Notices by Tomas SA2TMS (tomas@social.umeahackerspace.se), page 74

So, Matrix is dying. The server is too heavy to run, the protocol is mismanaged , and two of the biggest homeservers (tchncs and weho.st) have closed registrations. Another, disroot, is considering shutting down their HS. At this point, an alternative needs to show up, and soon.

The last 10 years of development in computers were a mistake. Maybe longer.

Instead of making computers Do More, or making them Feel Faster, we've chased benchmarks, made them more reliant on remote servers, and made them less generally useful. We brought back the digital serfdom of the mainframe.

Just tried #brutaldon ( https://github.com/jfmcbrayer/brutaldon/ ) -- it's a lightweight Mastodon web frontend that doesn't require Javascript and so it supports Lynx, w3m etc. Or, it just works in Firefox and Chrome without using a bunch of RAM maybe? If you like the sound of these things: it does these things.

TIL it is not only possible to have a database where the database servers can't tell which records clients are accessing (this is called Private Information Retrieval and is already pretty cool)... not only that, but it's possible to do that while splitting the database across multiple servers in such a way that the servers can't learn anything about any data in the database! Also you can efficiently identify servers that give you wrong answers, and tolerate faults. https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/orpir-usenix.pdf