Funny because the UK colonized half the fucking planet just for tea and curry.

You’re very lucky. I lived 60 miles south of Seattle, 30 miles southwest of Tacoma, and was able to get a single channel with an antenna because my city was in a valley surrounded by mountainous terrain and so the broadcast signals from the TV towers were all blocked by the terrain. No local stations, no local towers. Seattle actually has plenty of stations, but unless you’re in the right areas, they’re nearly impossible to access.

I also worked in local television for a long time in the early 2000s and 3 out of 4 of the stations I worked at no longer exist and there are fewer and fewer rural stations, so unless you live in the big city or unless you’re in a very flat area where the big city signal can get to you, you’re shit out of luck.

Yes, a matrix server is an “instance” of matrix on the larger federated service.

Discord calling their different channels “servers” was really unhelpful because they were never servers to begin with.

Thought it was pretty clear. Matrix sucks.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

I mean I wouldn’t say the original message was clear at all that you as an individual have had bad experiences. There are also people who may have things to say from a development standpoint beyond just “I have personally had bad experiences with it.” So, sorry you had bad experiences, but to be perfectly clear “LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL” doesn’t actually tell anyone anything at all. Thanks, however, for the clarification. I haven’t had issues like that with Matrix in a long time now, but I’ve been using it off-and-on since 2018-ish.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

Compelling argument.

That’s really not something to be proud of.

I suppose XMPP’s 27 years of development is embarrassing as well?

Or are you just shitposting without any concrete arguments for what you’re saying? I won’t argue well thought out arguments, but this shit is just childish. You can do better, artyom.

Personal opinion, Discord was already enshittifying before they did an IPO, like at least 6 years ago or more. The IPO just gave them an excuse to speed up the process.

Exactly this, that’s a client quirk, probably Element in this case.

Exactly, this isn’t even a new problem… it just keeps happening.

As someone who has been advocating for the use of the federated Matrix protocol for a long, long time now, the proliferation of new, competing options actually is frustrating to me. Technically Matrix is actually already fleshed out very well, has several different clients, and even has Thunderbird support so if you’re already using Thunderbird you don’t even need a separate client.

The beginnings of Matrix go back as far as 2014 so it honest has at this point 12 years of development behind it. I know Matrix has it’s issues, but it’s by far the most secure combined with being able to communicate with large groups of people via federation. There’s definitely slightly more secure options, because they lack federation (and thus don’t leak metadata), but I personally am ambivalent about them because some of them have a kind of crypto-bro feel to the companies behind them and I’m skeptical they won’t go down a path similar to Discord while Matrix on the other hand has been slowly but surely leveraging itself into a position of secure government communications all over Europe. So, to me, Matrix already has a game plan for staying relevant and staying solvent, while things like SimpleX or Stoat I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the enshittification to begin

Open source bona-fides are great and all, but for a lot of these messengers, I absolutely think not enough discussion is made regarding their financial plans to stay afloat whereas the reality is that while Matrix doesn’t exactly have money coming out their ears, they have a slow, steady gameplan that is working out so far.

The whole reason everyone moved to Discord was because it was a centralized place and since Discord needed to pay for it’s servers, it had to find a way to finance that, and enshittification naturally happened. I think it would be foolish to pretend that can’t happen again with several of the current alternatives.

(see: A/C chargers, character encoding, instant messaging, etc.)

I’d actually love a reason to try Ansible and get used to it. So if it’s well documented, maybe a good starter project.

I have actually looked at this one before but the main reason I hadn’t done it is no experience with Ansible. Would you say Ansible is easy enough to pick up just for rolling this out? I have a lot of networking experience, building docker compose files from scratch for projects, and am used to editing json and yml files. I have only set up a reverse proxy with caddy once and have never tried nginx although it seems more fully featured. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I also knoe of some good Ansible security hardening playbooks but once again just haven’t used Ansible so never rolled them out

I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.

Most underrated Coen Brothers film.

I don’t know if Verizon of AT&T offer these but T-Mobile used to have small cellular sites you could basically rent them to plug into your wired internet and it would piggyback off your internet to make a small cellular hotspot to give you good cell signal. I had one when I lived out in the boonies for a while.

EDIT: Looks like the ones T-Mobile used to offer are all End-of-Life and they don’t even want them back from customers because they were for 3G/4G and they’re moving all services to 5G.

https://tmo.report/2025/04/t-mobiles-infamous-cellspot-coverage-devices-are-now-end-of-life/

EDIT II: Looks like AT&T may offer some still though:

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1452148/

Also, depending on where you live its a pointless exercise. I ended up throwing mine away not because I didn’t want access to OTA television, but because I lived in a valley on the other side of mountains where all the broadcast antennae in Seattle are. So even being on the top floor of a building with my antenna as high as I could possibly mount it I still got exactly one channel total that came through and it was still glitchy a lot of the time. God the digital changeover ruined OTA broadcasts, because at least when you used to have weak signal you could tweak the antenna until the picture looked halfway decent, but no amount of tweaking fixes the digital glitching that happens from dropped packets.

Anyway, yeah, if you live in an unfortunately placed area, you need a 30 foot tall antennae pole on top of your building to even maybe have the opportunity to catch some broadcast channels. Stupid.

Let’s just cut the shit and admit that over-the-air broadcast television is effectively dead.

This is why Net Neutrality mattered, because the future isn’t in old tech (radio broadcast) being consumed by DRM in desperate plays to stay relevant and/or profitable.

The future was always in things like YouTube, Netflix, and other online content delivery services. Which is why strict regulation of Net Neutrality and strict regulation of such services was and continues to be so important.

No, the infrastructure isn’t “open” like broadcast airwaves, which technically anyone with a license and equipment can jump into using, whereas internet infrastructure is all privately owned wired networking. The fact that it is different isn’t an excuse for any and all governments to have just effectively given up on regulation of those spaces when they’re where the media-consuming public happen to be. That’s why we needed legislation of these things instead of a back and forth wankery of the FCC changing how the internet is classified over and over again in between warring political factions.

I can almost guarantee you that nobody under the age of 30 gives a singly flying fuck about having an antenna on a television. They’re probably watching more than half their media on their phone or tablet anyway.

The real reason that this kind of change is happening to over-the-air broadcasting is because it doesn’t have enough viewers, and by extension, enough advertising, to sustain it as a model anymore.

I think the loss of over-the-air programming isn’t the best thing, but I also think it’s stupid to keep holding on to this idea like it matters very much in 2026 where if you asked a kid in their twenties if they even knew what an antenna for a television was they’d probably go “what the fuck are you even talking about?”

But I mean we can’t even regulate shit like paid political speech online needing to say that it is paid political speech, so fat chance of any useful legislation coming anytime soon. US government in particular has been broken as fuck for three decades.

I mean, arguably, that’s what sex workers say, too. That you’re paying for their time and that anything that happens is a choice between two consenting adults. They’re getting paid for their time and sometimes sex just happens during that time.

Boss gets a dollar, I get a dime
That’s why I bang my wife on company time