Comment on My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk
poVoq@slrpnk.net 21 hours agoFine I didn’t need to go as low as Ayn Rand.
But I think you still didn’t get my argument last time. Tl;dr: there is no point in doing what you propose as it just results in recreating the same shit we already have. This has nothing to do with moral failings and everything with strategy and not repeating the same mistakes all over again.
And besides that I agree that Siskin isn’t great, and most likely suggested this instead. And that “open-source alternative” are now open-core and can’t pay their bloated expenses now that VC funding has run dry. I hope you see the irony in what you just wrote, because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.
rglullis@communick.news 20 hours ago
This is you your passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing “Let’s take on the big corporations by building another big corporation”, I am saying “we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of independent business.” and I am saying “if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don’t complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter”.
Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise.
Monal does not make video calls!
Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn’t change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.
So, at the end of the day, yes, I’d rather have this “unsustainable” growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This “unsustainable” system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
Lets not repeat the entire argument, but you are being extremely naive and literally play lipservice to what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.
And, no. Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced, Element requires a CLA so they can easily alter the deal even further, and their own marketing people go around fearmongering about the AGPL, which is a classic play of open-core companies. If it walks like a duck and all that…
And Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users. By their own admission during the presentation at the last FOSDEM, their MAU is barely above 300k. That’s what IRC had before Matrix started canibalizing them 🙄
rglullis@communick.news 11 hours ago
Yeah, completely typo’ed here. I wanted to change from “hundred of thousands” to “a few million” and ended up with the worst combination. Too late to edit, now.
If you ask me, I think Zuckerberg wants to commoditize the social graph and position his company to become the AWS of social web applications. It would be the best way to skirt all regulations (because he would claim that he is only providing infrastructure and is not liable for the content) and it would let he profit from the others by providing service and by snooping on the data they get through their servers.
And you know what? I’d be absolutely fine with him trying to do it. I actually would like to see how this would play out. I’d rather have a world where Zuckerberg has the "AWS of social media’ than a world where he has “Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram and whatever competition he manages to kill by buying them off”.
A world where Zuckerberg owns the AWS of social media implies a world where others like Hetzner, OVH and all the gajillion VPS low-end boxes can exist. As horrible and morally bankrupt Zuckerberg is, letting him make this move would be an improvement over the status quo.
Even if some compromises have to be made, a world where Zuckerberg controls 30-40% of the social web leaves us all some room to work and maintain a healthier alternative to our friends and family. And this is a better world than the one where we pretend to pass ideological purity test but inevitably need to install and use WhatsApp to talk with a friend or to send a picture to my parents.
Define “vital” and define “decently sized”. What point does AGPL Synapse becomes impossible to use? Are we talking about an instance for an university with a few thousand students and faculty? A company with a few hundred employees?
Couldn’t that issue be solved by simply breaking a larger instance into smaller subgroups? Couldn’t this “soft-ceiling” on instance size be actually a positive thing, as it would encourage better distribution of the user base among different service providers?
But more importantly, why should I care so much about theoretical, technical limitations that affect virtually no one and give preference to an alternative ecosystem that does not even have an decent client that people can use to make video calls?
poVoq@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
Fine, if you want to be the useful fool for Mark Zuckerberg you can do that, but I rather be not. The improvement in that setup is mainly on the side of Mark Zuckerberg as you write yourself. The rest would be some maganged opposition only existing because Mark lets them. But we had that argument before.
You are finding excuses for shitty business practises of Element. Synapse is already bad enough software as is, even for smaller instances, and this adds direct monetary incentives for Element to keep it bad, so that people are forced to upgrade to Synapse Pro or pay an even higher amount of money to upgrade the hardware to run this extremely inefficient shit software. This is all typical of open-core software vendors and you are having Stockholm syndrome if you think otherwise.
And please don’t be silly. XMPP had video calls long before Matrix. It works perfectly fine and there are many clients that support it. Just on one very small and developer hostile platform that outside of the US and Japan hardly anyone uses, it is work in progress and only partially supported.