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Comment on My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk

rglullis@communick.news ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users.

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.

what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

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.

Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced.

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?

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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨18⁩ ⁨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.

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You are having Stockholm syndrome if you think otherwise.
  
  I am not picking a favorite. I’d like XMPP to succeed. I still have my accounts. I still occasionally check if the apps improve to the point where I can install on my parents’ phones and having them using it, and every time I failed.
  
  Element is far from great, but I did manage to set it up for my parents, for my wife and then at least we can share pictures, we can have video calls so that they can see and talk with their grandkids, and we can have a family group, and we can have reaction emojis when someone says something funny.
  
  Can you at least consider not being so condescending, and maybe see that other people have different priorities and values than you?
  
  Just on one very small and developer hostile platform that outside of the US and Japan hardly anyone uses
  
  Oh, come on!
  
  35% market share in Europe
  
  22% in China.
  
  14% in South America
  
  XMPP does not work perfectly fine. You can cover your eyes and ears all you want, but stop gaslighting people.
  
  The rest would be some maganged opposition only existing because Mark lets them. But we had that argument before.
  
  Yeah, right. You’d rather deny the existence of literally over 1 billion people just to keep your belief that your solution is better for the people. Excuse me if I don’t buy your "argument*.
  
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  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It works perfectly fine on Android 🤷 In fact much better than any Matrix client does. That’s 70-80% or so of the global smart-phone market. Just because you made the mistake buying into a shitty walled garden like iOS doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for other people. But I see a pattern here of you ignoring reality and having Stockholm syndrome.
    
    Again, there is no point in moving “1 billion people” from Facebook to a “Facebook run AWS for social media”. There is just no benefit other than for Facebook to avoid accountability. You are wasting your time if you think otherwise.
    
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    rglullis@communick.news ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Just because you made the mistake buying into a shitty walled garden like iOS doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for other people.
    
    So much misfires in one single sentence. Impressive.
    
    “you made the mistake”: I am not talking my phone, but from other people that I want to talk to.
    
    “shitty walled garden like iOS”: I may not like, and you may not like, but there are 20-30% of the whole world that to do prefer to have a phone that gives them a walled garden and gives them some peace of mind. But instead of accepting that other might have different values than you, you try to dismiss their values as secondary to your cause and you pass your values as something that should be universal. Are you noticing the pattern here?
    
    doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for other people: if someone on Android can not have video calls via XMPP with someone on iOS, then no, it doesn’t work for neither of them.
    
    I see a pattern here of you ignoring reality
    
    You want to keep believing that your solution is superior and that the problem is with everyone else that keeps choosing the wrong things? Fine, I will not be able to convince you otherwise. But to keep being presented with actual experience from other people and respond by saying that “they are ignoring reality”? This is just silly.
    
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