All the Matrix clients are buggy using far too many resources & the protocol is slow as balls about joining new rooms while being wasteful about data duplication for throwaway bits of text/multimedia. I don’t think eventual consistency is the right model for chat & following Slack & Discord’s model is the way.

Gerrit is probably the poster child for branchless, stack-based diffs in Git. It takes some get getting used to, but once adjust your thruput is really ramps up. In some sense tho, this is a hack by tagging changelist values in the commit message to help reconstruct what the heck is going on due to Git limitations, but it’s old & robust enough to trust that system & many of its users absolutely swear by it (I have limited exposure but have used it more recently I can feel the appeal). You should be able to slap it in front of any Git server—even just straight host HTTP if not something lightweight like cgit, gitweb, or Ayllu. (Jujutsu is the same commit hackery in a different package & I don’t think it moves the needle as much as folks think being ultimately shackled to Git’s design decisions).

If you look outside of snapshot-based tools like Git, Mercurial, & so on, patch-theory-based options offer refuge. Darcs & Pijul are the leading (D)VCSs in the space. Darcs is very mature & shows its age in many ways (but is still developed & works good enough). Pijul is largely based on Darcs but meant be faster (& is), but it is immature; some features are missing on purpose to avoid the swell of Git commands, but I am personally surprised theres no good story for sending patches nor rebase. That said its identity system is how VCS should do it. Both VCSs have a lot less tooling built around them. Darcs is still supported by tools like Nix (but not Flakes) as well as Opam for OCaml with darcs hub & Smederee for maintained public forges. Pijul isn’t supported by much at all unfortunately & while Nest is a public forge, its lacking in features & basic usability like being able to fetch a tarball (despite pijul archive). All the latter negativity may sound bad, but all tooling requires momentum. They would be prime candidates for the Gerrit workflow–just without the hacks needed. With the two being similar, I hope we see more tooling pop up to support them & just like trying a new paradigm of programming gives you insight on the ones you know, a new way to do VCS will teach you about version control. Do recommend.

If ForgeFed gets up & running you should be able to self-host your own compatible VCS repository & send pull/merge requests from it instead of needing to create an account then for & use up space on another’s forge. The Forgejo lineage has a strong interest in this technology. Currently the only decentralized+popular way to send patches is via email so this will help put the D back in distributed version control system (DVCS). This would not only be great for users getting to keep their private data, but the distributed nature adds a layer of resilience for downed Microsoft servers (happens often) or censorship/sancations as with even a little momentum, your project will have mirrors in multiple jurisdictions.

GitLab is open core, which is a step up from fully-closed, but isn’t fully open (nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is of note). The bigger issues with GitLab to me are twofold: 1) it’s slow built on Ruby & React (I think) where it can’t run on a potato requiring both excessive CPU as well as data usage while also requiring JavaScript & 2) GitLab is publicly traded which means there are shareholder requirements for them that can easily get in the way of what is good for users (or even what will be or continue to be licensed with a free software license).

Codeberg is ran by a German nonprofit which means they aren’t trying to put profits in the way of users, but also being in the EU, they will have strict requirements for user data which means it’s safer. As far as I can tell, there are no ads & it runs fast & works well enough without JavaScript. I would rather see more self-hosting personally, but if it isn’t practical for you, this is a good option. With it being built with Forgejo, it should in theory introduce a lot less friction migrating from Codeberg to self-hosted Forgejo in the future.

Forgejo isn’t without flaws tho. One of the goals of Gitea (forked from Gogs) vs. Forgejo (forked from Gitea) is trying to be more compatible with Microsoft GitHub even moving its continuous integration (CI) to Forgejo Action to be compatible with all the bugs & YAML spaghetti that MS GitHub uses. They copy the generally-bad pull request model too which only is optimal in certain uses cases, bottlenecking review & having a UI that leads maintainers more to commenting on how to fix something rather than saying “thanks”, merging, then fixing small nits themselves to not waste the contributor’s time in review if they just want a small bugfix, not to learn your entire codebase + style + process. By copying MS GitHub too closely, you can up being a clone that is just FOSS while risking having something that is technically differentiating which is ironically counter to inspiriting migration since while it might be easier, the benefits seem moot (maybe even just philosophical) instead of providing something users want to leave for (which is what I think you might be getting at). Additionally being Git-based as well means Forgejo (& others) are stuck with snapshots that factor in time & patch order causing unnecessary merge conflicts with multiple users which is solved by choosing a better version control system (VCS).

Using free software to create free software is already a good reason.

But if you need more:

• owned by Microsoft, it is a US-based megacorporate product with value to deliver to shareholders first
• never forget EEE as we see a new form of it with Microsoft trying to control the entire developer experience from the server hosting to the editor/AI on folks’ machines; under-litigation Copilot is a straight exploitation of the Commons selling our hardwork back to us
• proprietary means you can’t fork or fix the numerous bugs in the platform nor is there a real issue tracker so you beg on their forums for fixes (anti-free software mentality)
• lock-in issues since aside from specifically the Git part, every one of those proprietary features you buy into will dig a further trench to make it hard to migrate elsewhere
• yes, privacy benefits of not just you but all potential contributors as well since it is a locked ecosystem that requires an account
• not everyone thinks software forges should double as a social media platform with upvotes, FOMO, commit anxiety with employers imploring you have metrics on a closed platform with knock-on issues like star-hacking where projects try to inflate their star numbers in this popularity contest instead of judging projects on merit
• related, the README used to be a file you could read without rendering but now instead they are full of trash markup, emoji, & the repository is filled with binary blobs of images or worse videos for your demo ballooing cloning all wrapped in a Microsoft UI not your own; setting up a separate site isn’t hard (nor is it easy either) but at least you get to own your look & keep assets out of your repository
• there are literally ads & upsells all over the platform
• you can’t use search or see the collapsed comments without authentication
• censorship is not uncommon–especially when it mess with the corporate status quo (see Nintendo Switch emulator dev, youtube-dl, etc.)
• being US-based & big enough for scrutiny, MS GitHub is required to follow US sanctions which prohibit some of your potential users/contributors from even accessing your code (and/or issue tracker and/or forum and/or wiki and/or donations if using MS GitHub)
• …& there already is a host of good alternatives out there for code forges with better performance & features, some of them aren’t locked to Git either; ‘network effect’ be damned

Pixel 4a was one of the last in the Google lineup with a headphone jack (5a being last). The OEM lost its way after that. This enough to not recommend their devices as far as I am concerned.

The social contract? Tf. The social contract still required attribution in almost all cases for creative work unless explicitlf stated otherwise—especially in the case of comercial products like ChatGPT—so I don’t know where this joker is getting his ideas.

Which is why I boycott as hard as I can every service this evil corporation provides (migrate your MS GitHub project away now so I can delete this account too)

Disappointed as I was hoping for some Richard Stallchan x Linus Torvaldsan fanfic

I’m just hoping wlroots can copy these any day now. Color management (& DisplayLink) are my 2 Wayland blockers.

Fish for interactive shell. “It depends” for scripting, but usually ends up Bash since it is the NixOS default.

You have to proxy their socket. It’s dumb, & Signal is bad. Using FSM is bad for privacy & limits to only Android/iOS primary devices is a slap-in-the-face for users wish to bleak out of the duopoly owned by two ad companies.

Yet the Molly fork supports UnifiedPush so I can reuse my connection with mf XMPP server to deliver notification from a server I control. Folks have asked for UnifiedPush or MQTT as an alternative to having multiple persistent socket connections open on your device, but Signal doesn’t seem to care.

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/12/01/PolyForm-Countdown

Felt. VR took priority over color management with ICC profiles & HDR which is more important for commercial & general entertainment applications. I’ve had to switch back to X11 too.

We had B2G (Boot to Gecko) for a while. We could have had FxOS on laptops instead of one shitty midrange phone & maybe it would have worked. 😔

Until Mozilla caves & Fx fully adopts Manifest v3. I hope it doesn’t happen but would not surprise me in the slightest if they did

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I think the parent is distinguishing between messages & the attachments as they are stored differently & often in different places in many systems. But I agree with you in assuming that the goal would ultimately be to then start scanning messages too.

Imagine governments used something like SHA1 that has conflicts & now you have collision potential–you could even fabricate attachments that could cause a collision to get someone throw in jail since all you have to rely on is the file hashes. If you can’t scan the actually content & you are just using hashes, then you also don’t prevent new content that those in power deem ‘bad’ from being flagged either which doesn’t really stop the proliferation of the ‘bad thing’ just specific known ‘bad things’. If I were implementing clients, I would start adding random bits to the metadata so the hashes always change.

The only way this system even works is if there are centralized points the governments/corporations can control. Chalk this up as another point for supporting decentralization & lightweight self-hosting since it would be impossible to have oversight over such a system if anyone can spin up a personal server in their bedroom.

These have tradeoffs you don’t see when certain groups cannot participate due to personal or systemic political or philosophical reasons. You also can’t hear from that crowd since they haven’t been given a place to voice.

In the case of chat & forges, these are solved for quality free options (& even decentralized in some cases). The choice are at least in the good enough category if not better in some aspects (& worse in others). For chat a room in Libera.Chat or OFTC is free & meant for free software—even if it is labeled as unofficial it still gives folks a sanctioned place who wish to avoid Discord for privacy, security, preformance, or US services being blocked (as well as being an out-of-band option for when a server is inevitably down). For forges, living in part of world where Microsoft often heavily throttles my bandwidth & all outages are during my day time, it is never a bad idea to configure your VCS to push to a second mirror like Codeberg, et al. not just for freedom reasons but resilience from server outages & censorship (see youtube-dl or the Switch emulators or nations that have blocked the whole IP due to something governments didn’t like in someone else’s repo). When you start coding around Microsoft GitHub’s Actions or API or Discussions or any specific integration without an eye to the generic/portable approach which is easier done from the start, dependence starts to add up. While readonly mirror would suck for freedom of contributions/communications, it is an option if it is seen as too noisy or too much of a burden to support multiple forges outages & censorship are real (especially if not in the West).

“Enshitification” is the buzzword for services whose quality goes down & devolves to ads + selling user data for profit maximization—usually because they can because users/groups are now locked into the service having relied too heavily on their infrastructure. We see free software projects still stuck on Sourceforge & Slack due to lock-in. Having started with the free option, the lock-in probably can’t happen. Even having one option supported as a backup makes one cognisant of features that aren’t going to port when these US-based, profit-driven entities decide to gradually make things worse to the point where users want to leave with history showing us this has happened several times.

You might say it is pragmatic, but I think it’s both lazy & short-sighted to not have these near-zero-effort options set up even as a back up (truly can be set & forget if really wanted)—especially when you think these values are good enough for the service you are building but also interacting on Lemmy, a decentralized, self-hostable platform (who said they have every intention of migrating their code to self-hosted as soon as ForgeFed is merge for federation).

It’s great to see this project still chugging along. I tried it on an old phone & it worked, but it would run into readonly filesystem errors after a few hours of usage. I never got to figure out why since I ended up actually needing to use the phone while mine had broken so it’s LineageOS for microG now.