Hexbear enjoyer, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades
Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.
He/Him
On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).
You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).
In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.
Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.
X11 used to require very cumbersome MANUAL configuration, where you would specify the exact parameters of your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. If you accidentally ended up overclocking your monitor it would melt. For at least a decade, it has been able to run with no configuration file at all, but in the 90s/early 2000s you had to produce a unique >75 line xorg.conf file for your specific hardware.
Facebook launched in 2004, 19 years ago, and bears more responsibility than just about any organization in Silicon Valley for the proliferation of abusive, invasive, proprietary, walled garden social media platforms. They function as an integral pillar of the state’s mass surveillance and propaganda operations. They have been complicit in many pogroms, including a genocide in Myanmar.
I assure you, they haven’t suddenly had a change of heart. They have a long history of acquiring their competitors and rolling them into their own private corporate infrastructure. If they intend to make a move on the Fediverse, there is no reason to believe their intent is any different than what their corporate history demonstrates. If they have their way, the Fediverse will end up no different than Instagram or WhatsApp.
The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.
Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.
Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.
For the love of god, listen to some Citations Needed and stop self-congratilating your media literacy because some fucking dork with a website tells you the New York Times and Washington Post aren’t biased.