Great article. One thing that stood out to me was Texas having the highest state limit for noise level at 85 decibels. That seems insane to me.

I haven’t tested it, but did you look at Damselfly? The documentation seems to suggest you can do it: https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly/blob/master/docs/Multi-user.md

https://damselfly.info/

It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn’t really explain Google’s changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.

Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub

Hard to argue with Intel, but I run one of the asrock j3455 boards (with a full PCIe slot and 2 SATA ports) and powershell is reporting OSTotalVisibleMemorySize of 12228504.

Pretty sure I am running a j3455 with 12GB.

edit> Confirmed

Random thoughts…

Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.

Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.

China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).

There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.

opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon

I switched. Not happy about it and will continue to consider it a factor in my next, but that will be years from now and I’m sure the list will be even smaller.

I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!

Amazon is moving away from Android. This move isn’t exactly surprising. It is disappointing though, imo. From my limited testing, I was able to side load an xmpp app on Android and message, voice call, video call seamlessly. In theory, the ability for developers of some types of apps to target Android and reach Windows without writing a touch of Windows-specific or accommodating code was a huge opportunity for open source developers to effortlessly reach cross-platform audiences.

There isn’t off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn’t to say there isn’t frivolous spending there - I have no idea.

Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.

Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn’t a good platform to deliver advertising through.

My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.

I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper’s campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.

Worth mentioning that most modern clients support omemo at this stage.

Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.

My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.

I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.

I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?

No major issues with the upgrade to 14, yet. On a pixel 7a. Not that I spend much time in the play store, but that design has become less pleasant over time.

I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.

Let’s say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.

Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I’ve used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn’t create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia’s xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.