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.

AFAIK the problem with resin printing is vapors, not particles. A respirator may help, but it is no substitute for proper ventilation.

The only reason Threads has 30 million users right off the bat is because they leveraged their monopoly position with Instagram to push their users to Threads. It is absolutely no different from how Microsoft leveraged their monopoly position with Windows to push their users to Internet Explorer in the 90s.

Facebook has a long history of buying out any firm which poses the threat of competition. Peter Theil, the literal fucking vampire who sits on their board, has made very blunt remarks about this. They bought out Instagram and WhatsApp for this very reason. Make no mistake. To Facebook, the Fediverse is competition. Every minute spent on Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and other AGPL federated platforms is a minute lost from the commercial attention economy. Every user who makes the switch is a user which isn’t feeding them a steady stream of marketing data. Every user who makes the switch is lost ad revenue.

Facebook cannot buy the Fediverse the same way they bought Instagram. Instead, they will join it and apply incredible pressure to influence it in directions which are not harmful to their bottom line, and once the threat is neutralized, they will drop it like a hot turd. It could’t be any more obvious what their intentions are, but a lot of the tech bro dipshits still think a “wait and see” approach is warranted, including Eugen (initial creator of Mastodon) himself.

This guy made a blog post this morning saying that Mastodon is different from XMPP. XMPP was only used by a bunch of nerds and that’s why it died. It had nothing to do with Google employing the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy. Meanwhile like 75% of people on Mastodon have their fucking Linux distro in their bio (gentoo gang, btw).

We might have gotten lucky with a handful of these “Benevolent Dictators For Life,” but only WE can create a network which is liberating and empowering. Nobody is going to deliver it for us.

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.