Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What am I missing with Matrix? (herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)

submitted 3 days ago by klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I will be upfront with this, and say that I've never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it'd gotten better in the year or so since I've last used it.

This just... Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I've tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can't find a way to change that.

Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can't.

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[–] eggJuggler@piefed.social 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I 100% agree with you and at the same time it's important to remember that a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects. Implementing features, keeping everything up to date and secure, documentation and testing takes time, effort and skill.
Most people need money to survive so they have a full time job and can only dedicated very limited resources to these projects.
Too many people got used to free services that "just work" and forgot that they are the product now. If you don't want that look for alternatives that charge (even then you might still be the product) or better yet donate to open source projects in the hopes they will one day be on-par with their closed alternatives (there's examples where this worked). Until we have a UBI and people have the time to dedicate themselves to a cool project this is the only way.

I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects

Yeah that does give me a lot of patience with a lot of FOSS in general, though as far as I can tell that's never really applied to Matrix in particular. It was initially started by Amdocs, an Israeli communications firm, and then they gave it to a UK group that formed a company, and then crowd funded it.

I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens

Or a legal one. If it were cheaper to enforce licenses FOSS devs would actually be able to use a separate personal/commercial license in order to actually get companies/governments to pay them, while still allowing them to be free for personal use. It's not exactly what WinRAR did (we were all breaking the TOS), but it's practically what they did. The problem is that FOSS devs don't have lawyer money, and you need lawyer money to do that

[–] eggJuggler@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think (and also wouldn't want) that this should be solved by the legal system. It would mean open source developers would have to deal with the whole legal side and implement telemetry into software which largely goes against the idea of many open source projects. How else would you be able to know that a company used your software?

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 2 points 1 day ago

We don't currently have another way of enforcing this sort of thing, though, aside making software paid by default. How else will you convince a company that isn't even concerned with its long-term growth in favor of quarterly earnings reports to pay money for free software? Especially when you consider that (at least in the US) that sort of thing could get them sued by their shareholders.

Frequently threats of legal action, backed by the ability to follow through on them, are enough to get most companies to fold, and pay. I don't know that telemetry would be required in most cases, just because employees do talk, and usually publicly. I'm not sure if Unreal Engine does, but I can say with some certainty that WinRar didn't, and most of their money was made through commercial licenses on nagware