there are NO hard drives in data centres, they are miles too slow !

I suppose that might true of some data centres, but certainly not all. Backblaze and the Internet Archive are obvious counterexamples.

Interesting points otherwise, though.

I once played the C64 version of regular Mario Bros. It was a surprisingly good port.

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.

I think we just found our common ground. :)

On the bright side: The general public (and some governments) are beginning to notice the importance of privacy and data sovereignty, more people are seeking out systems with distributed designs, and tools that address modern needs using those designs are slowly getting less complicated to use.

I hope we can keep our governments from criminalizing them.

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.

From what I’ve seen, it’s kind of a mix of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, with a larger map, biomes, and slightly more danger.

Oh no, how did we use it for decades and were even able to talk to Google Chat users.

Your comment is rude and misleading at best.

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, with clients integrated as first class features in the world’s largest social networking sites, 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 a few years.

Google Talk was replaced in 2013 by Google Hangouts, bringing an end to their XMPP support. Facebook Messenger added XMPP support in 2010 and ended it 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 were not 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 if you and your contacts also use clients with the same extensions implemented just right. This might be great for a small group with a well-informed system 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, and even those few who do will have no 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.

Follow me on Threads [aka Facebook]
Follow me on Twitter
Join us on Discord

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.

Have you played Dinkum? How do you think they compare?

I remember looking at US train ticket prices once, and finding that they cost nearly as much as plane tickets for the same journey. Is that still true?

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.

I kind of wish Lemmy called them rooms, or boards, or something like that. Community is a lot of syllables to say and letters to type. Oh well. I’m mainly just glad Lemmy exists.

The only real difficulty I foresee with users down the line is what happens when people lose their recovery keys.

Yes, the possibility of someone losing their recovery codes is a risk shared by practically all e2ee systems, authenticators, etc. (Have you backed up your Steam Guard recovery codes?) When a user is the only one with access to their secrets, they are also the only one who can be responsible for them.

This is part of why I suggested in my top-level comment that admins coming from Discord leave end-to-end encryption disabled when creating their first Matrix rooms. This keeps things simpler while their users get acquainted with Matrix, and reduces the consequences if someone loses their account recovery key. The point-to-point HTTPS encryption between client and server will still be in place, providing the same level of protection that Discord offers. End-to-end encryption can always be added to a room later, once everyone is familiar with the new environment.