mononoke

A lot of clients don’t have encryption enabled by default since they’ve been around for quite a long time, before this was a primary consideration in web communication standards. In these cases, like with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.

Conversations is my preferred Android client.

Movim has supported OMEMO since 2021 from the looks of it.

Prosody is what I use on my current server, which is just a really ancient Dell sitting in my closet. It could not handle Synapse+federation whatsoever. Prosody (and really anything XMPP) has been an absolute breeze in comparison.

I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I’m involved with and all it’s really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it’s mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don’t want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster. Sometimes there aren’t easy solutions, though, and I think this is one of those times. Big Tech is massive and in the world we live in now we cannot have all of the things it promises without immense tradeoff, and for the most part it just isn’t worth it. The modern web being almost completely centralized around Discord is really harmful, like what happened with Facebook years ago. What used to be simple, publicly accessible websites for all these groups, locations and interests with email, forums and chat rooms for asynchronous as well as real-time communication is now entirely on Discord or Facebook. It’s disastrous. Neither of those things are easily accessible or friendly to archival…why do I need to be in a Discord chat room or Facebook group for community events around my public library? It’s absurd. I hate all of this so much, and basically no one around me agrees with me so we’ll just circle the drain forever while the “pet cameras” start calling DHS on our neighbors.

I’m just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls. They’re both friendly and simple and xmpp supports modern features just fine. I can host it for myself and my friends who care; I don’t have much hope for the masses anymore. I don’t really like how bloated Matrix/Synapse is, and everything else is riding coattails we don’t need to ride. I don’t care about video games or streaming to people in a chat room or anything like that, and if I did I’m sure something like Jitsi handles that well enough. Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level…I just don’t get it.

Joe Biden continued disregarding the CDC with regards to COVID

His administration repeatedly said that the pandemic was over, you don’t need to wear masks anymore, you can go back to work, and then Omicron happened. None of that was at any point ever true. Biden himself caught COVID during the very press release he gave to say COVID was over in September of 2022! COVID/Long COVID are still billable conditions in hospitals; doesn’t sound very “over” to me! Everyone is always sick. They sell 4-in-1 swab tests OTC at pharmacies now. Is it really over? “Back to normal” happened with his administration’s blessings in 2022, and that playbook was primed as early as the second year of the pandemic in 2021, under Biden. Now no one cares about the most communicable disease in history that shows no evidence of ever being cleared, has no cure, and is still spreading and mutating to be vaccine-avoidant like a wildfire, not just the anti-vaccination crowd. Tons of opportunistic viruses re-emerge with new outbreaks of one terrible thing or another spreading every year because people are wrecking their immune systems catching COVID over and over and over, even while vaccinated. All of that happened during the Biden years. All of that continues to happen because the good blue man said we could go to the movies again. He is culpable.

But at some people don’t want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it.

That is impossible, then. I don’t know what else to say to it. You can’t use something without first learning how to use it. Life is learning new things, forever. We don’t know how to do anything without learning first, and in the age of the web learning something has never been easier.

And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.

If I wanted to do something, then I’d figure it out. I do this all the time in my work. I don’t know how every tool works, I don’t know how every environment fits together. I still don’t see how this is an argument for “I do not want to learn.”

Again, though…why is that bad? Did you know how everything in Windows worked the first time you used it? Of course not. Why is this different? There are going to be growing pains to learning anything new. What’s wrong with reading the manual if you don’t know how something works? Isn’t that what they’re for?

The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn’t always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It’s like saying “I want to ride a bike but I don’t want to learn how.” After a certain point, I don’t really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn’t make it bad, or even necessarily difficult…but anything you don’t know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it’s not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it.

I don’t want to learn CLI.

But…like, why? It is less effort than it was to type out the entirety of your post. I will never understand.

I’ve more-or-less daily-driven Guix System since 2023. I enjoy that there are very few things I “can’t” do, just things I haven’t learnt the “Guixy” way of doing yet. Sometimes that can be frustrating, but once I figure it out maintenance is a cinch and stability is unmatched. It’s an experience for stretchy minds, I think, but I like it.

What tools do you mean? The worst offender in this regard to me is Discord. No one in game development spaces want to get off that platform, and I hate it…

Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this.

I fixed my keyboard, and finally got EXWM set up how I like on my laptop. It has been productive!

Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.

You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”

Accessibility is a huge blindspot in all of these conversations. The tools that work with Wayland are not up to parity with what works in X. Until that is the case I see no reason to switch.

Some years ago I got in touch with one of the primary maintainers of that fork in the interest of continuing the project after realizing it was so stagnant, and I was essentially warned that doing so would open myself to immense harassment, and that harassment was why everyone involved stopped with the project in the first place. So…what is all of this about “if you don’t like X, fork it” if that is what will happen when one does? Seems pretty rotten advice to give if it’s just going to be sabotaged without any support anyway. Someone I know still uses the outdated Glimpse regardless.

There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is. Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.

Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation’s bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don’t care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it’s letting your opponents win. No thanks.

I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.

The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is. I’m sure there is something you would object to having been a part of; protecting your labor from contributing to that only makes sense. If you really have no problems with that, then that is simply terrifying.