I would agree. Some places are much harder to find other folks creating or using free/ethical software. & unfortunately more online projects are migrating to propietary chat like Discord while hosting their code on proprietary forges like MS GitHub which makes it hard to participate when free/ethical software are “your values”.

China, IL would be on my list

Seems like someþing folks should legislate against… ðat is unless ð lobby have all ð politicians in ðeir pockets. 🙃

I use the note to self capability of my XMPP server to send a message to myself for these sort of one-offs. I would never want my data in the hands of some proprietary service if I have the option—sharing data just to yourself on these services also means it is Big Tech’s data now too. All of the XMPP clients are super lightweight.

Bigger cases, I will use scp, rsync, or magic wormhole. Or just using removeable storage.

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.

Which means your two close friends & the corporate Discord data harvester.

With friends I can at least tell them to use a privacy-respecting or self hosted option, but I still don’t understand how businesses actively prefer US-based, proprietary services such as Google Meet for meetings. Do they really think Google & others aren’t record & training on their private business meeting data?

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)

Does the job

Well, we start be organizing the folks of Lemmy to understand the values of the old protocols instead of trying to chase the shiny new ones. “Ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

The web client is serviceable.

There are advantages, but I think a lot of folks are tracing trends in this space (including trying to copy Slack/Telegram/Discord rather than be better or strip the bad parts out). Newer ≠ better.

ｌｅｖｅｒａｇｅ

If you’re the type that that doesn’t like the kind of energy wasted for cryptocurrencies, you will be suprised that the eventual consistency the whole network is copying all message, all attachments of all users per host. This is also why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a new room or freshly launch an app as all of this syncing needs to happen. This also causes the self-hosting to be priced out as medium-sized (in terms of users) or low-spec hardware cannot keep up with neither the CPU/RAM nor storage space required to maintain a node on the network… which is pretty wild for mostly text in 2024. This causes folks to host their own single-user instances, or in reality almost everyone flocks to Matrix.org or a server Matrix.org hosts (or unfederates only serving to those on the host which is one way). With all of this centralization, almost all metadata ends up in the hands of Matrix.org (maliciously or not) due to the design of the protocol needing to have the entire history of everything. Copying Slack/Telegram/Discords UX in this sense was not the best call. Eventually consistency does add a resilience & uptime guarantee, but technically I don’t think those cost outweigh the benefits in most cases.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is important, but it’s not always required. Many rooms are purposefully public so IRC(v3) fits most basic needs (tho I am not a fan of needing pastebins & separate image uploads). In the case of these encryption algorithms, almost everything is using the same double-ratchet encryption seen in Signal for DMs (provided you can verify there isn’t a backdoor via source code availability). If you need more features like E2EE or reactions or threading or pasting source code, XMPP is & has been the gold standard. It treats chat as ephemeral (while still having history, archiving, & no need for bouncers) where missing an old messages isn’t seen as the end of the world. Important, long-lived announcements & information should be in the Atom/RSS feed, mailing list, or forum (or Movim if you want this task on the XMPP network via PubSub) as these are the proper platforms for these tasks (we know how horrible searching a massive chat room is UX-wise… it’s basically gone in many cases, & in the case of proprietary systems is in a literal knowledge black hole). XMPP was built to run efficiently on machines from last decade so it is just as lean in both clients & servers now saving you money, data, storage, battery.

SimpleX is a project worth following, but I am not too sure how it handles ephemeral vs. eventual consistency & it is also far too new to have multiple clients & a proper decentralized community. Maybe this will come with time, but I am only keeping tabs on it for now.

Defiantly agree 🙃

Using proprietary chat apps like Discord, Telegram, Slack, LINE, Meta’s WhatsApp / Messenger. Still judging on apps that require a SIM & mobile OS (like Android) primary device like Signal… or an expensive chat protocol like Matrix.

Hosting your code & bug tracker with a propietary forge like Microsoft GitHub when you say you support open source—but don’t even bother to apply the same mentality to your own project.

…Oh, the question was “secretly”.

Vampire Survivor with my partner

I converted my old phone photos to JXL for this reason. It is malpractice that Android isn’t doing this by default for all users right now.

Monospace support for abugidas & abjads is pretty horrible