Every community I care about is dead

  • 45 Posts
  • 206 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.


  • You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.





  • The app I use (Eternity) has options for 15/30/60/etc mins. You can theoretically get notifications every second if you set up your own RSS reader to check that quickly (though be considerate of your instance’s resources). Before I settled on my current solution I had an RSS reader check every so often and ding a desktop notification when it found something. I use 30 minutes because if I’m using Lemmy I’ll see the notification alert anyway, and if I’m away from Lemmy I don’t want to be notified potentially every 15 minutes when people keep replying.



  • Yote.zip@pawb.socialtoReddit@lemmy.worldF#€k $pez
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    1 year ago

    These will probably need to grow naturally again. We have enough techy users to carry tech-related discussions, but we probably don’t have enough users to carry niche communities yet. By gaining more users of any kind, techy or otherwise, we have better odds of gaining people with a secondary interest in those niche communities. It’ll take some time, but the Fediverse is much more permanent, and investments here will pay off theoretically forever. Even if another open platform supersedes Lemmy, it will be easy to port our community over to it.


  • Yote.zip@pawb.socialtoReddit@lemmy.worldF#€k $pez
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    1 year ago

    Not very surprising to lose users after the big intake from June. If that were the only intake we’d ever get I would be worried but we all know that Reddit will continue to do user-hostile things. Lemmy now exists as a permanent lifeboat for those who get fed up with Reddit over time, and the next time something big happens we’ll be better prepared.







  • Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn’t impact Conduit as much is that there’re other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

    Right. The current perspective is based on the idea that if Synapse/Dendrite go closed-source right now, an open source version would be good as dead. Element is responsible for 95% of Synapse/Dendrite and I’m sure a community fork would have to play a lot of catch-up to figure out how to keep it going. If the community was more involved in Synapse/Dendrite implementation (and if Element let them) there would be less cause for alarm, as closing the source would just mean an immediate community fork and putting Element on ignore. Also to reiterate, The Matrix Foundation is not going along with Element on this move, and even if Element pulled something shady the Matrix Core Spec etc. would still remain open and under the Foundation’s control, so the max we have to lose is Synapse/Dendrite and all of Element’s developers.

    As for the rest I agree and I do actually trust that Element is simply playing their only card here. These maneuvers are all required in order for Element to survive as a company at all, but they also unfortunately leave this backdoor open as a consequence. Matthew has pinky-promised over and over that they are only acting in good faith and that they would never use the backdoor, but it’s understandable that the presence of the backdoor is putting everyone at unease. Best case scenario we take this as a warning sign that if Element drops dead tomorrow then Matrix is also dead. If people want Matrix to not be practically owned by Element then we should diversify and prepare escape plans.



  • This is actually quite a controversial change mainly because of their switch to a CLA. This indirectly gives them the opportunity to switch the license to closed source whenever they feel like it in the future. Semi-controversially, they are also primarly making this AGPL change in order to begin selling dual-licensing to companies. The Matrix Foundation itself does not support this change from Element, though Element is within its rights to do so.

    You can read some more thoughts on this from the pessimistic folks at HackerNews. My main takeaway is that I don’t trust Element because I don’t trust anyone. I’m sure they’re doing this in good faith but I don’t like the power they have at the moment. I hope this is what’s needed to begin focusing efforts on alternative homeserver implementations like Conduit.