The ability to defederate arguable makes it more free & open even if it isn’t what I would prescribe.

I recall having some fun with League of Legends when you could just join chat & chat rooms thru a regular XMPP client. This was convenient at work on Linux to not need a working client to catch important messages from teammates. But everyone wants a walled garden now.

Not open? Wat

It is a standard, starting at RFC 6120. Everyone can use it today. 😃

Since we are on a decentralized platform & many of us care about federation, do yourself a service & read this little history lesson: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (archived)

V3 has chathistory + away status so the bouncer isn’t needed. Voice & video would be out of scope if trying to use a single tool, but the way these protocol operate is just to handshake & negotion for another protocol. My mates & I use Mumble (looking for alternative but everything kinda sucks & uses too many resources) for audio & share terminal sessions for other tasks where video is a massive liability for bandwidth & accessibility with video artifacts making text illegible.

Even still none of this requires perpetual data replication—what it leads to is Alice joining Bob’s server instead of setting up her own server & joining that way since the cost of hosting all that data + CPU/RAM prohibit her sovereignty in the space. Our society has enough of that where you can’t own your own land or other resources, reliant solely on those in power. With tech we can give that power back to folks so they can run their own stuff if they want, but we can’t have that if the cost of running everything is too high due to bloated design.

Also this was hard ta read: Is your space bar broken? ’Cause a lot of words are stuck together… ins & outs*, DMs* …apostrophes don’t make words plural.

The VoxeLibre mod is a substitute

It’s once you start federating do the prices start to soar, & most things can hold local channels fine… but that’s kind of the point if you are hitching your cart to say something is decentralized as a bullet point for privacy. But if it’s mostly local channels, wouldn’t IRCv3 cut it?

Matrix servers chew up an order of magnitude more CPU/RAM which limits the places you can deploy it. The eventual consistency model makes storage balloon as every message, attachment, metadata must be copied to all nodes in a conversation which is resilient, but wasteful in duplicated content in practices which has historically caused many medium & larger servers to shut down due to the explosive just of storage (similar issues with Mastodon). That same model is why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a room or come back to a client that hasn’t been opened recently. Element X & new servers have to work so damn hard to work around asynchronously than fundamental decision to attempt to hide it from the sluggish UX but behind the scenes still too expensive. & since it is expensive to run in many vectors this causes folks to then move to the biggest servers that can handle the load which means the Matrix network is in actuality a small number of massive servers (most of which managed by Matrix.org) & a small number of tiny hobbyists running nodes of <10 users is practice. With so many users on Matrix.org-controlled instances (& again with eventual consistency), almost all data gets synced to their nodes make subpoenas a breeze.

A healthier network would have many fewer massive centralized nodes, medium-sized nodes, & the resource requirements would be low enough that more folks would be encouraged more often to run their own nodes they control so they aren’t required to trust an unknown serves operator. Meaning “just making an account on any public server” isn’t a great mode of operation for privacy—especially as with Matrix joining a medium-sized server will put them under a lot of strain causing them to throw in the tower & joining the few massive servers further exacerbating the centralization issue.

Copying the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in a decentralized manner is a fool’s errand. Keeping the chat history for eternity is already a questionable call over using forums, but trying to distribute that out like a blockchain is so wasteful.

https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matrix/ https://www.process-one.net/blog/matrix-and-xmpp-thoughts-on-improving-messaging-protocols-part-1/

Oh you could if so inclined run a Notcurses renderer for Minetest. https://l-m.dev/cs/hijacking-opengl-with-notcurses/

They already have a render for NEStopia + RetroArch lol

The folks I collaborate have a policy now that if it doesn’t have a TUI or CLI version, it doesn’t exist 😂

That is why upterm & tmate exist… ephemeral shared SSH sessions. Biggest missing feature would be some sort of scoping since someone could raw dog your system—catting SSH keys, deleting config, force pushing a repo if unlocked keys are in memory.

Well Discord, Slack, & others are web tech too so it’s not like avoiding it is easy. If I have to use these services, I would prefer it be in the browser’s sandbox.

Even still, almost all debug, troubleshoot, pairing session I have done in the last 4 years have been done over Upterm or Tmate, which is much, much lighter on bandwidth & not crushed by video compression.

What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).

This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub