats and just pretends so by (in email parlance) adds every one in ‘CC’. This only works ok for small private groups.

IRC just needs to get it’s shit together and start adopting IRCv3 features on the larger servers. The problem is really only that networks like libera.chat run a feature set that is at least 15 years behind what IRC can actually do.

This article is nonsense. The Foundation was always a front for New Vector and their board is largely made up by New Vector employees. So of course they knew what was going on.

New Vector simply decided that the strategy to make Matrix appear as an open standard was against their business interests and thus left the foundation to fend for itself with obvious consequences.

It is still planned for later this year, but there are some potential blockers on the Piefed side with password hashing and now it seems less urgent to be honest.

Well, that is a funny read, but it clearly describes upper and lower middle-management and not the actual bosses / company owners. Those have their own issues i.e. mostly being almost entirely isolated from reality by generational wealth.

I am not a fan of having arbitrary and highly fluid definitions of pathological conditions as they lose all meaning that way. If you can massage the numbers to cover 50% of the population, then nothing stops you to go even further, and then we are in the territory of claiming that human nature is inherently egoistic (with some rare exceptions maybe).

And I don’t see much point in having such pessimistic world views and they also don’t fit to my personal experience 🤷

It is still worthwhile to look out for toxic behaviour pattern, but I don’t think we should be chasing shadows and expecting bad intentions behind what most people do. Because that then just becomes a self fulfilling prophesy as others are quite sensitive to even unspoken accusations of bad faith.