K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social That's not a stretch at all, actually! It's properly a federated model, though, not peer-to-peer. Way back when I started using TextSecure (as Signal was then known) this was indeed nominally the plan. But the lead developer Moxie moved away from it so that he could make breaking changes without disrupting traffic while some servers updated from an old, incompatible version.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social

Is there an architecture for how that would work? Signal runs on mainly mobile devices, which tend to lose connectivity and/or see their IP addresses change frequently. With a server, you can drop off a message and your buddy can retrieve it, and neither of you needs to be able to address the other directly. But once you remove the centralised server, you need some way to know where to send it.

@freemo @2ck That's diag(). You just multiply by the appropriately-shaped unity before Hadamard, i.e. for a column vector x and matrix A, diag(x)⋅A = (x⋅1ᵀ)∘A

@freemo This toy programming challenge never got any nibbles, but I did use linear algebra when I did it - maybe it would scratch that hankering for you?

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social I see, thanks!

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social Are there notable differences between quodverum, noagendasocial, and freespeechextremist? I mentally bin them together but there might be subtleties I'm not aware of.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

In the sense that if you visit a post from within QOTO, say, https://spinster.xyz/@TatsuyaIshida/posts/104158509568722634 you only see one reply (even if following the post author). But if you go to the Spinster site, there are more - it's just that any branch of the tree of replies is pruned where the author is a Spinster user you're *not* following.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins My main dissatisfaction with it is that I can (1) follow a user on such a site, (2) click on a post of his, and even after these two active, affirmative-consent things I have done, any reply-threads are cut off once another user I haven't followed comments (i.e. that comment and any children are suppressed). A QOTO user really can't be part of the conversation with even a silence in effect.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but would there be an obstacle to personally muting the server while leaving it unblocked on the account listed as site admin? Seems to be the best of both worlds - you get to ignore instances as you please, but you can still see the full context if someone reports me in a thread involving users from those instances.

@arteteco @freemo

Working now :)

Thanks very much!

@freemo Trying to set up videoconferencing leaves me with the message, "Nextcloud talk app not installed on the server, aborting"

So, for my part, the request for Jitsi stands, amended with Nextcloud Talk as an alternative.

@realcaseyrollins I'm always confused when I see an American comment on foreign politics using colour references. Labour red or Republican red?

I know #LinuxMint 20 is due to be released soon, which will obviate this issue, but today I figured out why 19.X versions based on Ubuntu 18.04 don't play MIDI files correctly. Turns out Fluidsynth has a bug (332) which results in it being unable to find the default soundfont. Since the default media player Rhythmbox relies on GStreamer, and GStreamer uses Fluidsynth to play MIDI files, this propogates down the dependency chain. This bug was fixed a while ago, but the version of Fluidsynth available on 18.04-derived platforms is rather old. The fix is to grab a newer Fluidsynth and its associated dependencies from the eoan or focal repositories.

@snow @design_RG this is implemented on the client side rather than the server side. I think that's okay given the short term use of mastodon - you're not likely to reply to a weeks-old post, so the interval between starting to compose a reply and sending it will rarely be long enough for you to have lost access to the original client. Attached pics are Tusky - if your client doesn't implement something equivalent, you probably want to send your feature requests to its maintainer instead.

@design_RG See this concept that I sketched in reply to @realcaseyrollins, looks doable if you have an always-on machine on which it can run:

@freemo Thanks, I'll try that. I can't tell if it will allow me to host meetings involving people who aren't members of the QOTO ecosystem, but I'll play around and see what's possible.

Hey @freemo, in light of the stay-at-home orders impacting so many people, do you think it would be practical to host a Jitsi instance?

@realcaseyrollins

In principle, that makes sense, but it doesn't come off that well in practice. Tell me I'm wrong (or to be diplomatic, say my *argument* is wrong) and I have to defend my position, but tell me you disagree and I'm not going to bother. I have no desire to spend any effort convincing a guy who's going to ignore what I say because "it's okay to disagree". Pointing out what I said that was wrong, on the other hand, is a strong signal that you were paying close attention to what I was saying, and I'll extend you the same courtesy.

(I guess you could do both and say, "I disagree because you were wrong," but that would seem to defeat your purpose).

@realcaseyrollins you could probably implement this as a mastodon client bot without messing with the server code itself.

Have it monitor the local timeline and pipe it to spamassassin. If a message scores too high (i.e. likely unwanted content), the bot can fire off a report. If you gave it mod privs, it could also silence the user or post pending a human mod looking at it.

@sptnkmmnt

Many Linux environments allow you to enter Unicode codepoints. On my machine, I:
1) key Control-Shift-U and release
2) type the hex for the character
3) press enter or space

The hex for Ω is 3A9. If your system works the same, you should see after each step:
1) u̲
2) u̲3̲a̲9̲
3) Ω