Why stop at Windows? There is so much other Microsoft crap to ditch.

Ungoogled*

Or XMPP or IRC or Mumble …all of which have clients that will consume less resources on your machine

I mean we already had the universal protocol last decade in an extensible markup language, but the next generation decided we needed to rewrite everything in a JSON schema that isn’t as easy to extend as XMPP. It’s federated/decentralized, has many chat clients, some social media + community managing platforms (Movim & Libervia), used for video conferencing (Jitsi & Zoom), negotiation matchmaking for games (most of them), displaying friend roster status updates (Nintendo, & many other systems). This would have (& can still be) the dream instead of needing to reinvent everything.

Worth reading: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

OAuth or SSO is not the same as communicating over the same protocol. You can also log in with Google, Facebook, Apple, GitLab, Microsoft GitHub, & others on different platforms as SSO options… clearly these are not the Fediverse.

Being federated isn’t the same as living in the same Fediverse. You can upvote a Lemmy post from Mastodon since they both use ActivityPub but you can’t do that with a Matrix account. There are a couple of different ActivityPub-like generalized protocols out there, but none of them are near the size of ActivityPub & Lemmy is ActivityPub so for all intents & purposes for this conversation the Fediverse here (& most places) is ActivityPub. Matrix is on an entirely different federated network & they aren’t related.

You can use its underlying ejabberd, Prosody, or other server for chat. Most modern clients offer OMEMO, OTR, PGP for client-side encryption (end-to-end implies the servers don’t/can’t do anything here)

Matrix isn’t ActivityPub ∴ not a part of the fediverse

Jitsi is built atop XMPP so you have a general purpose chat server already on the system.

Movim v0.28 released within the last 24 hours. It has a web UI (that is optimized for both large & small viewports), E2EE via OMEMO, OTR, or PGP (but users can choose native clients if they wish). With the NLNet funding they are extending to full video conferencing + compatibility with the Dino native GTK client. Subjectively, it looks pretty sharp for a web client. You can also use it to share ‘posts’ for announcements & public feed aggregation—something a group chat should never be used for (announcements & other long-term messages get lost in the black hole search can’t find & unreleated posts all around it with messy-to-follow threads since this sort of content isn’t supposed to be chat).

It’s not quite as easy as services.movim.enable = true for NixOS but the NixOS module isn’t far off once an XMPP server has been selected with optimized defaults beyond standard setup—& the option I would personally recommend for self-hosting as declarative config is easier to work with in the long run, but there are non-Nix options. Being PHP, it’s fairly performant as well as not being built on some space-wasting, RAM-sucking ‘eventual consistency’ model that will cost you out the ass (which is Matrix, by design). The front-end, being mostly vanilla JS, is not using some heavy, bloaty framework. This will meet all your needs & not require expensive hardware host even on an old laptop at home or part of a multi-purpose server (does not need dedicated hardware).

While the greater knowledge tells us the jack integration costs the manufacturer less than a greenback, the narrator buys @ 20× the price a dangling dongle whose DAC quality is an unknown. Strolling with cellular apparatus in hand, the narrator’s new phone tails are inserted—one side waving in the wind & the other causing a weird, uncomfortable cinch in the junction with 3.5mm jack. Additional stress is forced upon the singlar USB-C port. Who will last longer on this phone, port, battery, screen? “This is fine” he tells himself lifting the screen searching “best Bluetooth headphone 2024” just to see what’s out there—even tho his headphones have no performance issues & a replaceable, detachable cable already built to last.

Flimsy awkward adapters + having to choose between charging or audio? But they had matching earbuds with irreplaceable batteries to sell…

Embrace your forefather ALGOL: 🤚‍ and, && 👉 ∧

5a is EoL so no headphone jack for you. This is a nonstarter for portable devices to me.

Responding broadly to the thread of folks talking about userScripts & add-ons. This effort would be better put to getting folks to a different protocol where client modification & alternate clients are the norm.

Why put the effort into such a hostile service?

I literally used to say this last decade, but as I grew experienced with more languages/paradigms/systems, it became 3rd best, then 4th, until I realized it actually not really great at anything other than there is an large ecosystem around it (wildly varying in quality). To some that might be enough, & going outside what you know isn’t typically the most wise thing to do, but it’s not particularly simple, or readble, or performance, or composable, or offering great patterns. Anything that used Python in Nixpkgs tend to be the most unreliable software for actually building & using.

This is so true & unfortunately everyone keeps telling beginners to start at Python

Why folks always say this as if it won’t connect to your neighbor’s open WiFi? Some of these are being built with cellular access like those Nspresso machines—or LoRa—so you can’t just not connect it. These devices don’t need any network access.

I had to buy a washing machine recently. I asked if I could get one without the smart features (this was a half joke thinking there was no shot in hell, but at least I got to express disinterest). They looked in the back to find that they did have the previous model. They said it was basically the same but without the smart features—then they said it would still be under the same warranty & would cost me $150 less. I got real lucky that day—& the fact that I need a new TV has caused me dread knowing you basically can’t find ’em anymore.