That’s a fair point, I’ve been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.

It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.

I saw somewhere recently (don’t remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn’t recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it’s something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:

• This is a point-click-drag interaction, but how would a person do this with a keyboard only?
• These two components are identified using color, but what if a user is colorblind?
• There are buttons labeled with iconography only, but what if a user cannot see it and uses a screen reader to interact with everything?

It’s tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.

Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.

But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.

I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.

There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.

Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.

The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.

Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.

I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.

I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.

You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.

Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don’t extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can’t get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.

Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn’t have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can’t be unlocked with biometrics?

Those aren’t “nice” features for people in the Apple ecosystem, they’re baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don’t just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn’t enough. And I’m not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.

Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…

There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility

Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough…

Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums… I get how this happens, but it still sucks.

Probably even with a CS degree.

It’s just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.

I wonder if the same won’t happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.

I’ve heard a lot of people say it, but it feels like FUD - it really isn’t as hard as people say. I host my own mailserver (well, I use a VPS, so the provider does the hardware and the networking, but I do the mailserver). And I don’t have a degree in Computer Science (well, I do have a PhD in Bioengineering that involved software-adjacent research, and did a few undergraduate CS papers - but none of that covered anything relevant to mail, so is not relevant here).

Delivering from commercial rather than residential IP space probably helps - and try to get an IP address that hasn’t been previously used by a spammer. If you set up DMARC with DKIM and SPF (lots of abbreviations, but look them up if you want to set up a mail server), you will be deliverable (at low email volumes) to the majority of places already. Microsoft is the one exception, but just send a bit of email to them that isn’t spam (can be to one of your own accounts), and if need be fill in their form to complain you are being blocked incorrectly, and you will get deliverability at low volumes.

All of that is enough for normal personal or business emails at normal volumes to be deliverable pretty much anywhere you like, and it doesn’t take long to get there. If you want to send legitimate bulk newsletters and the like, it is a bit harder (basically, you have to warm up the IP and not grow too fast), but also not impossible - but understandable businesses doing that want to pay for someone else to have done that for them, and that is where advice not to run your own server comes from. But for the average person who doesn’t run mailing lists, getting deliverability is not that hard. And the more people who run their own servers, the harder it is for those who would make email a walled garden to get their way on it - so it is for the greater good.

The bigger challenge with running your own server is actually not other’s anti-abuse measures, it’s that you have to have your own anti-abuse measures if you don’t want a mountain of spam and your logs filled with people trying to brute force you. It isn’t that hard, but a few tips: 1) install packages for your mailserver from your distro, and update early, update often, 2) use keys rather than passwords for protocols (like ssh) where you can, and use long secure passwords where you have to (e.g. for IMAP and submission logins), 3) read the docs for your mail server to make sure you aren’t set up to be an open mail relay please! Check authentication is required with a secure password or you will get blocked by everyone as a spam source, 4) use something like fail2ban to block brute forcers before they fill up your logs, 5) consider SpamAssassin and postgrey (or some other greylisting solution) to cut back on spam, 6) there is a tiny handful of ASNs on the Internet that allow spammers and don’t take any meaningful action against them. You can do a daily download from https://archive.routeviews.org/oix-route-views/oix-full-snapshot-latest.dat.bz2 and bzgrep it with a command like bzgrep -e " (213035|400377|399471|210654|46573|211252|62904) i" $TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2 | cut -d" " -f 3 | sort | uniq to get a list of IP ranges that are more likely to be spam than anything else (obviously, never use one of those providers since they are widely blocked). Script blocking traffic from them with iptables, and your spam volume will fall greatly. 7) if a spam does get through, check the headers and report it to the ISP it came from - you will be helping to shut down spam for everyone, making it easier to run small mail servers.

I run my own mail server for US$5/month (on VPS compute resource shared with other things, not just for mail), it is mostly automated (and can be redeployed with Ansible if need be), I rarely need to touch it aside from checking upgrades are working etc…, and I haven’t had a deliverability problem in ages, and I now get pretty minimal spam (and the spam that does get through is reliably filtered by Thunderbird’s spam filters at the client).

So please don’t let the naysayers deter you from self-hosting your mail, it’s really not that hard, especially compared to the constant stress that providers like Google might lock you out of your account for vague “security” reasons, shadowban you, sell information from your emails for marketing, decide to cancel the service, or whatever other abusive thing they dream up next.

Some context though is that this article was written when cloud computing was all the buzz like crypto just was and AI is now. So many people used cloud just for the buzz and without understanding the tool.

That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.

What’s your setup? How do you aggregate different feeds to one page? Where do you find the feeds? I have so many RSS questions - everyone who uses it loves it and I want to understand it.

Reddit kinda replaced that for me. With leaving Reddit, just today I’ve installed a rss feed reader on my laptop and phone.

Fresh RSS is what I use, self hosted and the mobile web interface negates the need for an app. Though there is an app, I’m not a fan of it

After getting burned by Google killing Reader I decided to never use a 3rd party service again, and FreshRSS has served me well for years.

You can self-host Newsblur, and the app is available on F-Droid

any newsgroup recommendations?

The no algorithm part is pretty neat. Don’t know if you are referring to the Nextcloud News app. If that’s the case, it’s free on the f-droid app store.

There is a great chapter in the book “architecture of open source applications” dedicated to audacity! https://aosabook.org/en/v1/audacity.html

Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.

Outlook

• hides email address => security issue; eases phishing (even beyond not showing whether it’s ensured valid)
• can’t have an inbox filter that moves emails and gives you a normal notification of unread email
• can’t have an inbox filter that is both server side and gives a desktop notification
• can’t save your reply email next to the replied to email in the inbox - but can in the folders
• can’t handle specific column orders (was it category before date then not working? sth like that)

I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I’d much prefer using Thunderbird.

Because I’m using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.

u c4nt b3 l33t w1th0ut fru1tb00t5 0n yr f33t

If you can’t rollerblade to a public phone to use your bluebox so you can call your granny for free, are you really a phreaker?

Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.

As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.

Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.

90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.

If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).

I’m glad you mentioned SimpleX. I think it’s a really cool and promising idea, yet hardly anyone knows about it :(

xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.