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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I’m very much with you.

    Never understood why Plex, a once open source fork of XBMC, was seen as a positive thing when they switched to the closed source, SaaS model.

    I also don’t understand the love for Tailscale when Wireguard exists.

    But, anyway, the same people who are reacting shocked to Plex can be shocked when Tailscale does the same.

    They’ll probably hop on Discord to vent their frustrations before there, too, they find themselves spurred by a company with no clear plan on monetization finding out that offering hosted services at a yearly loss can only exist for so long.

    Open source isn’t just about idealogy, it’s about longevity for software that can’t be clearly monetized - harken back to “amazing” services like Keybase that worked great for a few years until their VCs started asking for return of investment.

    Use the shit that was made for you, not to exploit you. And if that shit isn’t up to your standard, learn to contribute, or just enjoy the corporate graveyard in which you choose to live.

    (so sorry for the pseudo-unhinged rant, but between the recent Win11, Discord controversies - and now, this - I’m just fed up with all the shocked_pikachu.jpg posts I’m seeing on Lemmy)


  • From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the “voice/video calls as persistent rooms” feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner[1] as they work on Element Call.

    Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they’ve pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.

    So, TL;DR you probably won’t see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they’re not being funded.

    So that means, right now:

    • No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
    • No push-to-talk or “game friendly” settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)

    Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it’s super lightweight.

    ~[1] It’s not really on the backburner so much as it’s something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem. There is an experimental “video rooms” feature, but that really isn’t the same as a native, persistent voice-only room.~


  • As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:

    1. Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
    2. If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.

    For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.

    As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.

    So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.

    Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)

    Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.