Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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I'm completely afraid of logging into fedora.im now. It's so engulfed in spam, not even normal phishing spam. Absolutely horrifying spam, like gore and killing and other deranged shit.
I had to move back to matrix.org and abandon my account.
Don't get your hopes up, I deleted my account on matrix.org because of that same spam, and there's no way to mass ignore invites to the hundreds of rooms from all the spam accounts they let run rampant.
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We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn't abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.
It's more organic. It's also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.
Matrix isn't perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.
It's gonna be like 100 years before Matrix and the clients are in a good place at this rate. It only seems to be getting worse right now with more fragmented clients and servers with more and more spam issues, and the performance just keeps getting worse too.
Even their very own Element app is being retired and replaced by Element X which is missing a ton of features.
They still don't have any of the features people coming from Discord/TS/Mumble are expecting like voice chat rooms, push to talk, or streaming to a room. They don't have the features Telegram users are expecting like stickers, threads inside groups, read only channels, and so on..
The vast majority of users have no reason to switch since it's nothing like the apps they are used to. And it's buggy and slow on top of that.
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Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?
Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.
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Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.
Such as?
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I think IRC wins by being around the longest, but also being dead simple to set up and use.
I tried using Matrix and it just honestly frazzled my head a little. I know it's just a few extra steps to get registered, but it honestly feels like a few extra bits of friction to what amounts to trying to join a big social circle.
I had such a pain trying to get a consistent client working on mobile.
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Such as?
Most of the stuff I run on my server is just a basic
docker-compose.yaml
file and it's up and running in a minute or two. Some random examples:- Immich
- Peertube
- Pinchflat
- Vaultwarden
- Mealie
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Most of the stuff I run on my server is just a basic
docker-compose.yaml
file and it's up and running in a minute or two. Some random examples:- Immich
- Peertube
- Pinchflat
- Vaultwarden
- Mealie
So, going from Mealie's instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you're working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?
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So, going from Mealie's instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you're working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?
You need to learn some Docker stuff initially for sure, but the underlying OS can be anything including Windows which is why Docker is nice.
The database for Mealie is part of the app already and is handled automatically, with the SQLite docker-compose file they provide.
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I swear there were calls when I was testing it a year or two ago. Guess not then.
Take this with a grain of salt, I don't have it deployed right now, but if I remember the current state correctly, one on one calls are a thing, group calls aren't.
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So we need to bring back IRC, if someone doesn't know how it works - well, I don't want to talk with such person. Bring back gatekeeping
IRC doesnt fit the requirements though. I cant send pictures or videos, I cant make little icons to react, I cant quote reply, I dont get push notifications when pinged. You may think these arent nessesary but to majority of users they are and I dont think IRC is going to adapt to include them.
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Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?
Honestly, setting up things using Docker Compose is generally a question of copying and pasting and editing the file locations.
The moment you need SSL and/or a reverse proxy it becomes a bit more complex, but once you set up a reverse proxy once you can generally expand that to your other applications.
Something like a Synology nas makes it very easy and to some extend even the Truenas apps are kinda easy.