Luckily, the DMA has a heap of requirements around what their messaging interoperability will have do. For one thing, it will enforce the providers to not downgrade any encryption along the way, so FB etc will have to handle messages without them being decrypted first. There are some great videos that the matrix foundation put on their YouTube channel of talks that go over much of this.
Most of that extra stuff is there to handle user contact privacy and security with the bridges, which is fair. I don’t have any interest in self hosting beepers full setup, I want to get the functionality of multiple messaging services in one client - which I have, with my self-hosted matrix instance and the bridges they help develop and maintain.
I wish all of it was open source, but I did feel it necessary to head off comments that imply that the entire thing is closed source. Their implementation around dynamic servers and isolated containers spinning up isn’t really the bit that seems relevant regarding user privacy with regards to data scraping or anything. There are a lot of comments in here implying it’s fully proprietary, but there’s a lot more nuance to it than that, as you point out.
Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.
Yeah, I should have clarified that. Hopefully the EU regulation regarding messaging interoperability removes this (currently unavoidable) flaw.
This is using matrix. You can even connect to it from any matrix client.
You can use any matrix client with beeper according to their FAQ. It’s frustrating that they forked element and kept the source code closed, but it is Apache 2.0, so it’s not against the licence terms.
The bridges are all open source, and they use matrix synapse as their server installation - though their client is a closed source fork of element with changes. You can use any matrix client to connect to it, and they say it’s a standard synapse setup.
If privacy is a concern, bringing your own client should remove that concern as the rest is open source. It’s also e2e encrypted, as any matrix server is.
I self host my own matrix homeserver with bridges set up using their code. The only bit of their stack I can’t use is the client. I don’t like that that’s closed source, that’s frustrating.
Edit: while writing this two more people made the same comment. Sorry!
I’ve seen a couple of people mention this bug. I’ll check if there’s an issue in their bugtracker for it.
OK, I’ve just realised something new - images pulled from websites as thumbnails are uploaded to the server and appear to be basically full sized, i.e.:
https://agora.nop.chat/pictrs/image/59cfdd9c-2f69-4e8d-8afc-6fbc0c1cca87.jpeg
This image is on my server, but it’s just pulled from the website as a thumbnail. This doesn’t seem to be super consistent in how it’s handled - I’m continuing to look at what’s causing it and why it doesn’t seem to happen all the time.
EDIT: Seems like there’s more on there than I expected. Gonna continue digging.
Yep, OpenMW is totally playable. There’s also a multiplayer-enabled version of it around, which works surprisingly well.
Are they thumbnails? If not, perhaps this is configurable… I’ll check out my own images folder and see if it’s pulling them in, but it definitely shows the remote url for images when I’m viewing them on my instance.
As far as I can see, images aren’t federated, only a link to the image.
My understanding is that images don’t federate by default and you’ll load the image from whichever server it was uploaded to initially. Uploading an image here in the comment certainly does that:
I’m going to go find an example on an image post
The only good implement is the Zelda ToTK gacha machines. All the fun of gacha with none of the monetary expense!
Thanks for the link, looks like they had the same idea.
I need to do some experiments to find out what happens if a bot is tagged in a community they’re not subbed to. It may be that this is exactly what I can do - it’d be a request by a user, then the mod can ban it if they want. I don’t know whether I can do something where only a mod can invite, I’ll have to see if there’s anything that might help there
Personally, I’ve been thinking about bots, but I plan to run them on my own instance or their own dedicated instance. That way, they don’t add any load at all with their interactions, and only their comments are synced to other instances. That also makes it easy for whole instances or communities to kick them if they don’t want them there.
Luckily, there’s a checkbox in the profile that can be enabled to mark an account as a bot
I was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that’d make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like !bgg@bot.pls or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It’d keep it small enough to call, and make sure they’re always 100% intentional.
This is mainly because I don’t want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I’ve seen too many people annoyed at the “natural response” bots that pop in all the time on reddit.
If they’re on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don’t want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. I found the loot in 3 to be so dispensable so quickly that I never felt like I knew what I had equipped, and the visuals really put me off.
I’m picking up D2: resurrected when it next goes on sale, and I’m going to play through all over again, and really take my time. Once I’m done with that I’ll see where D4 landed.
You can use any matrix client you want with it. The closed source one is just making bridging more straightward and adding some little quality of life features.