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.

this place isn’t what it used to be

the above comment was written by a person who’s lack of understanding of consent suggests they are almost certainly guilty of sex crimes.

deleted by creator

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.

I guess it would be too much to get a set of metronomes eh.

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.

whatever gets em there

It’s written in a messy way but I actually read it the opposite way.

There is a non insignificant portion of the gun community who, when presented with the concept of “everybody should be taught gun safety, because it’s a right granted to us” relating specifically to liberals (go figure) happen to get really fucking antsy at the thought of people they don’t like owning guns.

I think what @KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com meant was that the 2A people don’t seem to be very interested in defending gun rights for people outside their circles. I don’t know if I’d use liberals as the example here. I think Black people would be far more salient.

Did the NRA Support a 1967 ‘Open Carry’ Ban in California? | Snopes.com

While 1967 was a long time ago, the “antsiness” has remained. How often do you hear of these people doing anything to defend the people who are the primary targets of anti gun laws? Which is, by a large margin, Black and other racialized people.

I heard an interview with some Public Defenders who had submitted an amicus brief in relation to a guns rights case on the basis that even though the actual case was stupid, changing the law would materially improve the lives of overincarcerted communities. I thought it was on 5-4 podcast in follow up to the first ep that covered the case in a less friendly way: New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. I don’t find the subsequent ep where they had the PDs on for an interview… maybe it was taken down.

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.

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.

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

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 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’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.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/5757510 ???

Well I will say that I totally didn’t predict crypto would pop up in this thread. Curious.

getsession.org > Technicals > Documentation > Overview

In exchange for maintaining reliable and trustworthy blockchain nodes, node operators periodically receive rewards in the form of $OXEN tokens.

It sounds like what it is saying is that people who host the remote servers are paid in this crypto currency for the service. Cryptocurrency is mainly useful for laundering money and scamming people. I am having a hard time understanding (a) how there is enough demand for this niche chat service that it should play a major role in their little economy, and (b) where the usefulness of this crypto (e.g. value in fiat so you can do anything with it) could possible some in. Other than scams, laundering etc.

After that comes

It’s so… weird… to have all this as the introductory docs. Not a troubleshooting guide or dependency info but all this crazy scam BS.

I see that you are saying this crypto stuff doesn’t intrude on the app. Like you are not getting popups trying to scam you; OK. And you think the app is really good. Can the server/app could be de coupled from all this other stuff? Could it be run independently of this fake economy? That’s what I don’t understand about this “not crypto” blockchain stuff. If it’s not crypto, why is the documentation all about crypto instead of normal user or dev manual?

I appreciate the time to answer the question. But I have to be honest this feels icky. Don’t you get the feeling something sleazy is going on? At any rate when these people get caught or cash out won’t everything vanish?

so if you click documentation on the session website it brings you to this page https://docs.oxen.io/oxen-docs/products-built-on-oxen/session

I am seeing the words “blockchain”, “economics”, “token”, “instant transactions”… And one click to NFT crypto stuff.

I remember hearing that blockchain tech could be used for stuff other than scams but it is used for scams a lot and this app seems to be related to scam-type activity.

Can someone provide any insight?

That is a great chart. Do you think it’s up to date? One issue I had was trying to discern very old from current materials.

Thanks, we don’t need high level security, just a reasonable modern attempt at it. Due diligence. I had a hard time understanding what kind of encryption we “should” use.

I tried SchildiChat and I liked it except for all the problems that seems inherent to matrix.