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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2020

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  • No.

    It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.

    Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.

    Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.





  • In practice Matrix isn’t decentralized in the slightest. Almost every account is on Matrix.org or a server they host. The whole protocol is a data/metadata syncing machine that isn’t good for privacy & is prohibitively expensive to run anything beyond a single-instance since all history of all users in all rooms necessarily needs to be synced onto the server. Many medium-sized servers have shutdown on storage costs & system resource requirements (especially RAM)—which forced its users often to flock back to Matrix.org. This is wild since it is mostly text chat.

    Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.





  • MS GitHub doesn’t do anything the others can’t besides the social media features which do not need to be so prominent. If you must, it can be one of multiple code mirrors but should not be the exclusive one, or even the primary option.

    Matrix is ass. You cannot reasonably scale an eventual consistency model without centralization & it will be a wasteful network like many of the blockchain projects. We already have had IRC & XMPP MUCs for ages that run on toasters & did not need to be reinvented. Chat has its place tho to help steer folks into asking the right questions, but such questions once formed need to be triaged as bugfixes, issues, FAQs, or forum posts to benefit everyone on the discussion.