Could someone smarter than me explain Matrix to me? In particular,

• What would be the utility for someone, who cares about privacy and currently uses Signal and email for communication?
• What advantage would it give me over other services?
• Is Matrix anything good already, or is it something with potential that’s still fully in development?
• How tech savvy does one need to be to use Matrix?

I’ve been using Fennec. Any one got advise on what would be the best alternative? And please explain why.

Now could you explain it like I’m 104?

shorts are not my cup of tea. Pretty sure shorts have a negative impact on peoples attention span. I’d still be happy to see people watch their shorts on the Fediverse rather than at tiktok/yt. Of course, but still…

I followed in 2021. What remains is that I use YouTube quite a lot (even though it’s through piped or yt-dlp).

ListenBrainz

Sabotage Wikipedia, Ddos the Internet Archive. Makes you wonder if in the future we’re going to forget our past. Will actual history be obscured in a sea of alternative histories unrecognizably presented as the same thing. Maybe we need to keep some books laying around in archives just to be sure.

We still have it, and it’s quite nice.

If you have a lot of money

• you contributed a lot to society
• you took a lot from society

If you’re a successful businessman and you want to contribute, perhaps you could lower the prices of your products, perhaps you could give shares to your employees who do all the work. Not only is it efficient for them to have a stake in the company, it’s also only fair. Not doing so is unfair. We won’t celebrate your ‘success’, a successful thief is a thief nonetheless. You doing so-called ‘philanthropy’ won’t do any good either. Money is power, you exerting your power over us isn’t the moral thing to do. It’s still wrong to the core. Sure, people voluntarily giving money to all sorts of causes is a beautiful thing, but only if money is reasonably distributed among people in the first place. If you take money from society on a large scale and then exert this power, than undoubtedly your views and interests are disproportionately represented. Your intentions are dubious, because if you intended well, why did you keep all the money and power for yourself in the first place? It’s likely that you’re a power hungry maniac. But even if you’re somehow naively unaware of this and truly have the noblest of intentions with your philanthropy, then it’s still a ludicrous idea that this would be an efficient way to distribute money. It’s quite obvious that if everyone got a say in where the money goes, that the distribution of assets would better represent what society deems important. It’s only logical that if you get to distribute the money, it will go to things you deem important. If you think that makes sense, it can only mean that you deem yourself wiser, more moral, than all of humanity combined. It means you are a narcissist. It’s not unlikely that you are, people who are successful money-wise, often think that life it a money-game and they’re the winning players. And they have won because they work hard and are clever. The thing is, life isn’t a money-game, people have moral compasses and strive towards others goals than making money. And even if it was a money-game, you’ve not won because you’re so smart and hard-working, it is in a very large part due to your luck. That’s not an allegation, it’s a logical fact. People don’t have the same starting positions. Being a billionaire is morally wrong, even if you give all of it away later in life.

Where ever you listen to your music, in most cases you can hook it up with ListenBrainz, to save your listening data on a FOSS alternative for Last.fm. And to get all sorts of beneficial features, like for instance recommendations that are truly independent, and getting updates on new releases.

good luck finding one with a decent resolution AND price.

That raises the question: is there one that has decent resolution and privacy, but is expensive? Those of us who can afford it should surely go for the privacy friendly option regardless of price. Boycotting the surveillance society that’s in full development is worth a lot.

Interesting, care to explain?

I can only see ‘being a billionaire’ as ‘stealing from the population at large’. So you’re saying the biggest thief of society is still popular among 6% of democrats.

Youtube isn’t just a thing people use to waste time

I fully agree, didn’t mean to imply it’s just that. But it’s also that.

Direct payment to creators seems like the most simple and efficient method.

That’s a fair point. There’s a million things you could do, and watching videos on YT is just one of them. Watching videos online has become a large part of peoples lives. Surely it has a lot to offer, but we should probably not forget it also replaces a lot of things, things we would spent are time on otherwise, if we didn’t have YT as an easy time-drain, and those other things are presumably equally rewarding or more so.

Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

I learned that just now.

Elon Musk

it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all

Could someone expand upon this? I’m don’t know much about tech, but the idea that FOSS decentralized platforms can’t be banned does seem to make sense right? Ban one, another one will pop up, etc. What am I not getting here?