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

@anthropy @rail_ All of that ultimately leads back to Element, unfortunately.

I know a lot of the folks working on alternative implementations, and almost without exception they start out with great intentions and then somewhere along the way realize that the spec is incomplete / Synapse is unreliable / the documentation about E2EE wrong / there is a client interop issue / etc.

Even the non-Element clients are constantly held back by the mess on a governance level, making it way more difficult than necessary to implement a good client, and nearly impossible to implement a reliable homeserver. The result is that people end up burning their time and energy on accounting for all these issues so that it works at all, instead of on building nice software for Matrix.

There's just no fast solution for this that I can see. The possible paths to a solution that I know of are either a) serious changes in governance (ongoing but slow), or b) just spending years on mapping out all these issues and working around them to build a stable base. Once either of those points are achieved, building good software is possible.

@vantablack Leaseweb?

@rail_ The frustrating part is that almost the entire problem lies with Element's stuff specifically, but it's so prevalent and woven into everything that it pretty much defines the image and experience for all of Matrix.

(And also I've warned the Element folks about exactly this outcome *so many* times and they have not acted on it)

@rune I mostly just go to Zeeman for my clothes nowadays, specifically because they're less bad with this 😐 They tend to have the same things without change for years and years, and their reason is different (lower cost) but it suits me just fine...

@sharan To relate it back to the article: in that case, the pact being described is to sabotage your own ability as a service operator, to enshittify things in the future when an investor demands it.

And sabotage it to such a degree that if you were to do so anyway, users would immediately notice, get pissed, and walk away. Meaning the investor probably won't even ask you to, because they realize this too.

@silvermoon82 Immediately reminds me of the timeline view in Etherpad.

@sharan An explanation from my perspective, in the hopes that multiple descriptions might help to understand it better:

The idea behind a Ulysses Pact is pretty much that you accept that you are fallible, almost treating your future self like an adversary of sorts.

Often in the form of "I'm going to be tempted in the future, so I should make decisions now that I can still foresee the problem, in such a way that I remove that possibility for when I get tempted."

An example from my personal experience would be to burn bridges ahead of time, by making myself extremely unlikeable to eg. capitalists who might try to tempt me out of being activist in the future, by being very loudly anticapitalist.

So the common properties of these pacts are basically:
1. Right now, you are not yet tempted.
2. But you foresee that you will be in the future, in some situation you are likely to end up in.
3. So you take steps today to deliberately sabotage that future situation today, in a way you cannot (easily) undo later, locking yourself into your commitment.