Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@freakazoid @KuJoe The problem with Firefox forks is that they tend to track upstream (ie. there's only so much they can do, and they can't meaningfully diverge from Firefox's development path), and it's apparently really difficult to make it a proper diverging fork because of how complex the codebase is.

@bananas Yeah what the fuck was *that* move.

@mayank @jacksonchen666 I would expect it to detect whether the stylesheet uses the prefers-color-scheme property (which is usually how dark/light mode should be implemented), but I'm not certain

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social I mean "funding" in a very general sense here - whether that is by literally paying people for their work or otherwise making sure that they don't starve. Most people cannot afford to spend large amounts of time working on this stuff because they need to maintain an income too.

You need *some* kind of answer to this if you want to make complex research projects possible (to the point that you can expect others to work on them, that is), otherwise you'll just end up with a group of well-off white dudes in tech.

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social This notably also introduces all of the other complexities of P2P design, in particular how difficult it is to build something that remains interoperable and possible to adapt over time, and isn't constantly at risk of feature-freezing because of its P2P nature. Because if it feature-freezes, it will never be used for anything except highly specialized cases.

I'm not saying that work is not worth doing, but it's several orders of magnitude more complex and unexplored than "make your protocol not leak metadata" would imply, and that is likely also the answer as to why people aren't doing it - we barely have infrastructure to fund a run-of-the-mill protocol project on proven technology as it is.

So this really shouldn't be a conversation about metadata at all, in my opinion, it should be a conversation about sustainable structures for community infrastructure. That's the dependency that will likely need to be resolved before this can actually be pulled off successfully.

And that, ironically, requires a good-enough platform to communicate on. I would say that Matrix doesn't really meet the "good enough" criterium, but that "metadata-preserving" is an expectation that lies too far in the other direction.

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social Sure, you'll find no disagreement from me here.

But my question is a technical one, not a "devil's advocate" one - I *do* build communication systems, and I have been fruitlessly searching for answers to this question for a very long time now.

And a perfectly secure system is all well and good, but if nobody actually can be convinced to *use* it because it's too inconvenient, it might as well not exist.

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social @delroth Okay, but this to me sounds like it implies *P2P* messaging specifically - because if you are going through a server, onion routing or not, there is still conversational metadata available to that server.

And so that immediately poses a significant tradeoff, because that leaves a large gap in functionality like "offline messages".

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social @delroth Okay, but say that they do. How do you address metadata around who talks to whom, on a technical level?

Because from what I've seen, there just seem to be no known ways to do this, that don't involve severe usability tradeoffs that would make something unusable as a general-purpose messenger.