Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don’t see that feature in the web interface.

I kind of wish those games didn’t confuse evolution with metamorphosis.

My gaming groups use Matrix, mainly for its stronger ecosystem and better long-term outlook. Despite developing slowly and not yet doing everything we want, Matrix is consistently improving and growing to serve more and more use cases. We’re willing to tolerate some inconveniences for now, in exchange for having the contact networks we build today continue to grow for decades to come. We use Mumble for voice chat, because it’s great, but might switch to MatrixRTC when Element Call leaves beta and becomes available in more Matrix clients.

I recently wrote up a few tips for Discord users considering Matrix.

If chat for a small gaming group was all I needed, I might choose XMPP. It’s arguably easier to administer than Matrix once you learn about all the XEPs required for comparable features (ease of admin is relevant to me because I self-host) and I would be able to guide a small group through client choices and setup. But I have found XMPP’s ecosystem to be a poor fit for large and diverse contact networks.

You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago.

No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.

I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it

When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)

In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.

One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links

I think I’ve seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don’t remember the status of that idea, and can’t find a relevant MSC at the moment.

This bot looks like it could be helpful for now:

https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink

https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink

I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly,

Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.

it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to,

When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.

I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.

I have deployed LiveLit for my homeserver

Do you mean LiveKit?

an always on chat channel.

I guess you must mean an always on voice channel. Thanks for clarifying.

(For what it’s worth, my groups are using Mumble for that purpose, alongside Matrix, at least until MatrixRTC brings its voice features up to speed.)

offer true jump in /jump out game chat.

What does this mean?

Ah, yes… the old “acting responsibly here won’t completely solve the problem, so we might as well act irresponsibly” argument.

Do we really want clickbait headlines in the science community?

The only purpose of law enforcement traffic cameras is to generate revenue.

More accurately, it’s to extract money from people.

Revenue “generation” normally comes from providing some kind of value to people willing to pay for it. What they’re doing here is more like automated extortion.

Tor Browser is a modified Firefox ESR, which is just Firefox with less frequent releases.

There’s a lot more here than what the headline captures, about Flock, their lies, and how their systems’ widespread use affects communities. It’s worth a watch.

But if the ENDS are both compromised…

If either end is compromised, then there is someone reading over the proverbial shoulder, and the conversation should be considered compromised.

Hopefully Linux Phone gets some love.

That would be a welcome step in the right direction, as would open hardware.

So just to confirm the answer to my question question: Its pointless to use encrypted messaging on an Android device?

Of course not. End-to-end encrypted messaging protects against eavesdroppers in transit. It’s an opaque envelope.

(Edit: Keep in mind that Google is not the only potential eavesdropper out there.)

What it cannot do is protect a message from someone reading over your shoulder when you write a message or open an envelope. On mainstream Android, that could be Google, if they choose to abuse their system-level access. On iOS, it could be Apple. And so on.

Those companies might be eavesdropping on sent/received messages already, either at a large scale or in a minority of cases, or regionally, or they might not be doing it at all… yet. But they have the capability. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that risk is acceptable.

Google has the capability to read everything that you can read on an Android phone, unless you have taken steps to remove all Google-controlled components that have system-level privileges. Last time I checked, this included Google Play Services, which are installed by default on most Android phones.

Note that messengers with end-to-end encryption, like Signal, cannot protect against an adversary with full access to your device.

This is part of why people de-Google their phones, which usually means replacing the entire OS with something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS.

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To be clear, this is not about EXIF data (which is its own problem).

Digital cameras can be fingerprinted from the images they produce, due to variations between pixels in any given sensor. If you’re concerned about an image being traced back to your camera, you might consider some post-processing before distributing it.

This is mostly true.

However, it’s worth noting that your home instance is uniquely positioned: it can see not only everything you send out into the fediverse, but also everything you read or subscribe to, so its privacy practices can still matter.

With that in mind, I suggest avoiding instances that run behind Cloudflare, which can see (and even change) every interaction you have with the instance.

You might also want to disable off-site images in your web browser (if you use Lemmy’s web interface) and prefer an instance with a large image cache, because loading images that are hosted on other instances will leak your reading habits to those instances.