Scrobling used to be huge back in the day of mp3s and last.fm practically invented it.There are also alternative APIs implementing the same idea. Unfortunately for them they never caught up on the age of streaming.

Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I’ve been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We’ve been using it for about 5 years now and it’s chugging along. It’s simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server’s point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It’s perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.

Here’s a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).

Isn’t that too complicated for no reason? Just keep them under public control. No need to incentivise anyone, no need to share dividends to anyone.

It’s the be-all end-all justification for anything

Early on when Google wasn’t shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can’t be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There’s 1 million % this will happen again. It’s textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook’s strong arming tactics. Facebook’s server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

Yes, I feel “social media” (or whatever this engagement driven, algorithmically fed hellscape can be called) is driving up the responses. We know, by now, how adversely social media affect the mental well-being of children, being bombarded all the time by the fantastic lives of plastic “influencers”. Add to that cyber-bullying 24/7 which is now common, peer pressure for “green and blue bubbles” and a ton of other nonsense you can probably understand how people in a age bracket that there’s chance of being parents might feel negatively about today’s technological status quo.

You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It’s especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.

There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate