(Huh? Why is this showing up twice in this community’s list of posts? Did I do something that caused it to be that way? If so, sorry, I didn’t intend to do that!)
Well, although usually it’s a good idea to read the original post first, in this instance the original post is at best misleading because it refers to Plasma as an “operating system” rather than a desktop environment.
(Or for those who want to use even more precise terminology: its full name is either “Plasma Desktop” or “KDE Plasma Desktop”, because KDE also has some non-desktop environments such as Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen… none of which are as popular as Plasma Desktop, though, so usually Plasma Desktop is colloquially called just “Plasma”.)
There’s also a newer federated chat (plus VoIP signalling) protocol called Matrix that’s worth a look.
One feature that sets it apart from XMPP is its support for multi-client synchronization: if you log into the same user account from multiple clients (e.g. where one of them is a desktop app and another one is a smartphone app), your chat history will be synchronized across them. Or as one of the Matrix developers put it: “XMPP is all about message passing, whereas Matrix is all about state synchronisation”.
On the downside, though: although the Matrix protocol is designed to support presence-status, it seems that many (?) of the public Matrix homeservers have that feature disabled for performance reasons.
Hello. I’m someone who’s previously/currently had accounts with 2 other nonprofit Unix shell account providers similar to SDF since approximately 1996/1997, and first found out about SDF maybe 10 years later while looking for other email-account-provider options. Then, last year, I saw SDF’s Mastodon instance listed on joinmastodon.org
, and decided to sign up for an account there… which eventually (thanks to the email announcement that was sent to users registered there) led me to this Lemmy instance.
I suppose the main reason why I decided to sign up here is out of hope that ActivityPub/Fediverse will become similar to, but better than, the various types of discussion forum systems (Usenet/NNTP, mailing lists, mailing list archivers like Pipermail & MHonArc, phpBB/vBulletin-style web forums) that were popular in the '90s and '00s. Personal blogging/microblogging systems (Mastodon, etc.) aren’t an adequate replacement for newsgroups/forums, as far as I’m concerned; to paraphrase something I read elsewhere, too much of so-called social media is mostly about “look at me”, as opposed to “look at this” (i.e. organized by topic).
(By the way: Lemmy currently seems to have some sort of incompatibility problem with QtWebEngine and/or the Falkon web browser. I initially tried to post this from Falkon, but the “Preview” and “Post” buttons were disabled even after typing some text, so I ended up posting this from Firefox instead.)
Sorry about that; I’m kind of new to Lemmy in general, e.g. I’m not sure offhand what my exact post-count & comment-count were before today, but probably both of them were in the single-digits. So, at the time I posted these, I wasn’t sure about what users’ etiquette/expectations for how frequenly one should/shouldn’t post tend to be like.
I’ll keep in mind that I shouldn’t post so many links all in a row in the future, and especially avoid posting many songs by the exact same band all in a row (which I suspect is the reason why the first several that I posted today got some downvotes).