Who would realistically buy Chrome that wouldn’t degrade the consumer experience?

Also, would Google lose incentive to target the web entirely with its properties? In other words, what happens to the web if Google’s focus shifts entirely to Android?

Perfect is the enemy of good. There is no scenario where cars are getting banned in most of the world where EVs are being sold.

I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper’s campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.

Worth mentioning that most modern clients support omemo at this stage.

Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.

My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.

I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.

I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?

No major issues with the upgrade to 14, yet. On a pixel 7a. Not that I spend much time in the play store, but that design has become less pleasant over time.

Thanks for sharing. Anything in particular that was broken, or just a bad experience overall? I thought about spinning it up for family group video chats, but I guess I can cross that one off the list.

The 5 users will only talk to each other, or you have to connect out to the regular phone network? Group calls? Messaging? And when you say secure, do you mean end to end encrypted?

I don’t have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.

I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.

Let’s say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.

Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I’ve used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn’t create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia’s xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.

The lists of public xmpp group chats I’ve found are all centered around xmpp software - clients and servers. If I ever find myself in the position of launching or running a large community (unlikely), I’d try to offer an xmpp-powered chat. It seems like the decision today is Discord -> Matrix -> IRC - xmpp isn’t even in the running. But maybe users have to be a little more vocal.

Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.

Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn’t included in the core / official.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn’t terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.

It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn’t use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.

If it’s mostly about motion detection and false positives, it’s hard to avoid the object detection stuff if you aren’t doing that already. I stopped using Blue Iris before it started integrating object detection and I can’t speak to it at all. I liked the setup I had with ZoneMinder, Zoneminder Event Server, and the associated machine learning hooks, but the developer behind the event server and ML stuff left and it isn’t particularly well integrated. I like how quickly and comprehensively Viseron (https://github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) has progressed. Very sleek software, engaged developer, uses YOLOv7, and even supports an openvino backend. Well worth a look.