To paint a more complete picture, PrivacyGuides.org comes from the subreddit of the same name. When I was last there (about a year ago) some of the people behind that subreddit had a habit of pushing misguided views as if they were facts, and did so with an air of authority that came from their control of the subreddit and the site.

My point is not to support either group, but just a warning: They are not “the privacy community”. Please take their advice with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it is not so good.

!business@lemmy.world

I believe Matrix has this in beta, sometimes referred to as MatrixRTC or Element Call.

Edit: Recent status update here:

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-native-matrix-group-voip-video-matrixrtc

I feel like matrix is a better alternative, but yeah it’s not ready yet since it lacks the call features discord has.

I haven’t used Discord in years. What call features are you referring to?

!apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world

!iphone@lemmy.world

!business@lemmy.world

IMHO, this community should be about technology. Novel inventions. Interesting or creative applications. Discoveries. Dangers, advances, impacts, experiments, tutorials, etc.

Instead, it’s overrun with stock market and business news having no more to do with technology than CEOs of wood pulp factories have to do with literature.

I wish Rule 2 was phrased in a way that clearly excludes the latter, and enforced.

Some of us do, but that doesn’t remove the unending flood of business news and corporate drama that we don’t want in our feeds, so it doesn’t solve the problem.

I think it has to be focused on software or hardware as a rule.

I don’t. Those fields are but small slivers in the realm of technology, and they’re not even particularly novel any more. A community dedicated to one or both of them might make sense, but there’s no reason to let them dominate the technology community.

News about stocks, CEOs, rebranding etc should not be allowed.

I agree with you there.

SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:

• It is funded by venture capital, which calls into question its longevity, and if it does manage to stick around, suggests that it will be leveraged to exploit people once the user base is large enough.
• Its queue servers delete messages if they are not delivered within a certain time frame (21 days by default). Good luck if you take a vacation off-grid for a few weeks.
• No multi-device support. (This means a single account accessed concurrently from multiple independent devices.) The closest it comes is locally tethering a mobile device to a computer.
• Establishing new contacts requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is not always convenient.
• No support for group calls.

I look forward to seeing how its design decisions develop in the coming years, but outside of a few niche use cases, it is not a suitable replacement for Matrix or Signal.

We tried that approach with leaded gasoline and paint, asbestos building materials, cigarettes, and a variety of other things over the past several generations. They didn’t kill the entire world population, but things didn’t turn out so well for the people who waited for definitive studies. Good luck with your gamble.

We’ve reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions’ share of feature testing and development,

Most of the web standards driven by Chromium are not particularly beneficial to the web, but are beneficial to Google. This is not an accident. It is how Google has made itself gatekeeper of the web while maintaining the facade of an open and standards-compliant browser.

This is not a good thing. Community-focused projects investing time and money into supporting it is a bit like digging one’s own grave.

Microsoft’s approach to their OS seems to be, “constantly add more stuff that relatively few people want or need, and require everyone to buy new hardware to support it.” The resulting upgrade cycle is needlessly wasteful of people’s money and harmful to the environment.

Meanwhile, the Linux ecosystem is more like, “make new stuff available, but optional, and constantly optimize things to be more efficient.”

I was still gaming and developing software on a ten-year-old computer (with a somewhat newer GPU) until very recently. I’ll let you guess which OS I was using.

“Oxygen.”

I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable

This is important, and for some media, it should be more often than that.

People forget that flash memory uses electrical charge to store data. It’s not durable. If left unpowered for too long, that data will get corrupted. A failure might not even be visible without examining every bit of every file.

Keep backups. Include recovery data (e.g. PAR2). Store them on multiple media. Keep them well-maintained (e.g. give flash drives power). Mind their environment. Copy them to new storage devices before the old ones become obsolete.

It’s funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.