This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.

Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.

It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.

An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.

Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.

No.

• I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
• I want to send media other than text
• I want my messages to be e2ee
• I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
• I want voice/video calls

and many more…

None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.

Also Matrix can bridge to XMPP, of course you wouldn’t because nobody uses XMPP.

No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)

It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.

At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.

The analogy is that you buy a car (because if it breaks, the car and your entertainment stuff, you will buy a new one to replace it, you will also carry all maintenance) but suddenly you can’t drive backwards anymore because the manufacturer decided retroactively that you should pay extra for that (possibly in a subscription).

I would say it is your good right then to make your car drive backwards regardless of what it may take.

You really don’t know the history of Microsoft, do you?

The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)

It’s basically the same thing that happened to Homer Simpson. The original did dumb things but never intended for things to fail or to be evil. Of course it is easier to write cheap gags if you throw all of that out of the window.

I see you are a man of tights

I see you are correct.

I mean I can compress any story you like into 3 sentences making it sound completely silly. Is there a point to make?

Which is exactly the problem people think has been solved but isn’t anywhere near being solved. It cannot comprehend semantics, the meaning of things is completely beyond it and all other AIs.

Unfortunately saying I made a thing that creates vaguely human looking speech with little content isn’t astonishing to most people hence they are looking for something useful this breakthrough machine must be able to do and then they don’t find anything leading to these articles.

Might be true for you but most people do have a concept of true and false and don’t just dream up stuff to say.

An algorithm suggesting things you might like doesn’t have to be AI. There are simple metrics to achieve that (e.g. things other people who liked this also liked)

Or are we calling every algorithm AI now?

The implied difference is if someone or even you know how the algorithm works, which for “new” is relatively straightforward.

This happend to me a lot 10-15 years ago but since then has never again happened to me. With the noteable exception of Arch Linux which does tell you to read update notes though.

The Valve that pushed always online drm to the masses? That Valve that takes 30% of every purchase made on their monopolistic platform?

Yes, that Valve.

Let’s not pretend Valve hasn’t gotten to where it was against consumer interest and especially not that Valve is some kind of a good guy.

One more on top: That Valve that had to be forced to offer refunds and to this day offers the worst customer support in the industry by choice? (Yes that one)

Nothing has changed about why that is compelling: NAT sucks and creates nothing but problems.

Network security is almost the same with IPv6.

If you rely on NAT as a security measure you are just very bad at networking.