Hacker News: leetnewb

New comment by leetnewb in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

leetnewb — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:53:25 +0000

Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, governance, and federation. In contrast, I would argue xmpp covers a strong subset of commonly used discord features well enough to provide the chat/social component to many existing communities.

New comment by leetnewb in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

leetnewb — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:10:09 +0000

Isn't this the sort of moment that pushes users off of Discord into alternatives? Maybe pragmatic/opportunistic users should establish new channels or servers and advertise them when the shoe drops on Discord.

New comment by leetnewb in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

leetnewb — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:06:53 +0000

Hasn't social media like HN, Reddit, fediverse, etc. become the real clearinghouse of information about those sorts of questions? I can see how it would be nice for xmpp.org to be an authoritative source of truth, but user response/consensus seems more relevant these days, at least to me.

New comment by leetnewb in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

leetnewb — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:03:31 +0000

In addition to Dino, you could use movim as a PWA.

New comment by leetnewb in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"

leetnewb — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:03:18 +0000

Probably not exclusive to open source, but at least some projects are running into issues publishing to the Play Store with little/no explanation.

New comment by leetnewb in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

leetnewb — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 11:53:10 +0000

I have an x86 HP tablet that dual boots Windows 11 and Linux. I don't have specific numbers, but battery life is better on the Linux side.

New comment by leetnewb in "XMPP and Metadata"

leetnewb — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:45:03 +0000

Funding and centralization.

Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.

xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.

There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.

I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.

New comment by leetnewb in "Why We Abandoned Matrix (2024)"

leetnewb — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:50:26 +0000

What do you think of a system like Delta Chat built on top?

New comment by leetnewb in "Cassette tapes are making a comeback?"

leetnewb — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:43:39 +0000

From what I remember, exact audio copy could not complete the rip on the final track or two.

New comment by leetnewb in "Cassette tapes are making a comeback?"

leetnewb — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:08:28 +0000

I bought a new album on CD a couple of years ago. Badly scratched straight out of the case. Guess that wasn't really the right comparison though.

New comment by leetnewb in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

leetnewb — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 06:04:35 +0000

There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.

New comment by leetnewb in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

leetnewb — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 06:01:08 +0000

Not just moving very fast. Mobile is bigger than desktop, Google owns the platform, defaults probably matter more, and control is tighter.

New comment by leetnewb in "Ozempic does not slow Alzheimer's, study finds"

leetnewb — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 08:54:51 +0000

T2D is not limited to "old, fat overeaters".

New comment by leetnewb in "Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory"

leetnewb — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:59:39 +0000

One thing I would note on the client side of xmpp - there does seem to be a lot of work happening under the surface. Snikket is working on an SDK to streamline modern client development. There are a couple of alpha stage clients written on it already, and maturatoin of the SDK should lower the bar for pushing clients forward.

Also independently, Movim keeps advancing and Libervia is doing a ton of cool work. I'm sure I am missing others.

New comment by leetnewb in "The recently lost file upload feature in the Nextcloud app for Android"

leetnewb — Thu, 15 May 2025 08:15:54 +0000

From my reading, the new API seems like a move in the right direction. But either way, Google is asking Nextcloud to silently break backup/sync-ing until users grant permission, and my guess is that many users won't notice until they discover data loss - the damage to trust and brand would be substantial. And I don't think it is fair for Google to demand in this case when the consequences are almost entirely felt by the users.

New comment by leetnewb in "Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel"

leetnewb — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 18:51:24 +0000

People in the Symfony camp want less magic. There is also a lot of activity around Tempest.

New comment by leetnewb in "Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel"

leetnewb — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 11:30:57 +0000

Laravel seems to get a lot of hate from within the PHP community as well. I suppose every framework in use has its detractors.

New comment by leetnewb in "The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome"

leetnewb — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 10:14:10 +0000

I think this could be a double edged sword. Slowing down new browser feature/"standards" could allow browser competition, yes. On the other hand, people don't explicitly need a web browser in 2025 like they did in 2015 - many operate mobile-only. Let's say browser features additions fall drastically behind native mobile, and content publishers progressively limit access to native clients only. The web browser market might be more free/open/competitive, but it doesn't mean much if the market just moves beyond the web.

Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?

New comment by leetnewb in "The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome"

leetnewb — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:54:17 +0000

I don't think those are either/or scenarios.

New comment by leetnewb in "An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox"

leetnewb — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 07:38:22 +0000

Firefox can't compete with iOS or Android for what should be obvious reasons - it is structurally impossible. Also, the competing browsers are way better today than in Firefox's heyday. There is very little reason to use Firefox today outside of ideological.