I used to use floccus and the thing I really liked is you can selectively share bookmark groups. So if you have certain links you want everywhere you can do that, but some sets you might only want in in specific browsers. I do not know if the others that have this.

Stopped using it because of unresolvable problems and not much Dev attention but looks like its picked up again so I plan to get back to it.

It’s taken me forever to reply because (a) I feel guilty about short replies to long messages, (b) I had to think about this a bit, and © I almost exclusively access Lemmy on my phone and I hate typing long messages on my phone. Not an excuse, just an explanation. There are no good Lemmy desktop clients, but I’ve finally logged in to my instance’s web interface to respond to this. 3 months later.

well I appreciate the time and tbh and in no hurry for any of this. I’m glad it was on an account I actively monitor. I also don’t have a perfect system set up to keep track of lemmy stuff so probably I miss things sometimes.

The argument that because the currency isn’t endorsed or backed by a government means it’s not real seems debatable, at best.

So as to the nature of crypto vs fiat. Fiat is not only backed by The State, it is created and controlled by The State. I have never done a deep dive but superficially I find the ideas of MMT as explained by Cory Doctow compelling in the context of capitalism

MMT’s core precept is that governments first spend money into existence and then tax it out of existence (contrast this with the standard account that says that governments must tax citizens to pay for programs, which raises the question, “How did the citizens get the money to pay for their taxes unless the government first spent that money into existence, given that governments are the sole source of currency?”).

I first encountered it on some podcast he was on, it might have been this one but not totally sure tbh.

So in terms of whether it’s “real” that is one difference.

People have been scamming people using regular money for far longer than cryptocurrency has existed.

It is an interesting point, and I’m compelled to agree that lots of scams have been conducted with fiat currency. If it were possible to count it all up, way, way more value has been scammed out of people via fiat.

Just to disclose my priors: To be honest, I am not too interested in “fortunes” being scammed because I don’t think anyone comes by massive quantities of money by means which are defensible. An old saying: “if one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, it means another man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.” It is clumsy and imprecise but summarizes how I feel about wealthy individuals.

But crypto has been extensively marketed to people without fortunes. Small people like you (I assume) and me and our families and communities. These people will never get redress for their lost money and it can be devastating. It has specifically targets for example racialized communities who have been systematically excluded from systems that would allow them to accumulate fiat and property.

Unlike fiat, which is created and required by the state, crypto is more like an MLM (pyramid scheme). It is only valuable while new people are buying into it with fiat. If the money pump stops or even slow down, there is a crash. Fiat doesn’t need people to buy into it with crypto and it never will.

Back to the topic of chat apps.

I think it feels sleezy to you because the devs are also interested in integrating cryptocurrency into the Session ecosystem, and you believe cryptocurrency=bad.

Disagree. I wouldn’t use a chat app that was run by Wells Fargo or PayPal or Visa or a local credit union or any other such organization. That would be weird. My use case for a chat app is 100% in social communication and I see no reason for that to be entangled in financials unless I was directly choosing to contribute money to the development costs of the app.

However I can see different use cases where integration of financial exchange into the platform would be of benefit. Those would be for conducting relationships with a significant transactional nature. Platforms like ebay and aliexpress have chat/mail features and that makes sense. And think of facebook marketplace; also combines chat and transactions. People do business on instagram and whatsapp. It appears that the primary application of something like session would be as an adjunct or replacement for those kinds of conversations.

The question is: Is this a chat app that also has a way to send money, or a financial transaction app with a chat feature? I think it is the latter.

I will admit I don’t deeply understand the inners of blockchains. But we know they are unstable so I still find it strange to mix up other unrelated features so intimately. For example aliexpress has a chat feature, and ultimately the stability of the chat is reliant on the business continuity of the organization. But on a day to day level, the reliability of the infrastructure isn’t changing according to how much business is being conducted, how popular aliexpress is. I also wouldn’t use aliexpress chat to conduct my personal relationships. If I made a friend on aliexpress somehow, I would move that to a more appropriate platform.

You’ve correctly compared crypto to the stock market. It is very apt as they share a lot of structural elements; only the stock market is older, more entrenched. My opinion: stock market is completely indefensible; get rid of it. Same premise different conclusion. :D I wouldn’t use a chat app that was relying on some penny stock for it’s technical viability.

further reading if this wasn’t enough:

Molly White follows and explains crypto et al; her website: Web3 is Going Just Great is updated frequently. If you are a podcast weirdo like me, she appears on them from time to time, search through your app.

boooooo crypto yuck

If you want to host your own github-type server, there is no need to demean yourself by even going near crypto scams. try any of these https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#software-development---project-management

there are also various instances of these softwares available if you prefer to sign up to someone else’s server than DIYing.

Thanks, great answer!

I couldn’t possibly obtain access to this software any way except through the employer. They only sell it to people in the industry and it’s too niche to pirate. It also only works in context of other stuff that would be impossible to reproduce.

I will think on it… I don’t even know who would be able to make a decision like that on behalf of the employer and since it’s unlikely it has ever come up before probably nobody does. I’d probably end up sitting in front of the Big Boss trying to explain what open source is and why I am spending their time on it and why a license means anything.

thanks I will read that!

my industry is so unaware of this sort of thing that it would literally never occur to anyone to include it in a contract or even policies. i’ve never heard of it being discussed.

I am not worried about personal legal problems. I intend to distribute for free to other people doing similar jobs who are not competitors. I guess the worst is that someone could make me change it or something? I would probably never be in a position to enforce anyway.

It is primarily an educational intervention for other users. So I don’t want to do it wrongly enough that it causes confusion.

I made a proto mail account recently and got the message about this.

But since i dont have a gmail account I cant do it. I think there was another one that was impractical also.

How do you prove the gmail thing? Without providing them your gmail info?

ah wonderful!

Your GNU/Linux is infected with 87 proprietary packages out of 5290 total installed.
Your Stallman Freedom Index is 98.36

boooooooooo!!!

Somehow my wifi drivers have become non-free? I am pretty certain I selected the free variant during install. Though come to think of it I wasn’t clear how assertive that option was. I do think there are free drivers for this… hmm.

As FYI for anyone reading this,you need to use -f to get a complete list. It only shows me about a dozen even though it says there 87! The information is carefully hidden.

This thread is hurting my brain

i live like this all the time. :/ wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. sorry to inflict my cognition on you but I appreciate your time :D

Yes it would be good to filter, or sort. Have a little icon or color code licenses according to configuration. I’m always annoyed when I discover I accidentally installed some proprietary application. I would always select FLOSS if something is available. And it usually is.

From what I’ve found, expac would probably be involved in in displaying this information; I couldn’t find any more direct way.

I did actually try to write this but I got stuck with my rudimentary skills. (user name is aspirational lol)

Don’t you think that in the context of this thread, ubuntu is more FLOSS than arch?

This post is made wishing that someone will tell me I am missing something here. But if I’m not then it seems like we have to give the point to ubuntu no? because you have a much better chance of obtaining a FLOSS system if you can at least have a way to select what you are installing.

Would be interesting if there was a script that could audit the licenses being used by all the installed applications. Then generate a report. I wonder what the arch-based community is rocking with. I guess they also have logs of what people download though not sure how centralized/available that info is.

I find it surprising that this data, which as you say is available is impossible to display except by going on one by one investigations. It is too time-consuming to be reasonably accomplished. Especially when you consider going up the dependency chain. I am hoping someone can point me to a reasonable way to go about it. If none exists I do feel like its just not a priority for the whole community. I couldn’t even find anything about this by scouring the usually-helpful arch wiki. I don’t find any gists or other scripts, no forum posts, nothing .

I have not been much of a distro-hopper, just using ubuntu/debian and now manjaro for years. Maybe I will switch. I strongly prefer the pacman situation to apt. I never looked into any of the other options though so maybe there is something suitable.

1. where does it say its open source? I do not see this anywhere. what is the stated license?
2. assuming it does say this somewhere, have you attempted to contact the developer to request the source code? for example here https://app.macoou.com/inquiry What was the result?

if yes to the above and no resolution:

• could try reporting via whatever google’s mechanism is; “flag as inappropriate” i guess
• could contact the SFC https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ they are the only org I am aware of that does this kind of thing as a general activity; I doubt they would be interested in this little hobby project-looking dev
• if the dev is using FLOSS code, for example which was published under GPL, and they are not complying with the license in redistribution, then you could notify the devs of the GPL code
• if you wish to pursue the matter independently you will need to find about about the dev’s local jurisdiction and how to carry out a legal action there. looks like that would be japan.

Codeberg us really new, i think like 2 years. Since covid for sure.

I did the emoji thing and even though I went through it correctly it did not proceed reliably. A problem with the client? Network issue? Who knows. Sometimes it works after a few attempts and other times not.

Encryption keys didn’t work because my password manager ended up with several keys all associated with the same account but I didn’t know what each one was for. (And did the keys each also have another password too? I might be thinking of something else.) They were for the account or the device or the conversation or the client or the session? And my friends were having similar issues; even when I get it set up someone else is having a problem.

I guess with all these things, it gets easier once you get going and stable. You can’t do the emoji thing without having a logged in client available. If everyone is bouncing around clients it’s a mess. There is nothing stable for any of us to join onto. I have used the occasional established matrix community and I don’t have these issues in that case. A lot of the complications come from the fact that we are trying to move together.

I’ve been with the FLOSS people and advocating for freedom and empowerment of the user for quite some time. It’s always a struggle. You always have to actively fight for your freedom. And if you want to stay in control of your data, you have to take matters into your own hands, to some degree. And that is some work. You have to learn concepts and gain a certain amount of literacy. The other option is to give up parts of your autonomy.

I mean the other other option would be to take care of each other and struggle collectively. I do not really think we get freedom one by one. I believe that to be in alignment with FLOSS.

Philosophically it’s kind of regressive to say that lost autonomy is deserved by people who fail to learn to the standards you think are reasonable in the areas you think they should know about. There is way too many things in the world we can’t all know about all of them.

I tried both of those. I don’t know if I got confused about which key was the right one or what but that didn’t work. I also didn’t really get what the key was for… it was attached to my account, or to the conversation…? Ended up with multiple keys and trying to guess what they are for. And since I’m not the only one involved and others were having issues it was just constant headaches.

The emoji thing I did and it also just seemed to fail. Like I would get through it and it’s still not working. Sometimes it works after a few tries another other times not.

I think that having a few people all trying to move together kinds of exacerbates all these issues to be fair. Because everyone is setting up multiple devices (maybe trying different clients on a given device) and trying things out. Normally you just wouldn’t be doing that much logging in. And none of us could really help the others out. If it was just one person joining an established network I don’t think it would be so annoying.

I am not one of these people who’s constantly surveilling RAM. But I look at it occasionally and I don’t really see anything unexpected in your screenshot. Maybe you could load up comparable non open source applications doing the same task and show the comparison? How does Safari or Edge do if you create a comparable session?

Right now on my linux computer, Firefox is using 1 GB of RAM. I have lots of tabs open so that’s typical. Sometimes it is higher. You are using logsec, zotero and libreoffice which suggests you are conducting research and writing. So I will guess you also have lots of tabs. And maybe browser extensions? The zotero web clipper that looks at every page you load to see if it is scrapeable? Maybe a markdown clipper doing same thing?.. And there is a good chance those other applications are working with a lot of data like your whole citation database, whatever you are writing etc. Do you have any of those zotero extensions that do all kinds of fancy stuff to the items you add? Not to mention Thunderbird and whatsapp. It is a lot of stuff for the computer to do.

In firefox (and presumably librewolf) you can go to about:processes to see exactly what is going on. This page with your thread is using 59 MB. Also you can go to about:unloads which has a rudimentary method to remove background tabs from memory. With only 8gb of RAM you should make a habit of this. You can also get extensions with more sophisticated unloading methods and that might be worthwhile for you.

All that said, I think an 8GB RAM machine is likely under-powered for your task. To be fair I am making assumptions based on the applications you have open. because when I have those sorts of applications open, I am typically being quite demanding of the computer. Opening documents, converting filetypes, scraping metadata, OCR, passing information between applications, interacting with databases, drafting documents, searching email archives… and lots of tabs.

I am really surprised that Apple would sell a laptop-type device with only 8gb in the modern era. I always think of them as expensive but good hardware (if you are using them the way Apple intends). If my assumptions about your work are correct, life will improve if you can scrape up some more RAM.

I had one of the early generation kindles for a while. There was a straighrtforward jailbreak to make it more sociable. The set it up with Calibre which was smooth once properly set up. There was (likely still is) a cool plugin that would get RSS feeds, generate an ebook and sync automatically over wifi per schedule. So then when I went out I would have everything to read fresh with zero effort. Which at the time was pretty impressive. Phone batteries sucked so they were not really viable for reading unless you could have them plugged in all the time. The kindle was magic in comparison.

Anyone who wants to dive into e readers should go to the E-Book Readers section of MobileRead Forums. There people are very serious about ebooks.

I was thinking of buying another ereader a couple years ago. I sort of assumed there would be some open-ish type options. But I didn’t find anything that suited me. I really liked eink and wish it was more widely used. I would love one of the phones with dual ekin/LCD displays.

All this to say I hope there is community uptake and participation in the project. I myself do not have a soldering iron and don’t really need an ereader. But I think it’s a cool contribution.

I’m not an expert on messengers

me neither! and I have not desire to become one. :D

It has been a big surprise to see how involved you have to get and how much complex understanding is required just to chat. And in my group of friends I am one of the more power user types. If I struggle to use something, then I can’t recommend it to others. So far everyone is really discouraged and I think it is reflecting quite badly on the concept of moving away from corporate/proprietary solutions. And FLOSS. It seems like just not viable for average users. :(

In this kind of situation we don’t have unlimited chances to try all different options one by one. because in requires a coordinated effort for multiple people to make accounts, set up devices, learn new software etc. People do not have time for that on demand. I think for most people, you have 1 shot at this kind of thing, if any. And if they are not FLOSS-type people they will be basing their opinions of all of FLOSS alternatives on the experience.

Patience is wearing thin. I think if the next thing we try doesn’t work, then it’ll be back to facebook/whatsapp/sms for the next 10 years. So I want to find a viable suggestion or be able to manage expectations and adapt to what is realistic.

I have seen it but never tried it. I kind of got the impression it was like a novelty/experimental thing rather than a general purpose serious application. Is that incorrect?

Does your email account get filled up with bazillions of messages? I once installed an app that “backed up” all my SMS to email; it made 1 email for every SMS. It was terribly annoying because when searching mail for something all these irrelevant scraps of old conversations ago clutter up.

Or do you just have a separate mail account to use on chat?