“can you recommend an alternative?” no. that’s why I’m so fucking angry.

[loke@functional.cafe]

@zzt @arthfach I am going to take a contrarian position. The system doesn't really have to be distributed. Every community can spin up its own server, and then the technical problem is much more easy to solve.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@tux0r @DrCuriosity @t_var_s @zzt i'm not sure you understand the question at hand.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@anhedonie @joegaffey @zzt

the key problem is that nobody wants to run a box

they want to use a service

that ends directly at discord

mastodon has the advantage that it actually successfully decentralised, and 75% of users can and do tell eugen to go whistle

it has the disadvantage that you can see the wires and plumbing and worst, the guys loudly telling you that the leaks and sparks and flames and outages are features akhully

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@Arthfach @zzt

But you gotta understand "move fast break things". *insert tech-bro cry emoji here*

[jer@chirp.enworld.org]

@davidgerard @anhedonie @joegaffey @zzt and worse than just seeing the plumbing, there is no real model to buy a box and then call a plumber when you need the sewage flushed

You either give a company the right to all your personal info so they can shove ads in your eyes or you learn enough about admin to be able to run it with the help of a hosting service you pay a sub to. There's no Middle model that mostly just works with occasional maintenance like plumbing

[r3yscale@techhub.social]

@zzt
Do you know the best place to start making a difference?

I'm super out of my depth but from today it seems like XMPP might be a viable way forward in terms of large-scale community platforms like discord? Does it lack for decent clients or... are we really so far behind that we don't even have a base to build upon?

[abrasive@digipres.club]

@zzt @arthfach @loke but how many communities have people who can do that? and how many of those people will stick around for the lifetime of that community to keep it running? I'd wager there are at least an order of magnitude more community builders than server runners even amongst Discord users.

really, it's a political question. *who* are you building a new system for?

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@R3yScale @zzt my starter suggestion was "signal but with defined groups of groups", which replaces a lot of the important chat server function of discord

getting it into signal, that's another question of course

[froztbyte@mastodon.social]

@R3yScale @zzt XMPP got shot in the knee by google who cosied up next to it with federated Talk, got a whole bunch of people to mostly be on Talk, and then (intentionally) fucked the federation as their last stage of EEE

in today’s world its encryption is somewhat lacking (even OMEMO has some pains), a lot of the clients are lagging, and the protocol is decidedly Not Light(tm)

jabber-muc to try do what discord does? I laugh and laugh

[froztbyte@mastodon.social]

@R3yScale @zzt there are in fact some interesting historical precedents to this, too

MXit (an old chat service in ZA) ran on protocol-compressed xmpp (iirc they made it asn.1 encoded but I could be misremembering). WhatsApp killed them stone dead by being a more efficient system with a better store&forward

there’s a bunch of annoying hard parts to this problem, and few of the open systems are up to the challenge right now

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @R3yScale signal groups support 1000 participants, and video chats supposedly will do 75

an idea (no warranty on how good it is) is to use libsignal to implement a signal client with a concept of a signaling group chat, used to implement groups of groups and present them like how discord presents servers and channels. signal’s existing invite URL mechanism can be used both to invite users to the “server” (signaling group chat) and manage channel membership.

[abucci@buc.ci]

I have fond memories from the 1990s of people on IRC telling me they were going to come murder me.

That's a big part of the problem, seems to me. Mom signs up for IRC, someone says something like that, Mom leaves IRC, calls the police, and tells all her friends about what happened. Nobody in her social circle will ever consider signing up for IRC after.

This kind of tech, whether IRC or insert your favorite here, can't spread if it can't guarantee the boughie white person experience. Entire shopping malls go bankrupt after an assault happens in front of them.

CC: @t_var_s@phpc.social @tux0r@layer8.space @zzt@mas.to