(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

Unga bunga.

The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I’m curious what’s changed.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.

The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.

Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.

Good to hear. For context, I made the switch late last year, so my experience may be outdated.

I use Koreader on Android (available on F-Droid or Google Play).

It works. Configuring fonts is a bit confusing — every time I start a new book that uses custom fonts, I need to remind myself how to override it so it uses my prefs. But aside from that, it does what I need. Displaying text is not rocket science, after all.

I used to like Librera, but I had to ditch it because its memory usage was out of control with very large files. Some of my epubs are hundreds of megabytes (insane, yes, but that’s reality) and Librera would lag for several seconds with every page turn. Android would kill it if I ever switched apps because it used so much memory. I had a great experience with it with “normal” ebooks though. It was just the big 'uns that caused issues.

Better yet, use borg to back up. Managing your own tars is a burden. Borg does duduplication, encryption, compression, and incrementals. It’s as easy to use as rsync but it’s a proper backup tool, rather than a syncing tool.

Not the only option, but it’s open source, and a lot of hosts support it directly. Also works great for local backups to external media. Check out Vorta if you want a GUI.

Just wail til they become AI-generated-JavaScript-only shops. They’re gonna be vibing like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.

I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!

Honestly, I’m amazed how long it’s taken Microsoft to run GitHub into the ground. But let’s be real: enshittification is inevitable. This is Microsoft we’re talking about.

The best time to migrate away from GitHub was 2018. The second-best time is today.

It would be like taking your compiled machine code and editing it by hand because your compiler sucks.

Just use the right tool from the start.

SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.

Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.

do they just want everything to be crawled

Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.

The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.

Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.