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> Nokia did not understand what it had

Like any other large company, Nokia needed time to adjust its strategy, whether it would have happened or not we will never know, because Nokia got Trojan horsed by Microsoft killing any plausible competition to windows phone, and the whole phone division as a result. I still find it incredible that it happened just like that.

> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.

I think if fits well in this comparison, because Scala-native:

- has the ergonomics, abstractions, expressiveness and conveniences of a high-level language with pointer-level semantics if/when needed (essentially covering the abstraction vs. cost spectrum of all those languages)

- can be used with or without GC (same)

- has the libraries and tooling to tackle massively concurrent/parallel workloads with ease (the niche that Go carved for itself)

- offers the same memory safety guarantees as Rust, and possibly more in the future with capture-checking (a more general concept than borrow-checking to guarantee resources scoping at compile-time)

Yep, that's what late stage capitalism leaves you with: consolidation, abuse, helplessness and complacency/widespread incompetence as a result

Nice thing is, Microsoft themselves are undoing that with the push to Office as a web-first application. While making it more ubiquitous (they think), they are at the same time cutting loose some of its strongest anchors

Should really consider adding scala-native to the comparison : https://scala-native.org/en/latest/

So, that sits firmly where Django/Rails are at, except that you use a GUI rather than code to define the models? I suppose that lowers the bar ever so slightly, because any management rule or business logic is still deferred to a proper framework/programming language. Seems very niche and limiting, all things considered.

I suspect it got worse with the advent of algorithm-driven social networks. When rage inducing content is prevalent, and when engaging with it is the norm, I don't see why this behaviour wouldn't eventually leak to algorithms-free platforms.

For sure, it got continuously refined for WA-specific needs over the years, but XMPP very much still is there, lurking in the shadows: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17422...

just posting this here: https://www.isode.com/whitepaper/operating-xmpp-over-hf-radi...

> my experience with XMPP is that was not as solid as other solutions, including closed source ones.

Considering that WhatsApp is essentially an old/non-federating fork of ejabberd (from where this blog post originates), I think XMPP is doing alright in that regard.

I repeat: when confronted to bad or evil, you should expand your options.

This doesn't fly in light of recent history: first, Signal has some trust issues of its own (I mentioned a couple user-hostile acts in sibling comments), but that aside, do you remember how much praise WhasApp was getting in its early days? There is no guarantee the same can't happen to Signal (though it's pretty clear that it will become a major target for takeover and under significant scrutiny and influence would it ever grow past a certain point).

What you say is barely different from what the opponents to generalized https were saying back in the days "true your ISP can see all your traffic, but they are the good guys, you are their customer after all".

With SSL, we no longer have to care, and that's much better that way. Signal has all the same means of (meta)data harvesting and analyzing as Meta. It can't be made different: this is built into their very centralised service. All I'm saying is that we should aim for better, and have guarantees baked into the protocol to avoid absolute metadata centralisation. Federation is a good start.

Precisely. The metadata and some basic packets analysis suffices to reveal if you are at home or at work, sending text or images, traveling/from approximately where to where or still, on the toilet or working, etc, all without breaking the glamorous post quantum ratchet encryption.

> The article confuses confidentiality with anonymity/pseudonymity.

sure, but let's not pretend that the distinction is lost on Signal and serves to fuel their security theatre.

> My grandmother cannot, but she can use Signal and she will be one user among millions.

And she will not be better-off than on WhatsApp. Even assuming that Signal is a good actor today (and, surprise, it very much is *not*: using a 3rd party client is against their T&C, they have a history of pushing their crypto to your face, their marketing is based on blatant lies, …), she will be back to square one the day inevitably Signal flips.

The case I'm making here is for federation. I skipped the whole Signal stage. My family and friends (including grandmother) are now on XMPP instead. It has all the guarantees you might desire from Signal without the hanging sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

> Signal is the only WhatsApp/Messenger alternative I've managed to get friends and family to actually move to.

And what good did that achieve, practically? In effect, your friends and family:

- still use a centralised service with Signal (subject to enshittification/changing the deal overnight/acting as a single point of control and failure) - still use WhatsApp because they really have no choice: that's where everyone else is (and so, there is no avoiding Meta's data collection on them and indirectly, on you) - gained nothing compared to WhatsApp+E2EE (being centralised, both Signal and Meta can infer your social graph, the nature and volume of exchanges you have with your contacts, and hence the nature of your relationships, Signal only "pinky swears" it's not looking at it, and that's a very lame "guarantee").

> They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.

I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?

That's provably untrue. If you mainly write modules for the ejabberd server, indeed erlang might be on the menu, but that's very specific. If you develop on the client-side, pretty much all mainstream languages (JS, Python, C/C++ w&w/o Qt, Java, Go, rust, C#, …) have decent and independently well-maintained libraries to interact with XMPP. On the server-side, prosody (Lua) is as big (if not bigger) than ejabberd. And there are Openfire (JVM) and other implementations as well. Erlang is definitely not as unavoidable as you make it seem.

It's probably an important feature now, but it's a recent one in this context.

By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at.

In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.

Similar-enough story on an Asus similarly branded "ultrabook", I figured I would put my whole fedora root partition on that cache, which worked wonders for a few months, until I started having random freezes and crashes that I later diagnosed thanks to `rpm -V` to be data corruptions. At that point the hinges were dead, pulling the screen away from the chassis during operations and dangerously exposing a mainboard PCB. That's when I replaced it with a ThinkPad T that's still going like new after 8 years :-)

I'll be the one to nickpick, but Scala never intended to be a nicer Java. It was and still is an academic exercise in compiler and language theory. Also, judging by Kotlin's decent strides, "little Syntex differences" get you a long way on a competent VM/Runtime/stdlib.

> The machine-learning community

Is it? I only see a few individuals, VCs, and tech giants overblowing LLMs capabilities (and still puzzled as to how the latter dragged themselves into a race to the bottom through it). I don't believe the academic field really is that impressed with LLMs.

I mean, without going this far, the very first computer I put my hands on as a child was a Mac, because then Apple had a reputation for user-friendliness and discoverability. Least I can say is that Apple has taken a few turns since. I don't consider myself a WM power-user, I just need boring, and MacOS is not, and the surprises I encounter along the way I can't describe as clever or well thought-out (especially stuff like this¹).

¹: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253594264

> wiping out desktop Linux

Doubt. I couldn't figure out how to do windows management under macOS to save my life. This is so needlessly obscure and inconsistent.

For what's worth, I have a "form history save" add-on for Firefox that retains this kind of info for a time, that doubles with a password manager (bitwarden) which I suspect would have caught it as well.

Taking screenshots of your whole desktop every other second and sending it to a third part, just in case their OCR and cheap search built on top of it might come up with something useful? I haven't found a single situation where I would rather take that above more conventional and established approaches (browser history search, bookmarking, file management hygiene, etc)

To me it felt like just shoving more AI for the sake of it, pretending that there is a problem to solve while making no case for it, and boiling oceans along the way as an acceptable externality.

But somehow the malware infested/backdoored alternative has more appeal? Even more than the myriad of other distros, or DIY options for that matter? Doesn't click.