TIL about another community on Slack who is now being asked to pay thousands to preserve basic functionality 😬
Proprietary tools that offer a lot for free, without fail, will squeeze you. And unfortunately, because of their nature, a lot gets left behind when you inevitably migrate.
When we select tools for our communities, we need to think over longer time horizons.
FOSS options like Matrix for chat and Discourse for forums are the better bet.
Since announcing the idea of #Matrix 2.0 at #FOSDEM, we've been busy building out full real-world implementations for folks to play with, and today we're super excited to take the wraps off Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix. https://matrix.org/blog/2023/09/matrix-2-0/ 👀🎉🎊🍾👀
We are positively overwhelmed with the outpouring of support 🚀
People are responding to our call for help! We've also had a number of smaller organizations show up and begin the process of becoming supporting members.
This is encouraging progress, though we still have a lot of work to do to hit our fundraising goals.
This week, next gen @element client, Element-X, and @neochat announced they are supporting #UnifiedPush. This makes 2 more @matrix clients supporting it !
NeoChat the first Linux app officially supporting UnifiedPush.
Exciting news! The Ubuntu Community is now on Matrix. As of today, we're now fully federated with the rest of "The Matrix"! Anyone can join the party 🎉
Did you know that you can also find the Ubuntu HPC community on Matrix? We're an active group supercomputing professionals that meet every Wednesday over Jitsi. Just look for hpc:ubuntu.com when exploring rooms.
Hope to see you there with the rest of the Ubuntu Community 😎
Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?
Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix is the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It's also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools listed, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness there.
In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.
Let's envision what a truly federated chat like #Matrix could do to improve the cross-connectivity of chat channels. Most of these features are already possible, they just haven't been implemented yet in a community-oriented client experience.
If this lands on your feed, tell me about different features that are just missing in Matrix.
It can be anything, but please don't include memes like "unable to decrypt message" or other things that are already in the works, or maybe has already been merged (e.g media captions)
Some examples include better forwarded messages, rich profiles, or a live location sharing, just to name a few.
(I am writing something about this, boosts appreciated!)
You know who will never mine your private communications to train an LLM?
Better yet, you know whose words you don't need to trust, because you aren't obligated to use any particular server? And the software is open source? And regularly audited by security researchers?
Matrix.
It's not perfect, but no tool is. It's a matter of what trade offs you're willing to accept. Just sayin' ¯_(ツ)_/¯