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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

    In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

    I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.



  • “Collapse” meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?

    Years back, I setup a Synapse’s server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the “big” Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.

    But don’t just take my words for it:

    https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339

    Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I’ve not tried these yet. They’re still in development.

    How does it scale differently than Matrix?

    The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can’t shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as “primary” as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.

    XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That’s an “old” model, but it scales.

    https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html

    That’s for the host. For other attendees, it’s much lower.

    I don’t think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can’t report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).

    Out of curiosity, why do you say this?

    I don’t use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don’t want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts

    And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don’t know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.

    Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.

    And that’s only considering well intended people.

    But these are my humble 2cents.




  • What I don’t like with Matrix is the load it puts on the server. It basically copies 100% of a room content to any server having one or more users registered in the room.

    So if you’re on a small server, and one user decides to join a 10k+ large room, your server may collapse under the load as it tries to stay in sync with the room’s activity. This is deterrent to self-hosting or family/club/small party servers.

    XMPP, on the other hand, has proven to be highly scalable, has E2EE, federation and some bridging services.

    The only thing XMPP does NOT have is a single reference multiplatform client with all basic features for 2023 (1:1 chat, chat rooms, voice/video 1:1, and voice/video conference) than anyone can use without wondering if the features-set is the same as the persons you’re talking to.

    And while we’re there: I’m not even sure I want a messaging account linked to any of my Fediverse accounts…


  • matlag@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlEnjoy it while it lasts.
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    1 year ago

    Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

    Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

    We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

    The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

    You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

    You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

    You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

    And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

    Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

    Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

    Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

    And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

    And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

    Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

    It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

    But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!




  • There is pretty much nothing done in Matrix that couldn’t be done with XMPP. But XMPP suffers from multiple issues:

    • The protocol is very well controlled, but the downside is it takes forever to have any extension approved, leaving sometimes features you would want fast in limbo for months, years, and clients/servers dev waiting for the extension to be finalized. The worst example is probably when Google dropped a group video implementation for XMPP in 2005 on the table, (at the time, Google messenging system was using XMPP) with source code, free license and everything. They would just have to take it and use it. Version 1.0 of the protocol extension was released… in 2009! Meanwhile, many clients were just “waiting” for the protocol before starting implementing anything. When the protocol was finalized, XMPP’s world could congratulate itself for being 3-4 years late on every other communication system. This story repeated recently with an encryption extension.
    • There are many clients project, most of them are carried by 1 or 2 devs, each of them almost single platform.
    • As XMPP is “older”, it doesn’t benefit from any buzz effect, and some of the “waiting for features” have worn out many adopters.

    As it was said in another comment, there is a company and some investors behind Matrix, and with that:

    • Protocol can change as fast as they need to implement a new feature. Worst case it is updated again later
    • Having much more resources, they could develop a true multi-platform client with a quite consistent interface. That eases a lot the adoption by non-technical users.
    • Being the new thing and with a bit of marketing, they had a buzz, and that leaded to more servers and more clients developed, though they all have to follow the company’s train.

    Now, from a self-hosting point of view, Matrix has a huge flaw: rooms are entirely copied and synced on all servers from which a user participates. It takes only 1.

    For example: if any of your users join a room with 10k users exchanging thousands of messages per day, your humble server will synchronize the whole flow in a local copy. There is not a chance a small server can take that kind of load. Last time I checked where they were for solutions (it was years ago, might be different today), the proposals were:

    • Option for admins to prevent users from joining room bigger than xxx ?
    • Wait for a new server implementation that’s lighter than the mainstream one? (still not released in prod to date, and won’t really solve the problem)

    And for some positive points about XMPP:

    • It proved its scalability. Whatsapp started as an XMPP server/client with no federation (don’t know how far they drifted from the base protocol now, though)
    • It is extremely versatile. Right now, there are 2 leading project that include blogging/microblogging features and more

    https://movim.eu/

    https://libervia.org/

    The last has microblogging, events, forum, ticket management, file sharing features, etc… Still needs a lot of love but it shows the potential of the protocol.

    There are other projects using XMPP for whole different things (IoT, …)



  • Well, we’re talking about 2 different things here:

    1.Does the victim in an abusive reationship ackowledge it is abusive. You’d be surprised how many victims don’t. And that does not make them a tiny bit “less” victims.

    2.Once the victim acknowledges the abusive situation, how much support is offered to help the victim, and yes, very often, the answer is close to peanuts, and that’s quite a shame. But that’s a whole different issue.