I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.
You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.
Since Git can already be federated (no MS GitHub required), take a look at Darcs & Pijul for a better version control model based on Patch Theory. Tooling needs help, but fundamentals are sound.
Everything in the XMPP world is worth checking out. Movim is one of the more interesting projects bring a social media option to the platform & pushing boundaries for clients that is cool to see—as well as Libervia for setting up communities.
Not an endorsement of WhatsApp but they aren’t duplicating the metadata everywhere since it is centralized. I believe they run a fork of Ejabberd as well for the platform which is orders of magnitude more scalable & uses less resources than any of the Matrix servers—& they have to me RAM intensive due to how they duplicate that data..
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.
Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.
If we care about the planet & sustainability, we would not be recommending a eventual-consistency model for chat communications. Matrix’s protocol is so wasteful & expensive.
Matrix is centralized around Matrix.org or servers they run tho. Since the protocol is a big data/metadata sync by design & medium–large-sized servers are expensive to run, almost all of metadata is with Matrix.org—of which was originally funded my Israeli intelligence & I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting data out of it to this day.
If they haven’t already, SimpleX registers a URI handler, you could put an ID in a vCard just like your contacts on XMPP show up in a messaging client.
They reason this happens more often with Signal is a) Signal requires a phone number (which is not good for your privacy) b) your contact is more likely to put in their phone number but many forget to add other IM protocols to their vCard & the default contact managers do not make this very discoverable.
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.
There is compression & then there is whatever mangling Instagram does. But these are things an admin should be able to tweak as the defaults are are just not good enough for photography. You can’t be stripping color profiles, forcing sRGB, & camera data for these contexts—not to mention just trying to get a crisp image. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were using WebP too 🤢
I have waited so, so long. Recently color profile support (ICC) was merged & upstreamed to many repos so I finally reswitched back to Wayland since my colors are no longer broken on my displays.
I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.
I really wish Arcan were further along.