Can we make Matrix not suck first?

Technologically, very cool, much wow. But UI/UX wise, it’s pretty terrible. I managed to convince 5 friends to move to Matrix from Discord. They lasted like 3 days before going back to Discord. One guy couldn’t even figure out how to post a message and have it be decrypted by everyone in the group. We just kept seeing “Message could not be decrypted” or whatever over and over again. We had to fall back to Discord to reach him.

They probably won’t be taking recommendations from me anymore. :|

(We used Element X clients.)

My experience with my friends and family:

I left Facebook a long time ago and never looked back.

Yeah, you’re right. Bad advice actually. Oops.

Shortcut: use Tailscale to create your own private network and avoid hosting on the big, bad Internet. Otherwise, you really have to be careful on how you protect your services.

Minor downside (or upside) is that you’ll have to install the Tailscale app on each device you want to make part of the network.

This made hosting at home a lot easier for me.

Update: Ah! I misread the post. Tailscale doesn’t make sense for this use case. My bad! 😅

Hell yes. lemmy.world has always been slow for me. That’s why I switched!

If all my friends, family, and coworkers could get off WhatsApp, I would be so happy.

Interesting! I didn’t realize this! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.

So it seems like the FSF does this in order to be able to enforce GPL. Buuut, these guys really gotta be the exception. I feel like the probability of the FSF selling out and going full corporate evil is pretty low…

a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.

That’s exactly the problem though. The project owning the code, instead of the contributors owning the code.

I don’t think the type of license matters too much if you have to sign a CLA, since the company can just change it whenever they want. For example, you can be AGPL today (Joplin) and then not AGPL tomorrow.

The Thunderbird desktop app for Linux has a “Export to Mobile” feature. It generates a QR code that you can scan on your phone to, I guess (I haven’t tried it), transfer the login info of your email accounts from desktop to phone. After that, IMAP should take care of syncing the emails from the server to each device.

I was curious what the other apps were, found the list: https://fedidb.org/software

Seems like the owners of Gitea did something like a self-coup and kicked out community members from the project. https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

Forgejo is the community-driven fork of Gitea.

People like to act like Docker containers and environment variables are simple. But so often these things are not.

Oh for sure. I hate it when apps are like “EZ one line install” but then spin up a bunch of Docker containers. It’s just more potential for shit to break.

A huge reason I like Navidrome is because it’s just a single static Go binary. Can’t get much easier to manage than that. Plus a bunch of native music apps are available as well. Wish more software was like that.

For the specific case I’m talking about (CLAs), I check if the project (on GitHub or wherever) requires signing a CLA to contribute. In Joplin’s case, they do:

• https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
• https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/index.md#signing-the-individual-contributor-license-agreement

Basically, with a CLA they can change the license at any time to whatever they want. If they want to go closed source tomorrow they can with zero trouble. Without a CLA, they would need approval from everyone who has contributed to the project to do a license change, giving the project proper open source protections.

Ah, yeah. That’s why I’m wondering if I’m missing something… Like, cool. I know B sold my address… now what? I guess it’s a neat metric to know?

One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying “Your secure, open-source note-taking companion”. I guess that’s technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)

They even say so explicitly:

This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so

— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers

And fine, if they want to do that it’s up to them. I’d just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.

Hosted apps means you can use them on multiple devices. Otherwise, I have to wait until I get home, power up my laptop, wait for the OS to boot, wait for the app to load, then do the thing I wanted to do.

Any thoughts on how to solve the data sync problem without hosting? I guess I remember some apps doing a local network sync to get data to multiple devices. I kinda remember having problems with that not working all the time…

Yeah! I’ve had surprisingly good luck on soulseek! Didn’t even know what I was missing!

TIL about the Bitwarden integration! Thanks!

How do you use email aliases or what do you find them useful for? I’ve played around with generating unique aliases for different websites I use, but I’m not sure I did anything useful with that setup. Normally, if I get spam I usually just hit the unsubscribe link and that’s been sufficient. Currently, I just have 2 emails: one I use for businesses and such and one for random websites that I don’t care too much about. Is having more aliases better?

I’m currently using Migadu. It’s $20/year for their cheapest plan. They give you a lot of control over the email service, so it might not be the best if you’re a noob. In fact, they require you bring a domain name. But, they let you create unlimited users, aliases, have fancy routing, etc.

https://purelymail.com/ looks interesting too. And is cheaper at $10/year.

If you do decide to get a custom domain, just some tips:

• get something that ends in .net or even better .com because shitty companies with shitty IT departments will block other TLDs (I’ve had this happen with FedEx and my local garbage company). There is no spam folder for them, the email just explodes.
• probably don’t pick a domain with one of your names it in for better anonymity, unless I guess you have a popular last name? john@smith.com looks cool, but consider if you want random sites like lemmy to have that data.
• don’t pick a homophone or weird word because at some point you’ll have to speak your email to another human and it’s really awkward to tell your bank that your email is john@piggy.park or john@maill.com or was it john@male.com?

Also, the web interfaces of some of these other email services might not be as good as Gmail’s UI. It helps to use an email client instead. Thunderbird is fine or you could use something simpler like claws-mail or even something like mutt.