My phone has extra buttons, so I use the camera shutter for hardware push-to-talk

Mumble is like a reliable Toyota Corolla. You will turn no heads, but it has all the features you would need for the task (encryption, room hierachies, ACL, machine-learning-enhanced noise canceling, positional audio, choice of method input like push-to-talk, mini UI overlay atop games), and does them efficiently.

…And like a Toyota Corolla, there’s probably a decent upgrade out there, but you might be compromising on more than you think. Want a car without the manufacturer tracking you or bloated, touch-screen navigation? Many ‘modern’ VoIP options, especially proprietary ones, are literally doing the latter.

Here I am self-hosting Mumble for friends & using Mumble at work. Old tech was built to actually be good on resources.

No need when you have free software Mumble + Murmur :)

So one of the best features is a bad thing? Is the irony lost on you that Lemmy is a decentralized system without a central server or app?

God(zilla), I hope this country continues to cling to cash. Big wigs & tourists want it all digital tho. 😓

So happy the rainy season is underway here

https://lemmy.ml/comment/11113492

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Images & video work fine on Cheogram, Dino, Gajim, & can be piped from Profanity

OMG. Ctrl+F for Firefox with no results in the article… but there’s a link to a Pikachu image from Google image search results.

She’s done such a good job with this channel. I understand most of the content, but I always pick up a nugget of new as well as being able to better explain after a topic she ELI5’d

Balisage Paper: Fat Markup: Trimming the Fat Markup Myth one calorie at a time

Old paper, but so are these specs which haven’t really changed. I know there are more formats than XML vs. JSON but they are two of the most common, and relevant to the battle of XMPP/XML vs. Matrix/JSON.

XMPP is an extensible protocol that has over a decade of battle testing from the casual chat to massive industrial communications applications (Zoom, Jitsi, almost certainly any online game you’ve played). It has E2EE in modern clients. It’s decentralized by nature & relatively easy to self-host. Both servers & clients use very few resources like bandwidth, storage, processing, memory (consider conditions of the time of invention). It doesn’t take minutes to join & sync chatrooms (MUCs). Gateways allow folks to talk across non-XMPP platforms. Governance is distributed in the open & not tied to a single entity. There are even projects like Snikket that can be rolled out for a family that is close to turn-key for set up. Along with something like Movim can create a self-hosted social network built atop an XMPP server for posts to share stories & media for a longer-term storage.

If E2EE encryption isn’t seen as a must relying on TLS + self-hosting: lighter, simpler IRC (good feature set with v3) which has been around since the ’80s can be a good choice. Zulip which is a forum/chat platform that has the most usable UX for trying to actually hybridize both (it’s not amazing UX, but better than the rest); this can work for a great for certain communities that desire this behavior.

Distributed (not to be confused with decentralized) encrypted chat there is Briar with a mesh network not even requiring internet, but has limited platform support & last I used years ago had massive battery drain issues.

If you must, there is Matrix which decentralized & offers E2EE but is relatively expensive to run from the clients, to servers, to the design generally being that it replicates the room messages & attachments & state across all servers for all users. While that duplicated data is great for resilience, can be expensive to store & is what takes minutes to join any room. I think it was a design decision ‘miss’ to try copy Slack/Discord/Telegram-but-FOSS as doing too much & none of it that well–where I think chat is better to be a bit simpler + expected to be ephemeral & a different service like a forum for important, permanent discussions & FAQs. Mastodon suffers similar issues with replication that makes some have to shutdown their self-host due to cost–which has led to Matrix in practice centralizing around Matrix[dot]org (who has a history of Israeli intelligence funding) & the servers they provide to others funneling all the metadata thru their org since they offer free accounts, are big enough to scale, & have most of the users. Folks act like Matrix is great just for being newer, but the aforementioned already cover its uses while being more mature.

I still need to set up something like Slidge myself. The worst are these accounts that require Android or iOS apps to work.

It’s the bare minimum for passable due to E2EE, not being owned by a corporation, & mostly open source–not “best”. We have better.

Not if we liberate it from them

Right? They realized the power that be, corporations or governments, can take away any service at any time, & look for the loophole to access the service instead of the loophole to the entire centralized system …especially considering those powers can take down the VPNs too. Duct tape thinking.

Okay, but who’s is doing guerrilla advertising for a centralized service that requires a SIM card & an Android/iOS primary device or no account for thee. …At least in the past I convinced grandma this is the new SMS app you can use as I knew she would treat it as such, but now I wish I hadn’t since even that useful feature was lost. I want to drop Android entirely, but I need access to my contacts locked in the Signal system–which centralized system lock-in is one of the things we privacy-concerned folks want to avoid.

I’m still salty my current laptop is sold at a discount in the EU without a pre-installed OS due to laws in place–but where I am, I had no choice but to pay a Microsoft tax & immediately wipe it. I used to not connect to WiFi & just look around for a few minutes out of curiosity before wiping, but since 11 moved to Microsoft Account + WiFi required & all the telemetry on by default, I don’t even bother with that anymore.

I hear a lot of the folks in here not shaming you specifically but the general direction that a lot of projects are in. It’s nothing against you personally… especially with the “free” in “freedom” to do what you wish. They, & I, feel underserved–not just that but it feels ironic given the topic in question is free software. Occasionally I talk about sports still on Reddit despite it ’cause that sort of community I wouldn’t expect to understand why moving might benefit their community or understand the tools for migrating, but those in software I assume would.