I’ve sold a few things (games and electronics and such) on eBay within the last year without much hassle.

Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.

But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.

XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)

Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)

The ones I know of are not really masquerading, but rather, funding themselves and/or directly related services (often hosting) via convenient ways.

• Conversations.im (XMPP/Jabber client) is $8 on Google Play, free on F-Droid and is FOSS. Dev runs their own instance.
• OsmAnd+ costs money on Google Play, is free on F-Droid, provides hosting of gigabytes of map data.
• Beeper (bridges from popular chats to Matrix) costs money (subscription I believe), but can be set up on one’s own (I run two bridges on my chat server).

What I do dislike is companies overusing “Open” or “Free” in their own or their product names, with no implication of Free or Open Source software. Similar to slapping “engineer” on non-engineering roles or “manager” on non-managerial ones.

There are some mathematical models similar to a Voronoi diagram, which would make districts convex polygons.

With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be “red” (on paper)

A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as “a great place to raise a family”. From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:

1. The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).

2. The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other “traditional” values.

That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.

Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?

What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.

Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.

You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.

Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.

Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).

Worked pretty well for me in the past.

I’ve been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.

Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don’t really use it though).

I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don’t care and don’t want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.

It’s a Librem5 phone with cringe name and 100% markup, but it’s their own product nonetheless. I.e. it is not a generic Android with a custom skin and preinstalled apps like Trump Phone, Freedom Phone, or Quantum Internet box.

You can buy pretty much the same Librem5 assembled in China for ~$700. Take a look at Liberux Nexx Linux phone too (they are just staring out)

(Not sure what you’re calling racist here, appeal to “patriots”?)

Series plug-in hybrids that can run on battery (Chevy Volt, Honda Clarity, Prius 2024) are IMO better than both. They effectively operate like electric vehicles (regenerative braking and all), and one can drive them for months without burning gas. Their batteries are about five times smaller (~30-50mi range vs full EV’s ~250mi range), and thus lighter, and the gasoline engine is usually a small, efficient one (~40ish mpg on gas)