toastal

I got locked out my seldom-used PayPal account a few years ago. They decided to arbitrarily remove Google Voice as an SMS 2FA option (I want to say TOTP wasn’t supported when I signed up). I went to find out who to contact about authentication issues, but support, chicken-&-egg-style, requires authentication—even for auth issues—with no support@ email. I used the worst-case-scenario support option of Twitter but that support team banned me for messaging them about auth. Since I couldn’t get back into my account + the sheer incompetence of the support system, I never used & refused to use PayPal ever since. I am happy that my country prefers cash transactions & I can’t believe in the past I used a major bank credit card + major corp digital payment option for almost all purchases. Long live cash (& Monero/Zcash).

My feeling is this is being written not just as a vent for ProcessOne adding a Matrix gateway to ejabberd but a warning to everyone thinking of setting up a trendy Matrix server or assuming enabling Matrix support will just be free. The eventual consistency model is expensive–for storage, for CPU/RAM, for client speed/sync–& everything it seems the Synapse & Dendrite servers are trying to do to speed it all up is in response of this likely fundamentally poor decision eventual consistency to ‘clone’ Slack/Telegram/Discord over allowing chat to be ephemeral & using forums for long-lived topics & Atom/RSS feeds for announcements.

Other countries hate the IRS & FCC too. It is quite difficult to open a foreign bank or crypto exchange account… if not just outright blocked all Americans from even trying.

Well Discord, Slack, & others are web tech too so it’s not like avoiding it is easy. If I have to use these services, I would prefer it be in the browser’s sandbox.

Even still, almost all debug, troubleshoot, pairing session I have done in the last 4 years have been done over Upterm or Tmate, which is much, much lighter on bandwidth & not crushed by video compression.

What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).

This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub

Any on your shortlist for picking up?

.NET is such a second-class citizen (Mono situation looks shaky now) on non-Microsoft Windows. I mean don’t give it up cold turkey perhaps, but adding new languages to your belt will help you get unshackled from Microsoft.

Good luck creating a new account as folks are suggesting as they will require like scans of your head for ID (that’s what they asked me last time I bothered trying before I realized I was better off without it)

Only 128 characters? You’re gonna have issues converting everything to ASCII when you can’t even write “café”.

Water dries quickly. No need to overthink.

Not Hot n Ready tho… pony up for the deep dish