I don’t see what you’re describing 🤷 Soon only appears once on the page and not in this context for me.

It appears as a tooltip

Anyhow, where I intended to draw your intention was on https://prose.org/downloads

You can just download the client for your platform (assuming one is available), or use the web one (otherwise), or just build one from the sources I linked (which is what I do), and login with your usual XMPP account. Would you need an account and have to decide which provider to register with, this would come handy: https://providers.xmpp.net/

In this set-up, prose.org isn’t hosting your account and will of course let you interact with thousands of users or more, like any other XMPP client.

Those silicon valley tech billionaires are businessmen who, by the looks of it, have completely fallen for their own marketing, and secluded themselves in a weird echo chamber packed with sycophants and profiteers. They are not superior beings. They have no credential nor academic status enabling them to speak as authorities worth being listened to. Anyone with a critical mind and access to scientific literature understands better than them the actual challenges behind “uploading one’s brain to the cloud” and can debunk that science fictionesque bullshit.

All there is to this is a bunch of aging megalomaniacs with too much power, except over death, and that scares the crap out of them and makes them say some stupid shit. And I hate that we sanewash this just because they are rich and influential. As a society we should kick them back to where they belong, which is a court of law, for their continued effort in dismantling our society.

Just below you’ll find a section about “self hosting (soon)”, though you can already use it with your own XMPP account as a standalone client (no questions asked), like I do, or, optionally, with the server-side components (opensource prosody module).

Edit: adding https://github.com/prose-im

See my other comment: if you already have an XMPP account, prose is just another client that you can use however you like, for free (and at that point, everyone should be having an XMPP account, if you ask me). If you don’t have an account, they can act as service provider (but this being a decentralized network, the don’t want to encourage hosting everyone on the same server).

It is not spam, and you miss-read it. Prose is an open-source XMPP client. They can set you up (host on your behalf) for free, up to a certain point. You can pay for it (there is a commercial offering), or you can use it unlimited and with no extra costs than your own server’s if you self-host. It’s all being developed there in the open in case you don’t want to take my word for it: https://github.com/prose-im

In terms of tech and implementation details, it’s been years since everyone has been converging towards the same WebRTC architecture (with everyone bundling/linking the same set of basic components and libs as found in chrome, android, …). As such, a call between two participants (or as a group with less than a dozen participants) should be as good on XMPP as anywhere else (including the commercial options like Google Meet, Zoom, Matrix, …).

Where things start getting spicier is in large group calls (dozens of participants or more) requiring the stream to be brokered by a central server (SFU), with stream re-compression and optimisation. Standard-XMPP isn’t great for that yet (non-standard XMPP, like Jitsi, on which it is based, is pretty damn good, but unavailable from your regular XMPP setup). Work is going on to improve that (on two fronts, with some XMPP servers turning into SFUs, and with a protocol being designed for offloading AV streams to any willing existing SFU).

No idea what prose is.

Prose is an open-source XMPP client with a focus on large rooms/banquet-style conversations (like IRC, slack, …). It is still in its early stages but already quite usable and possibly a good fit for a subset of Skype refugees.

None of those (except Jitsi to a small extent) qualify as replacements if we ever want to evolve out of the silos we let megalomaniac CEOs build to better control us. So I’ll add to the list: prose.org , movim.eu (or anything based on XMPP) and matrix.org (though this one is rapidly falling into obsolescence). The keyword here is federation.

It has already started. Microsoft and Google hiking prices with AI bundled in is both a way to inflate the “demand” artificially, keeping the show going (covering up the fact that nobody really wants that, and even less so wants to pay a premium for it: there just is no miracle AI product/application to sell), and to mitigate some of the absurd imminent losses.

You wouldn’t see that in an “optimistic” and sound market.

Count me as a fervent critic of Hollywood, but the world isn’t binary and (unfortunately) Hollywood hating it doesn’t automatically make it a good thing for the rest of us. Essentially OpenAI, Google and the rest of the pack of thieves are lobbying to establish themselves as the rulers of a lawless world, and everything you already hate about Hollywood (its inordinate amount of power, the bullying of the weaker that ensue, the corruption and politics around it, …) is meant to get back to us, in worse, with new names at the top.

Indeed that would be the end of the copyright law, but only for the oligarchs.

Matrix has gone open core, XMPP is safer

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, open standards with similar or better capabilities already exist. Don’t create another silo, contribute to making e.g. XMPP clients better.

but it taught us that you always want more than one method of contact, as a a rugpull can happen at any time off any whim.

Being on the internet long enough taught me instead (by having seen countless providers rise and fall since the early 00’s) to self-host my comms and prefer open federated protocols. I switched to XMPP, I have no regret, everyone that matters made the move painlessly a decade ago or so.

leftist activism like tiktok

Lol, you might have missed a few news cycles if that’s your take. Tiktok has been well documented as a vector of foreign interference while propping up right wing populist movements.

Isn’t that the essence of the issue, that those models are loaded with biases, that might or might not overlap with dominant ones in inscrutable ways, hence producing new levels of confusion and indirection?

If you have the impression that there’s a dominant, homogeneous “mass” sharing the same opinion, you are right there in the middle of an information bubble and a victim of those “algorithms”.

Would that make a difference?

Tu veux dire, après n’avoir rien fait quand le précédent dumping chinois a fait couler l’industrie photovoltaïque allemande ? Notre transition énergétique se porte en effet bien mieux d’un monopole et de nos capitaux confiés à une puissance à l’autre bout du monde…

I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

I also haven’t seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of “babysitting” the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

It’s part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:

• is that thing opensource?

• self hostable?

• does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?

• can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?

• if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?

• is it profitable?

• are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?

• is it at risk of being acquired?

• is it subject to foreign/unlawful interference

Etc Etc