Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

We as a community should, in my opinion, pick a “good enough” solution for the majority of the people we interact with.

I’d probably suggest Deltachat. It’s defederated and has always on encryption, but is so incredibly simple and easy to onboard and use, and doesn’t require a phone number or even an email to use. It also works on all platforms with a single app.

I spread out my donations, so less to more projects. I also try to prioritize projects that need financial help the most.

So as an example, the Linux Mint project is very well funded (especially this year, where they are receiving 30k+ per month) so I personally stopped donating to them so I could shift that money to a project that would benefit far more from the relatively small amounts I can share, such as the Movim project, which is attempting to completely replace Discord with a FLOSS solution, but was only receiving like $40 a month before they started a funding campaign a few days ago.

Figure it’ll do far more good there to help the dude cover his expenses for providing such a valuable service to us all for free.

Glad to hear you’re all set up ^^

If you’re interested in Solarpunk, my instance’s sysadmin hosts solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net on XMPP, and there’s a cool little DIY project community at craftmanship@muc.loqi.im :)

I never used em dashes before, but I use the shit out of bullet points, it’s too good at distinguishing stuff from the rest of a comment. I’d hate to have to give those up…

I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…

Nothin’ to be ashamed of, we’re all newbies to this at first. I had to learn it too :p

Part 1: How XMPP servers differ from XMPP Clients

Okay, so: Movim and Conversations are both clients that can be used to login to any XMPP account. Those two clients in particular are a little bit more confusing than normal, because they also offer free XMPP accounts on their own XMPP servers (which are independent of the client software).

To try to liken it to something familiar, it’d be like if the Thunderbird email client (which you can login to any email account with) also happened to offer a separate email hosting service too, so you could login to your SomeReallyCoolUsername@thunderbird[.]com from the Thunderbird app.

Or to liken it to how lemmy works, if you’re familiar with the Photon front-end, it can access any lemmy account, even your blahaj account, as it’s just an independent front-end, it’s not actually hosting the lemmy server itself.

Part 2: How it works in practice

So in practice, if you create an XMPP account on Movim’s server, you can login into that same account right from your Conversations App too. The same would apply if you’d created an XMPP account on the Conversations server; you could login to it right from the Movim client.

One client can also communicate with any other. Let’s say you had a friend using the Conversations client, and you were on the Movim client; you could talk to each other no problem through text, or even call each other 1 on 1 with audio or video.

Part 3: The complication :(

But, bit of extra complication; the Conversations client hasn’t yet implemented some of the features Movim is capable of. Specifically, it cannot yet do group audio/video calls or screenshare. So if you’re in a chat room with your friends, and everyone is on Movim except for one friend (who’s using the conversations client on their phone), if you started a group call, that one friend won’t be able to join it.

However (‘But’ part 2); that limitation would only crop up if someone is using the Conversations client/mobile app itself.

If that same friend happened to have a Conversations XMPP account, they could still open Movim in a browser tab on their PC or phone and login to the Movim client with their Conversations account, and then would be able to join the call no problem.

And that’s it! :D

Sorry if I didn’t do the best job explaining that. I’m very much looking forward to the day when Conversations gets those missing features and I only need to explain the first part about how clients and XMPP accounts are separate 😅

Yes, many games implement that. More famously The Crew (which was mostly a singleplayer game with a large campaign with some multiplayer tacked on) became completely unplayable after Ubisoft shut down the multiplayer portion of the game due to always online DRM. They only later patched the game to become playable in singleplayer again after the extreme backlash from the SKG campaign, which focused on The Crew as an example.

There are many more singeplayer games either already killed, or currently at-risk of being destroyed. SKG keeps an up to date list of them here: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list

Especially with the Movim client :)

and now my life has been reduced from being perhaps the best engineer in the world

Yeah… I think we dodged a bullet when Linus didn’t let his filesystem in.

Yep :D

It has full searchable room history, can upload memes (gifs from either links like giphy or directly uploaded), images, video files (playable within the chat), and audio messages.

There’s also a built in paint-like thing that lets you draw directly into the chat, or annotate documents, pictures, or memes.

I feel like this article was written for you, based on your last paragraph (the author definitely relates).

Fluxer plans federation in the future, and its AGPL licensed.

However, it’s still in beta, and the backend’s ability to scale is currently unproven.

For something that’s more proven, we have Movim, which is already federated with the open standard XMPP protocol.

Movim. Though due to how recent it was implemented, you must use a chromium based browser to stream the application’s audio too.

StopKillingGames is also about keeping games with always online DRM (even present in many singleplayer games today) from rendering it completely unplayable, which would also determine if it could even be sold on GoG in the future.

All of GoG’s current catalog is only possible because the trend of always online DRM wasn’t a thing yet, but going forward, we’ll need SKG to ensure GoG is able to preserve newer games as they become old. If GoG cares about preserving games, then SKG couldn’t get more in their wheelhouse. Yet they ghosted the organizer for it.

They have the opportunity to right their wrong of bailing on the StopKillingGames campaign, but they’re likely more worried about appeasing the corpo publisher more than they are defending their supposed core mission.

Do you know anyone who is building neocities sites and self-hosting them

My friends aren’t the type to build websites at all, but there’s plenty of self hosted simple web 2.0 sites that get decent traffic, such as Low Tech Magazine (mentioned in the video).

Another walled garden

Not sure if you meant it this way, but Walled garden usually means ‘Closed Platform’, like a way to trap users. But the video is encouraging the construction of websites that can easily be self-hosted, which is the opposite of a walled garden.

Lemmyverse.net is a very useful site to find communities that may not have federated to your instance yet (at least 1 user on your instance must be subscribed to it for it to begin federating). Especially useful for smaller instances.

I only noticed in the comments after posting this that the new release of FreeDOS doesn’t actually have the newer kernel they’d been working on (it was released in the master branch a couple days before the video was released), so the test unfortunately doesn’t show anything new compared to the previous version since it’s using the same Kernel as 1.3. Hopefully the newer kernel addresses some of those remaining issues :)

I agree, it’s an unfortunate downside. But it’s still probably our best option long-term.

At least in XMPP’s case, I think a way of dealing with the fragmentation is to treat Movim as the ‘main’ app, and to encourage any friends willing to leave Discord to just use that, and not mention other options unless you know they’re a bit more tech savvy, and can understand the limitations of the other clients and just think of them as fun little bonuses (until they catch up, anyway). :)