If we’re talking about Lemmy rather than wider society then;
Inb4; I’m broadly in support of trans people and trans rights/equality but I think there are three small snagging issues
That people who identify as a women but who went through puberty as a male shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports. I think it’s a basic issue of fairness and that it ultimately disincentives people born female from entering a career in sports competitions.
That there is a serious debate to be had about trans people in women’s changing rooms. I know it is a very nuanced and sensitive topic and I don’t pretend that I have the answer, but I don’t think it is as simple as “I identify as X so I’ll use X changing room”. I’d like to make it clear that I don’t think this is a “sneaky perv” issue but rather a debate about spaces that should possibly be reserved for people born as female.
That no permanent changes should be made to the bodies of children. If you’re not old enough to get a tattoo, piercing, drink, smoke etc. Then you’re not old enough to make an extremely important decision that will effect you for the rest of your life.
I think all sports aren’t equal in this. The rules for MMA would surely be different than the rules for curling or chess. The people who control sports organizations usually have a life dedicated to their sport, and are in a much better place to make a call about it than congress or randos on the internet. This matter should be handled by them. The fact that anyone without skin in the game cares about this at all is a losing battle.
If sex doesn’t matter in curling or chess, then why are there different competitions for men and women in curling and why do women get their own titles in chess?
I do understand the sentiment of what you’re saying, but it’s not the reality we live in.
The “people who control sports organizations” only made separate leagues for women because some mens’ feelings get hurt when they lose to women.
There’s no other point to segregating sports by gender, just straight white cis dudes getting bent out of shape by any challenge to their supposed superiority.
Ultra-endurance sports such as marathons (women show a statistical advantage over men above the 150-mile mark), Figure Skating (Madge Syers beat two men for the silver medal in 1902, women were then banned from competing until the sport was gender-segregated in 1906), Baseball (Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig in 1931 and was kicked out of the league a month later), Shooting sports (Zhang Shang took the gold in shotgun skeet in 1992, women were’t allowed to compete again until the sport was gender-segregated in 2000, and women average higher scores in the rifle category to this day), etc etc.
Shootings an interesting one. Most people familiar with guns notice women take to shooting accurately more easily and quickly than guys (with rifles, not handguns). I’ve seen this lots personally. My theory involves lower heart rate and lower muscle mass being conducive.
(Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig in 1931 and was kicked out of the league a month later)
This lacks SO much context, it was an EXHIBITION match and she never played in the MLB, she played in the minors. Anyone reading that would assume she struck out two greats in a real game and was banned by the MLB.
There’s a lot of truth to she shooting thing, that should absolutely be co-ed.
However, my point still stands: women and men should be separated if the sport has a physical component to its competition. (i.e. any sort of contact.)
I think you mean sports without a physical activity aspect; and even then, sports like chess don’t separate males and females (they offer female-only competitions).
There’s no other point to segregating sports by gender, just straight white cis dudes getting bent out of shape by any challenge to their supposed superiority.
What are you on about? There are two HUGE reasons: safety and fairness:
Especially in contact sports, allowing women to play with men is not safe, and would only lead to an environment conducive to women getting injured.
There would be zero professional female athletes (excluding sports that only require mental strategy ofc) if there were no separate leagues for women. They wouldn’t perform at even close to the same level as the men, AND would be at increased risk of injury.
I don’t know what fantasy world you live in, but here are biological factors that make it necessary to separate men and women in order to have fair competition. Female athletes would be infinitely worse off if forced to try to compete in a single league shared with men, because they aren’t be able to.
Figure skating is a perfect example of a performance sport, there isnt any physicality. Also, I think its absolutely ridiculous to claim that Jackie Mitchell striking out an aging Ruth and Gherig in an exhibition match is a woman ‘starting to win’.
I can’t speak to curling, but in chess the womens’ leagues are there to get women involved. There are no biological advantages at play. This is a 2000 year old game they were excluded from playing until 100 years ago. So someone could put forth a good argument that it’s more about gender than physical sex.
There are very few women chess players at the top level of the game. The reasons for this are debatable, it could simply be that women are less interested in chess or that women are put off by a male dominated “sport”, but I’ve also heard that men are much more likely to have a specific type of autism that makes them especially suited to doing well at chess.
I’m absolutely open minded to the idea that women can become top level chess players and that women’s titles could be made redundant, but I think it’s reasonable to see the evidence of this before we say that it’s an equal playing field for both sexes. I’d suggest that we should see a decent proportion of women in the top one hundred players of the world, or even the top two hundred and fifty.
Given the current ranking of chess players, it’s really hard to say that women have the same chess ability as the men and I absolutely don’t want that to come across as sexism, it’s just factual.
There’s actually a big different in mens and women’s IQ distribution. Men are all over the map, from extremely dumb to extremely smart, but women tend to statistically cluster in the middle with comparatively few outliers. Way less mentally deficient, very few Bobby Fischers.
Because we can debate all-day about what is a man or a women or non-binary and gender roles etc. But I would say debating what is a male or female is much easier and simply comes down to genetics.
Edit: imagine getting down voted for saying XX chromosomes are female and XY is male haha, I guess we’re just ignoring the science of genetics now
Yeah, you get downvoted because we don’t waste breath on transphobes. Genetics has already been accepted by actual scientists, rather than by Quora Top Minds as a
Read a book, read an article, read something you absolute regress
In case you're too lazy to click a link:> In an additional layer of complexity, the gender with which a person identifies does not always align with the sex they are assigned at birth, and they may not be wholly male or female. The more we learn about sex and gender, the more these attributes appear to exist on a spectrum.*
Is English your second language? I didn’t say it can’t be associated to a person or group, I said it doesn’t need to.
I also didn’t say that you can’t have more than one problem, I just addressed the one you seemed to be concerned with and defined it as one that I’m not interested in debating.
As far as I understand (might be missing nuance, 'cause it was 80s/90s AAVE in the first place) it’s someone who puts the homies aside over chasing a romance, especially if the romantic interest is considered unworthy/‘for the streets’ or if the homies consider what you’re chasing to be unrequited
Basically a person who marks out for someone who probably doesn’t gaf about them
The point of that meme as I took it is to illustrate the uncertainty women face when it comes to the intentions of (strange) men. The bear, an actual killer, at least is predictable. Not a criticism of your hot take btw, just sharing my thoughts on this meme.
unfortunately they will almost certainly get picked on. i dont think abstinence is the best idea here, better to educate them on the dangers and monitor/restrict what they are using the phone for. lest they hate you. but certainly for someone under 12-14 they do not need a phone.
I hear what you are saying, but I dont want my kids to fit in with those kids, and thus we have them in private schools now. One main issue is even if you teach them not to just start watching porn, they turn into one of those kids that is on their phone all the time and then transitions into an adult like that too.
you realize most kids will still find a way, even if you tell them not to ? its better to actually educate them. which is the point of parenting; not just to restrict what they are allowed to do.
no. teach them about the dangers of porn and other dangers online. ban porn from their devices. if you make porn out to be this unspeakable horror, it only leads to a natural curiosity which can lead to an unhealthy relationship with it or even sex in general. please note that i am not advocating for actively allowing minors access porn, nor do i encourage anyone to access it themselves. a phone can be a tool, and tools come with inherent dangers. teach your kids like you would with driving a car or not eating junk food.
Sure, teach them the dangers but also make it as hard as possible for them to access it.
I think another big issue outside of porn is that when kids grow up with phones they turn into people that are always looking at phones. I have some inlaws kids that have phones, and they are just inherently not interesting and dont engage. I agree that phones are a good tool, but when people are constantly having it in their hand it gives them addiction and makes them not interesting.
I think this should apply in general, not just in this thread. Down votes are reserved for comments that do not positively contribute to the conversation.
If your political opinion begins with “why don’t we just…” then its a bad political opinion.
If we could just, we would have already just. If you think you’re the only one with the capacity to see a simple answer - newsflash, you’re not a political genius. Its you who doesn’t understand the complexity of the problem.
My partner lacked political engagement until his 30s for reasons so he occasionally has these hot takes. But he expresses them to me and I do feel bad because he’s not coming at it from an arrogant perspective. It’s ignorance, some naivete and also exasperation at a whole lot of shit things.
I have to gently explain to him why XYZ isn’t that simple or black and white, or why his idea doesn’t work - and the answer to that, 9 times out of 10, is ‘because money/rich people/greed/lobbyists/nimbyism’.
I’m just slowly chipping away at his innocence and it feels bad.
Its great that you’re helping to inform him! I have found the people who know the most about politics and global issues tend to talk less and listen more.
My responses to him are always prefaced with a big sigh. Because whatever I’m about to tell him is negative. And he often concludes with ‘so how can you care about this/why do you give a shit if it’s pointless’ and I’m finding it harder and harder to answer that question.
Adam Savage had a bit where he pointed out there is practically zero times when to you should start a sentence with “why don’t you just”. My first instinct is to patiently listen & respond but I’m slowly turning into “why don’t you just stop, think & rephrase that”
I’ve always interpreted “why don’t we just X?” as a shorter way of expressing “I think I would like X. Is this a good idea? If not, why? If yes, what are the barriers to making it happen?”
Oh, definitely not. This format is explicitly for pissing off nationalists.
Simply dismiss the validity of the governing body they worship by reference to the historical contingency of its creation, then sit back and watch as they work themselves into a froth trying to justify their imagined superiority without reference to their mythic founders.
every bit counts. otherwise i might as well throw away money on everything since rent is so high. if you decide that your spending is negligible (or would be spent regardless), then we can agree to disagree; obv what u spend ur money on is up to u, but i am entitled to my opinion on it.
you might be right about that tbh, although i would like a source.
you are right that it doesnt actively take food away from hungry people. i meant to say that you can improve the situation by giving away leftovers (assuming they are still in reasonable condition).
as a side note, i think the way most people are introduced to the argument is by their parents when they are young. the parents are simply trying to get their children in the habit of considering others’ needs, while also saving their own money. especially since most of the time the kid actually is hungry, but just doesnt want to eat vegetables or whatever. if someone (irl) is arguing the starving people card to you as an adult when u are wasting food, then that is less reasonable: though they have good intentions, i agree it is not all that impactful on those hungry. but again, every bit counts.
Parents’ jobs aren’t to protect their kids. It’s to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.
There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.
I grew up in the “age of internet anarchism,” where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we’ve swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.
To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that’s the only thing you can do on the internet, that’s what you’ll do
I have recently learned that the new helicopter parent type is the snowplow parent - these are the ones that not only shield their kids from the world, but also fully manage their lives for them. I work for the University of California and seeing how absolutely helpless these kids are is scary.
I’m in the UC system as well. It’s both concerning and amusing how much college students nowadays go to their parents for permission on minor things. I get it, to some degree. Respect for your parents and all that. But some degree of autonomy would be helpful at that age
If you’ve spent any amount of time among people who went to / are in college in their early 20s, and people who were working in their late teens and early twenties, it becomes clear that college arranges for the students to have a managed-for-them life to a degree that I actually think is severely harmful to them. It’s basically a big day care. Education is fuckin fantastic, I’m not saying it’s not, but the nature of the way your life is organized within it to me I think is very bad for people.
Like yes you know integrals, very good, but e.g. I spoke to a guy who had not paid his phone bill for months, who somehow still had phone service but was genuinely very confused about how the bills he was getting now could have gotten as high as they were. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him, I couldn’t get it across. I finally just gave up the endeavor.
Part of the issue with the value of college isn’t that it educated, but that it acted like an ordeal to overcome and filtered out people who didn’t have the makings of being a leader. Not all of that is due to educational ability.
I get you don’t mean this so broadly but you lose all nuance with this statement.
Protect them from every minor mistake or risk that could ever possibly happen, and smothering them? Sure.
Someone about to stab your kid? Protect them from predators? Protect them from various risks and hazards in life which every parent should be teaching them?
I’m pretty autistic, so you’re not allowed to write this off as “people using magic communication I can’t understand because I’m smart” or whatever your model of the current situation is.
When a person says it is not a parent’s job to protect their kids, you already know what it means. It’s right there in your three bullet point.
dont get into strangers cars
dont let strangers into the house
look both ways when crossing the road
If a parent’s job were protecting their kids, these would read:
Don’t let your kids near roads or cars
Don’t give your kids control over the door
Don’t let your kids cross roads
Like, if I was given care of a dog for a week while their owners went on vacation, and my job were to “protect the dog”, I wouldn’t be putting the dog in any of the situations where its own choices were the source of its safety.
Are you ready to stop pretending that you don’t see?
The first line of my reply literally says I dont think this is what you mean, BUT …. I very clearly stated I assume that isnt exactly what the commenter meant. The rest of my comment is to clarify what the poster defined as “protection”.
If someone came up to me and asked protect something, contextually yes obviously I understand that.
That isnt the situation here. The comment chain is someone with a “hot take” on what “parents protecting children” means. It being a hot take I feel it is completely valid to put aside any assumption that the commenter is talking about “well obviously I mean protect them from x y z”. Because its a potentially unpopular hot take. It’s not a common idea in society.
Unless you can read minds it is very possible this commenter meant it literally. IE how kids are raised in the film 300. “Heres a stick. go fight a wolf kid”.
Im not writing it off. I assumed what they meant but followed up for clarification. Did you just expect replies to be “agree” or “disagree” with zero further discussion?
I thought you’d be talking about letting kids climb up high into trees, going into the city on their own, let them hang out at the skatepark without supervision, stuff like that.
But no, it’s about computers and kids not being able to see goatse. Lol. That’s lemmy i guess.
On the other hand I owe my career in IT to learning how to bypass the parental controls my parents set up and cover my tracks. That got me started in computers really early.
Usa obsession with keeping the 2nd amendment is doing more harm than good. Your obsession with possession of fire arms in general generates problems that I don’t see in other countries, starting for the school shootings…
But no "muh rights, I must gun down anyone invading my home, we do things the muricah way here yeewah, Bald eagle screech! 🦅
Oh you must be thinking of the time they shot a student 70 years ago. No, I’m referring to events rightly called “massacres”. Not a trigger happy riot officer killing someone. I’m talking lining 20 people at a time up next to a ditch and shooting them all in the backs of the heads.
Im talking about massacres. Killing events where 20 is a rounding error.
Now I get it. Your teachers may have failed to teach you about human history. But we live in the age of informaron. You can look this stuff up.
I did. It’s how I learned about this stuff. But you, in the meantime, apparently think that
trigger happy riot officer killing someone
Is totally different and not at all a symptom of overall system. Cool. Don’t forget to keep your hands on the wheel in a traffic stop, lest an acorn falls.
So by reaching back to May I was able to find a massacre, in a country with a civilian weapons ban, five times larger than the on you found by reaching back to 1985, in a country with an armed populace.
Do you suppose they dropped bombs on these civilians?
So far thar’s two data points. Shall we continue one for one comparing the massacres of unarmed populations to those of armed populations?
Order of operations is important. Yes, if we got rid of all the guns then gun violence would stop being a problem. There’s a whole discussion that could be had about sensible gun regulations that is beyond the scope of this comment. Reform on the matter is necessary.
However, that ‘order of operations’ thing I mentioned: I’ll give up my guns when the fascists give up theirs, and not a day earlier.
If you are optimistic for others you ancourage them to do stuf. Doing some stuff that may not work is 100000% better than watching Netflix/TV. Especially in current nihilistic social climate.
Pessimist and optimist are both right (not my quote)
Example: Pessimist: I will not get this job -> So I will not even apply -> 0% chance of getting a job -> 100% correct Optimist: I will get this job -> I apply and prepare -> 20% chance of getting this job -> 20% correct But who cares if you are correct. What matters is taking a chance. This comes way more useful if you are optimistic every day. So you apply for a job whenever there is a chance. And if you apply for 10 jobs from initial 20% you get 89% chance to get a good job.
I can tell you that overly optimistic people annoy me to no end, and even tend to have the complete opposite effect on me. Cheerleading, thoughts and prayers BS, rather than acknowledging the suckage that’s happening so we can act on it, doesn’t help me at all.
Debatable
One can perfectly be realistic about its chances at an interview/job and apply and perform well at it and get it regardless…
You seem to be equating realism with pessimism and immobilism, while equating optimism and action. Why?
Optimistic person. And if saying “this idea might just work” encourages people you love to try things, then it also helps people you love.
We could debate on what “overly” means. If you believe you will win the lottery this is just stupid and naive, but if you believe you can start a profitable restaurant this is not overly optimistic. Still you must not be stupid when trying.
This is debatable. This statement is very broad.
Correct if you are realistic and not pessimistic. My hot take should be formed: “People who claim are realists are most often just pessimists, who will pass all ideas as bad”. Actually to continue from here we should exactly define all the words we are using. And in this case it would not be a hot take anymore. Also I believe to decide to try and take interview you must feel optimistic about it instead of pessimistic.
My hot take is targeting “realists” who say: “Your idea is bad. Do not pursue it. I am just being realistic.” Even though their idea has maybe small but fair chance of succeeding. This is just discouragement - which is more often seen in pessimists.
Actually at this point I do not even know enough about words and definitions to continue.
I think we should actively try to encourage each other to act, also by believing in others ideas (still do not believe in winning the lottery).
You’re not responsible for their self development. This is a morale thing.
Trust me it’s easier to pick yourself up for the whole team than it is for just yourself.
Maybe next time you ride the bus, imagine that you’re a background character in someone else’s struggle, and how you hold yourself will be absorbed by their subconscious. Maybe just by holding yourself the right way, you can make everyone on the bus just slightly more ready for the day.
More and more people are against giving kids internet access. Allow me to go against the grain:
If your child is neurodivergent, or LGBTQ+, or any other form of misfit, then denying them internet access is tantamount to condemning them to social isolation. It wasn’t until I got unrestricted internet access, circa 17 years of age, that I realised that actually, no, I wasn’t a fucking alien, there were hundreds of thousands of people just like me, but I didn’t know because I was stuck in this shitty small town with shitty small town people. So I spent seventeen years thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with me when in reality there was something wrong with the environment around me.
I would have had a much happier early life if I’d gotten internet earlier. Wouldn’t have spent 90% of my teens being suicidal.
Human beings are social animals. The only way that other people wouldn’t be able to hurt me non-physically is if I were to cut myself off from my humanity.
It’s actually pretty simple (but not easy at all)… You start actually believing that other people can’t hurt you. That is pretty much all there is to it. (Not quite, will explain later).
You simply don’t give that power to people. I love my spouse. But my spouse cheats on me. Now I could be hurt by the betrayal… But why? What is the benefit for me? I don’t need to feel hurt to know that my spouse is not worth keeping around, to be my spouse anymore.
If other people do something bad to me, that is not on me, it’s their problem. They’re evil/unaware/selfish. It’s no reflection on the quality of person I am. Thus when someone does something bad to me, it’s honestly just good to know. I can decide how bad I think it is and react accordingly. But feeling hurt by it is not really required in that process.
As I said at the beginning, “not quite”, there are a whole bunch of other beliefs attached to/required by this. For example, I believe that everything is temporary, or at least that the chance of something permanent (really, temporary until end of life) being low. I don’t expect to be together with my spouse to the end of time - if it happens though, I have nothing against it. I believe that change is fine, and I look forward to it: If my spouse cheats on me, I can experience no partner for a while or forever, or experience looking for a new one, both things are fine with me. And so on. Basically all my beliefs are set up in a way that I’m fine with whatever happens.
(The only exception is extreme, or lasting physical harm and death. I can’t experience anything “normally” anymore when these happen to me. Some disabilities could be fine, but I probably have a limit of how much I could be affected. Losing all movement in all my limbs could be fine, but I’m not sure. Losing an arm or a leg or hearing or similar severeness I could probably be fine with.)
Now the thing is, changing your entire belief system to be fine with pretty much anything is not something people are either willing or able to do. I did it though and think that theoretically everyone can do it.
What do you mean, like insults or if someone really insults you with a phobic term?
Unless you annoy or anger the person first, then sure I’d get it if they were big an asshole. But if it’s a retort, then maybe don’t start insult wars you can’t win.
If your free software communications can only be done thru US-based, proprietary options, then you are not free software. To think open source is ideal for your project, but not the tools surrounding it misses the point of trying uplift support & usage of these free sorts of projects (& this isn’t even starting with the privacy & lock-in concerns). Instead of coding around flaws in Microsoft GitHub or building Discord/Slack/Telegram bots, actually build & upstream integrations into the free options as you would like to see folks do unto your own project. Not saying you can’t have these services as an alternative, but as the only option (or the primary option to IIABH) should be shamed & definitely not considered the norm.
Also Matrix is pretty shit, where all the clients/servers run too heavy, & eventual-consistency means self-hosting storage often ballots into ‘too expensive’ which has led to de facto centralization the project cannot fix by design. Meaning Matrix is a better, but still bad chat option.
You could switch some of the problems with perf in switching away from the Python implementation server as well as Element clients but these support the most up-to-date features & the majority of users are now relying on these features that often don’t degrade graacefully.
The bigger issue is eventual consistency. Eventual consistency will not scale for small self-hosting. Every message & every attachment for every user in every chatroom they have joined must be duplicated to your server. This is why joining rooms sometmies takes 10 minutes. Even if you make this async from the client side instead of the current long wait, your server & storage are still taking the hit. A lot of small collectives had to drop their servers for performance & cost (read about yet another one today on the Techlore thread at c/privacy where now only Discord is used for realtime coms). This model is required to copycat the ability to search the entire history like the big, proprietary chat apps such as Slack/Telegram/Discord, but they are centralized so it is easier to manage—but its overuse for all announcement & trying to replace forums turns it into a black hole for information. Your small community probably does not need persistent chat like this—persistent info is lighter & easier to crawl as feeds & forums. With medium-sized servers shutting down, only the biggest & smallest hosts are still kicking with most metadata is largely centralized around Matrix.org who also hosts some of the other larger instances.
If you agree that chat can be chatter as well as ephemeral there is lightweight centralized chat in IRCv3 with TLS has most of the features you need with a longer legacy & massive choice for clients & XMPP for lightweight decentralized chat with a long legacy, client options too, & can be self-hosted in a bedroom on a toaster in comparison which increases the chances of self-hosters & decentralization. These were built in a time when we didn’t have such wasteful taste in tech since they needed to be efficient & only sip power/data in comparison both for clients & servers & storage. The bigger question IMO is what are fundamentally wrong with these two mature options that we need a new option built on unextensible JSON & Israeli Intelligence money?
Well, in their FAQ the Matrix team states that they love both IRC and XMPP and that for those whom these options perform better they wish the best of luck continuing to use them. Matrix does have some qualities they do not and they do not mean to compete with them, rather to put up bridges so as to federate between these decentralized protocols.
Personally, I want to move away from communicating through Discord with many of my friends. I do not believe neither IRC nor XMPP would entice them, but Matrix could as soon as they finish implementing their new video call capabilities. The same goes for community projects that use Discord as a replacement for forums.
Entice how? Spinning up XMPP on any hardware is simple to federate with you—& I wouldn’t wish they all self-host Matrix instances. XMPP’s jingle protocol works for voice/video & I use it self-hosted with my partner. What are the others missing considering the weight of the applications is literally felt. If you want a web client with stickers & reactions (& calling), what is Movim missing? Replacing forums is a part of the problem, not something to replicate… Movim & Libervia cover community posts that are web searchable.
I have no experience with the last two options you mentioned, but I was of the understanding that XMPP does not have video group call functionality. Also, it has been a long time since I used XMPP at all, but syncing history between sessions was not possible to me then. These are features that would be deal breakers to miss.
History / sync is known as message archive management (MAM) & every normal modern client & server supports it. OMEMO uses same double-ratchet encryption & multiple clients as Matrix (with the same old client key dropping issues sadly). By default it does not support groups you are correct, however, FOSS Jitsi (& Zoom for that matter) is powered by XMPP under the hood & can be stood up by yourself.
Personally three of my circles have opted for separate Mumble servers for voice coms (I run one of them from my living room) as video is only ever rarely needed & the system resources is minimal. Having web cams on is seen as a chore & distraction sometimes. The only time video is helpful in my experience is screen share which is different—but screensharing is the worst tool for trying to do code pairing / debugging a terminal using upterm provides a crisper view experience, lower data/system requirements, & observers can optionally drive the remote session.
Did not know about MAM, but that sounds great. I also hosted a Mumble server for my friends for over 5 years, but it was basically never used because there existed a one-stop solution (Discord) that allowed for more stuff^TM^. TIL Jitsi was powered by XMPP, thanks. I personally have no problem with fragmenting functionality between different specialized applications, but it will always be a tough sell for those I know because they believe they can have it all in their cool app.
At the end of the day, communication services usefulness are upwards limited by the people you can reach through them. The need for everything to be easy and centralized for the user (ironic with respect to server federation, I know) is what has made me so hopeful for the Matrix protocol, since it is designed for allowing this while still being decentralized at its core.
One of my longer-term goals is to integrate Mumble on XMPP (others have thought about this too) since its chat is pretty shit & needing accounts to join isn’t great but or two good foundational protocols.
XMPP is better for modularity which is why everything is at extension with means the foundations are simple & easy to implement where you can build something optimized & bespoke on it like Fornite’s coms or Nintendo’s presense. It’s a little harder to understand tho since out of the box you get almost nothing—but the big servers intended for chat like Prosody & ejabberd have sane defaults.
The centralization you are referring to seems more a client issue since the protocol & servers already ‘do the things’ but it sounds like you want a single ‘app’. For community building where you consider group calls less common, both Movim & Libervia offer more than Element (note the other Matrix clients are lacking feature parity) since they both can do integrated posts like forums—where Libervia supports calendars/events too. There’s no reason a client couldn’t exist with Jitsi or Mumble integration.
Ultimately use the right tool for you—it’s just nice to dispel myths that Matrix has some special sauce or that predecessors can’t fill the same roles (while also using less resources in all directions).
IRCv3 for accessibility if I need it to be centralized & TLS is the only useful encryption (such as a public chat room); otherwise XMPP + OMEMO for decentralized (but also is great for public chat rooms). No need to reinvent battle-tested, mature standards.
Yeah I’ve used jmp.chat before, but I couldn’t get any of the clients to work well with my pinephone’s microphone. Shame, since it’s the closest you’re going to get to VoIP on the thing.
I used it recently. Its actually really nice! Its fast. It also suffers from clients being weird. Although it is very stable. And extremely resource light. Apparently a single server can support 100,000 users or something. And it has distributed servers too (which is possible because it’s stateless. Wish Matrix had it though)
Matrix is in my (and a lot of other people’s opinion) way better for the future. The encryption is better, and there’s a lot more stuff supported by it. Importantly moderation.
Dino on Linux and Conversations for Android are both amazing clients imo, but the rest I’ve tried are SEVERELY lacking. Especially on iOS.
I personally think the future from a technological perspective is SimpleX Chat. Fixes so many issues that plague other private IMs, however I’m waiting to switch until I see that their venture capital strategy is actually sustainable and won’t enshittify it.
Matrix is definitely closer to Discord / a platform built for communities.
SimpleX is not P2P, as I understand it messages are forwarded through a random(?, at least varying) number of servers, so no server knows the sender and recipient. The main issue it attempts to solve is a complete lack of a persistent identifier. Your “account” does not have a single address you can be messaged on (you can create ephemeral ones). You can create a new identity for each person you message, meaning you don’t have to trust the people you’re messaging to keep your messaging account’s ‘identity’ secure.
I also really like how easy it is to route through proxies (esp on Android)
Most drugs should be over-the-counter. The especially dangerous or addictive ones maybe just require counselling with a pharmacist first. But I’m more concerned about people not able to access the medication they need than I am about idiots removing themselves from the gene pool by OD.
People in my dumbass country would rather 10 people with a genuine medical need suffer as long as 1 addict can’t get a fix, and it’s so many layers of bullshit.
there’s not really a way to know for sure but I imagine the price would actually come down somewhat due to removal of red tape and paperwork associated with drug control
possibly also from increased competition if that made it easier for a drug manufacturer to begin producing previously controlled drugs
for example amphetamine salt production is capped by the US DEA. if that cap were removed the supply would increase and the price might very well decrease