Privacy is one part. The cost of joining & maintaining a server on the network is the other. Many servers have shut their doors due to expensive hosting. If you are lenient on how many messages need to actually be stored on the server for archives, self-hosting is now much more accessible which leads to a healthier, more decentralized network since more nodes can afford to join.

You can still creating your own archives in your clients or on your specific server via s2s communications, but Matrix has this as a network requirement for eventual consistency. You can’t have the “search all messages in the last 5 years” feature without eventual consistency—but this is the point I am trying to make: copying the Slack/Telegram/Discord model makes this a requirement to have in a decentralized sense which costs way too much. Step back & reassess if copying this model is the right call. We were fine last decade without this.

Drag can archive it locally just fine or on Drag’s own server if using a different protocol. Is it worth storing hundreds of thousands of messages & attachments that price out self-hosting & low-spec hosters & medium-sized communities on a budget? These storage costs add up quickly & without lots of nodes, the network is no longer federated but held by a few mega hosts like Matrix.org & a sprinkling of single-user hosts. I have seen many servers shut down due to costs. This tradeoff just isn’t worth it for a triving, decentralized platform (Mastodon suffers similar duplication issues).

Libraries are clearly communist… or anarchist… either way, I hate it!

Same reason it is weird to want a FOSS copy of the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in Matrix instead of realizing you don’t need or want the chat history to persist for eternity. Good thing you can choose a different protocol/service in these cases.

GIMP 3.0 RC1 will come very soon (this month) & offers a lot of missing features users expect like adjustment layers (I’ve been waiting a decade for this).

I ditched after CS6… immediately when they said it would go to subscription I installed darktable

I had it in my cart & went to double-check nothing changed about unlocking… happy I took a step back

Sony still welcomes unlocking without anything special—you get a headphone jack & microSD too.

ASUS did this recently & lost a lawsuit in the UK for lying to customers to say unlock servers were only temporarily down for a couple months (lol)

Microsoft is the same as the corporate Google overlord. Both entirely evil to the core.

You either create new calendars or you share meetings ad-hoc thru ICS files manually. This probably depends on the type of work you do tho. This would not affect me since I don’t need folks randomly scheduling meetings with me for this to be a thing—instead the “Are you free X?” conversation is quick & painless.

Why assume everyone else has Google?

This doesn’t have to be the case but developers have been chasing bloated fads/frameworks for the over a decade instead of being reasonable with their technology. Résumé-driven development…? YAGNI.

I mean most calendar apps like the default in LineageOS & ikhal aggregate calendars & have a simple selection + coloring for the two calendars. It isn’t rocket surgery.

You can break those up into private vs. public calendars

This is what CalDAV is for. We don’t need apps. We don’t need Calendly or Google Calendar or some BS.

I think you could make an argument about depth & shadows being more difficult with a black background but I would question your design if those were imperative to the design.

I wrote a whole post last year about how using #000 is often preferred. It’s incredibly annoying how hard it actually is to find themes that are optimized for OLED on desktop. Mobile is less bad but often, particularly in FOSS apps, black is an option.

npm, Inc. (a subsidiary of GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft)

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm

Use them reluctantly & push back against it until you can free yourself from them. Let folks know you are unhappy about it or powers at be will think everything is okay. Surely we can agree fundamentally that Microsoft should not be controlling these spaces as it does with the platform lock-in.

Microsoft products you can start saying no to: Windows, WSL, GitHub, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, Codespaces, Azure, npm, Teams, Outlook, Office, & LinkedIn.