In gaming circles, Matrix is to Discord as Lemmy is to Reddit: tiny. You’re unlikely to find well-established rooms for niche topics, so you would have to either join an existing barely-used room, or start a new one yourself.

The good news is that, with so many people leaving Discord right now, promoting a small room could easily multiply its population and boost its activity. You might even consider talking to moderators of niche Discord channels to see if they’re interested in migrating with you.

an always on chat channel.

I guess you must mean an always on voice channel. Thanks for clarifying.

(For what it’s worth, my groups are using Mumble for that purpose, alongside Matrix, at least until MatrixRTC brings its voice features up to speed.)

Spectacle can read texts from screenshots

I use Spectacle to take screen shots. I wish it wasn’t so incredibly slow.

offer true jump in /jump out game chat.

What does this mean?

Can you give me some examples?

For example, browsing the most recent messages in linux@programming.dev, 13/20 of them are your reposts.

Magic Wormhole comes close. I don’t think it 100% peer-to-peer since there’s a coordination server, but that’s not so different to most P2P programs on the internet, which need something like a STUN or TURN server (or port mapping) to get around NAT.

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

Nit: vim is a visual editor. It has a text interface, but it’s not a command line interface.

An example of a command line text editor would be sed.

The thing you’re referring to was called Google Talk, introduced in 2005. XMPP was viable for the unguided public at that time mainly because Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were large public XMPP servers, supplementing the small independent servers to form a healthy ecosystem. This allowed anyone to easily discover the network, sign up to use it, and be confident that they and their contacts would remain reachable for more than couple of years.

Google Talk was replaced in 2013 by Google Hangouts, bringing an end to their XMPP support. Facebook Messenger ended XMPP support in 2015. Jabber.org, which was the only significant independent host (but still relatively small), stopped offering new accounts in 2013. The healthy ecosystem vanished over a decade ago.

Also, the rich feature set being discussed here includes modern end-to-end encryption (OTR doesn’t qualify), persistent message history with multi-device support, voice and video chat, and a variety of other things that were not supported by XMPP back then, if ever.

So no, you have not been doing this with XMPP for decades.

You can get most of those features today if you have an XMPP server implementing a pile of specific XEPs on top of the base protocol, and you and your contacts all use clients with the same extensions implemented just right. This might be great for a small group with a friendly and well-informed admin, or for the tiny minority of people who might stumble into a service provider that makes it easy for them, but the vast majority of the unguided public are not going to navigate those waters successfully or have reasonable assurance that their accounts will last longer than summer vacation.

I miss Jabber’s heyday, too, but to believe it can make a comeback is just wishful thinking. It doesn’t have the support that would be required for that, and there’s no sign that it ever will. That’s why I don’t recommend it outside of small groups.

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No thanks.

I’m a little surprised to see someone soliciting for those platforms on Lemmy, given that they are antithetical to the values that brought most of us here.

Currently the best self-hostable, private (encrypted) and federated communication platform is XMPP/Jabber

This is a very subjective opinion. I consider XMPP to be useful for small groups that have a knowledgeable admin to offer help, but a poor fit for the unguided public if a rich feature set and long-term accounts are important. YMMV.

And after trying it, if you want to see what alternative client apps have to offer, you can find them here.

I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen.

I guess you haven’t noticed that the Switch is not current gen.

If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware.

I guess you live in a country where typical incomes can afford purchasing Nintendo games and hardware without giving up more important things, like food and shelter.

Not to be confused with the (now extinct) North American Redd Foxx.

Out of curiosity, which client and OS sent the messages in question, and which client and OS says it can’t decrypt them?

I’ve seen that behavior in the past, but like I said, it has been more than a few months. It’s possible that at least one end of your conversation is using a client that hasn’t received the recent-ish fixes. It might be helpful if we could identify it.

Mumble is great. I don’t think there’s anything with better voice quality.

I hope Element Call comes close when it’s out of beta. Using a single app for both text and voice chat would be slightly more convenient than using two.

Most clients are probably waiting until it’s out of beta before they implement it. From what I’ve seen of the design, it does look pretty great. Looking forward to it being fully specced and released.

When was the last time you used it? They’ve been working hard on fixing the encryption bugs, and it shows. I haven’t seen a glitch in… maybe half a year now?

Promised in the same way that the publisher promised the developers a big bonus, only to cheat them out of it later?

This links to an image, not a news article.

For the curious:

Eufy is based in China, has already had at least one scandal for lying about data exfiltration, and (when I investigated last year) could remotely update their products with new behavior at any time. I do not recommend them where privacy is desired.