Where are the dreamers?
Back in the day tech nerds, coders, and hackers were far more vocal in favor of open standards and decentralized web.
The best time for advocacy is when people get burned. It's not a matter of if, but when. People learn through pain.
New billionaire owner takes over your favorite microblogging platform? Pain. Your clubhouse has been destroyed. You suddenly realize you didn't own anything.
New billionaire owner decides they don't like the topics you talk about and bans you? Pain. Your ability to express yourself and communicate and make connections with like-minded people has been destroyed. You suddenly realize that you actually need to get permission to talk to the people you want to talk to.
Massive data leak that includes your intimate personal information, photos and videos? Pain. Your privacy and personal life have been irrevocably violated. You suddenly realize that you don't control any of your own private information, and it actually isn't safe out there in those clouds. Even your most intimate whispers are recorded forever and will eventually be listened to by strangers or published on the cover of the New York Times.
The list of reasons to get the fuck off these corporate, centralized apps is growing every day.
Getting paid $$$$ at bigtech companies to build the centralized web.
To keep us locked inside, they keep us locked inside
(Janelle Monae)
Sure it's not the same size as the "real web" but it's got no ads, less spam, less bots, and enough to people to blow out your dunbar ring and fill your cup.
You might never get to be a freelance marketer drop shipping some stupid crap - but that's a price some are willing to pay.
They watched big tech clobber the internet.
They watched network effects cause irreversible centralization.
They watched Cambridge Analytica and "openness" get abused.
They watched toddlers being given iPads to watch YouTube by their parents.
They watched kids have mental health issues from online participation.
They watched teens start strangling each other after watching porn.
They watched robots become 40% of internet traffic, and that was before AI.
They watched crypto go from decentralized payments into a get-rich-quick scheme.
And they questioned whether it's worth standing behind this.
Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook?
Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough?
There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again.
In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.
I'm not sure, but Facebook has employed too many PhDs to name with the goal of fostering addiction to their product, as well as behavioral ad targeting, and to my knowledge, Mastadon has not.
> Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough?
I don't think user harm is correlated with size of the platform.
> There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again.
Which is why I support things like the AT Protocol, which enable decentralized social networks that can share data amongst each other, and permit users greater control over what they see and from where.
> In which case, why fight for it?
Because I've been fighting for a better internet for decades at this point and see nothing better to do with that time were I to stop.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Among other things left unsaid.
I fought for years and came to the same conclusion. I just focus on myself now and a few tight knit circles of friends. We still hang out together on Diaspora. We still muck and hack around with stuff like Ubuntu Touch and debate the latest Linux distros and see how long we can go without our smartphones.
A few of my friends have gone "analog" because of what's happened. They were there during the first dot com bust. They've seen what the internet and tech have become - they just want to opt out now. Kind of crazy the times we're living in. Decentralization was the dream - now its just a nightmare a lot of us no longer what to be apart of.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062485/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe...
“There’s no safe way to do it, no safe quantity of blood or oxygen you can cut off from her brain for fun,” says Jane Meyrick, a chartered health psychologist who leads work on sexual health at the University of the West of England. She describes being at a sexual health conference last year where data was presented on sexual strangulation – the prevalence and harms. “Usually, at those conferences, people will be talking about the extremes of what everyone is getting up to in a very sex-positive way,” she says. “When this was presented, you could feel the tension, the internal conflict, in the room, with professionals being unable to reconcile the gap between what they were hearing and their usual sex-positivity.”
Case in point, the sex-positive educators in the UK... forced to say that certain bedroom behaviors actually are too dangerous to participate in. Even that, yes, we will control what you do in the bedroom, with the force of law, and even restrict depicting that act regardless of consent, with the force of law. Extremely ironic that sex-positive educators are now forced to say what you can do in the bedroom, after they said "who are you to tell consenting adults what they can do" for decades.
> This is the first comment I've seen from you that leverages the UK's authority on anything related to online safety.
Edit for a (now deleted) reply: This has nothing to do with the UK; studies objectively say this activity is more dangerous than waterboarding. If that is true, action is objectively necessary, including against depictions.
https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=manly_suicide"%3B>...
It's from 2004 and dark humor.
...but sexytime "choking" has an entire range of intensity that is more about intimacy and physical touch and doesn't restrict airflow or blood flow at all.
If a 14 year old watches porn and decides to copy what they see, that is a failure of sex education. Every child needs to be taught fairly graphic and frank realities of sex, sexuality, and sexual activity.
For some reason, this is basically only difficult in parts of the US.
> If a 14 year old watches porn
This is not 14 year olds either, these are teenagers and fully grown consenting adults, notably not in the US.
"A survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, established with Home Office funding in 2022, after strangulation became a standalone offence, found over a third of 16 to 34-year-olds had experienced this."
The reality is that people are influenced by pornography, despite education, despite warnings, despite common sense, despite age, despite region, and it is killing people. Even sex-positive educators are stuck in cognitive dissonance on this one.
Sex education is just another school class that in goes one ear, out goes another.
The kids will follow what they see (including in porn), what the culture has normalized, not what some teacher tells them in class...
So, "porn normalizes X, but it's the duty of sex-education to prevent kids copying it" is a lousy and losing approach.
Any perversion relegated to a handful of people, now is part of porn "sex-ed" to millions of kids
We had BBSes, forums and IRC. Now it's Discord.
We had LAN parties. Now it's publisher-controlled match lobbies.
We had RSS feeds. Now it's curated social algos.
We had myriad self-hosted wikis and homespun fansites. Now it's all ad-choked Fandom.
So on and so forth.
Yes there’s Matrix, but it’s not packaged in a way that makes hosting a node accessible and the way it’s marketed, there’s no clear benefit to typical users.
Imagine if instead, the client and server were one in the same and starting a server is as simple as running the client and clicking “new server”, with the software figuring the rest out. Then, on the marketing side you can sell it as a way to get features that Discord puts behind a paywall for free.
There’s no way that wouldn’t have a dramatic impact on take-up.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
The world doesn't need that many clients, it needs 1 or 2 really good ones that are well polished, supported and marketed.
This is a problem in other open-source ecosystems. Eg. We don't need more web browsers, we need Firefox to focus on being a great web browser.
If you want to narrow it down to one or two really great ones which are well polished, supported and marketed just pick Element X, Beeper or maybe Fluffychat?
And yet how many web browsers are actually well known and used by the average web user?
Safari, chrome and Firefox (if you're lucky).
My point is that if there are too many choices for users then the network effect is lost.
One discovery problem is this client had three rebrandings, from Vector to Riot to Element. I've noticed users have had a hard time realizing the Element is a client for Matrix - even when they're actively chatting on Element. Usually they just refer to our chat by the homeserver's name.
What this tells me is that having a canonical primary client with the same name as the protocol would do wonders. This doesn’t rule out third party clients, it just clarifies matters for users who don’t necessarily know what a client is and have trouble conceptualizing the protocol/service/client divide. Those who are technical enough will seek out their favorite client, but for everybody else chatting on Matrix means downloading the Matrix app.
- No distinct voice channels with push-to-talk. Yes there's Jitsi, but it's not the same as the TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble style functionality that gamers have used for 20+ years. Solve this, and I think Matrix will see much more adoption for casual voice chat in the same manner as Discord.
- No server-specific display names. I have multiple screen names across multiple games/communities, and Discord accommodates that. Matrix (or at least Element+Synapse) does not.
- No path for server-specific invites. If I attempt to invite someone to myexamplehomeserver.net in the Element UI, they are instead directed to make a matrix.org account and are federated in. It works I guess, but it's shit for homeservers with closed registration that want to invite users to that homeserver. Writing an invite bot has been on my "I'll get around to it" list for a very long time now, and I know other homeserver admins have considered the same thing.
- E2EE is clunky. Yes, it is much better now. Yes, there are concerted efforts to improve this. Yes, it is an extremely hard problem. However, many times I have had users lose access to past messages because they were signed in to only one device and don't remember their keys. I understand the security aspirations, the proles do not and never will.
There are a lot of other little things like custom reactions, but I think the four above would do a lot to foster more Matrix adoption.
For $2/month you can spin up an instance on Pikapods, based on their community edition. If you want advanced features (available in enterprise editions) you'll need to figure out how to re-enable them by un-feature-flag-gate-ing the source code and recompiling (and at that point move hosting), or work it into the plugin system (which gives you tons of power)
It's not federated though
> It's not federated though
This is a big one for my server - our community has a handful of active "visitors" from other homeservers and the experience is pretty seamless.
It sounds like, if Matrix worked seamlessly (which is not the experience of... anyone(?)... in this recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 ) it would give us federation and better identity access management (compared to the Mattermost community edition anyway) which would be really nice
It also has video calls built in... also really nice, but people are saying since they migrated from jitsi to their MatrixRTC, setup & admin have been a nightmare.
Element X seems to be the more popular client, though it sounds like, while faster than Element, many features (such as threading) are not yet available, and people have been lamenting the extreme sluggishness of Element
As for my stack, it hasn't changed much since this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784816
The only reason people seem to complain about Element Call being hard to set up is that it's new and unfamiliar and doesn't have much docs yet, and VoIP is always a pain from a firewalling perspective. It's a hell of a lot simpler to setup and run than Jitsi, for instance. But if you run it via ESS Community (https://element.io/server-suite/community) or even https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo it should work fine.
In the old days it was easy. Get into computers, and the internet when it was there, and you would for sure only meet nerds.
Now you mostly meet hipsters.
Just at that early time there was this new field that nobody was really much interested in, but some geeky people were, and that is what united us.
And then we discovered we often shared common causes too, like freedom of information and nerdism.
But now our meeting spaces have been invaded by hipsters making use of the great tools we once created to help each other.
Of course this is not fun, but there is one good thing that might come out of this.
The hipsters might have invaded our spaces, but they are still óúr spaces. We created the fundamentals, and the reason for it's success praises our vision.
Maybe that vision will rub off on the hipsters a little bit, and they get a bit of a feeling of what real freedom is actually all about.
It might take a while, and it will still get worse before it gets better, but we might have set the stage for changing the world.
This is the people that build it.
"Oh, somebody made me do it"
Great excuse!