Alternative roots are an interesting concept, but really people just need good alternatives recursives.

Mostly we need advanced packaging built out stateside, all the most advanced SoCs have to go elsewhere to be built into their final configuration.

Don’t worry, the new strategy is to string a company along with talks of a buyout, then when their cash runs out and they declare bankruptcy, to buy all the assets on fire sale.

Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.

Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.

I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven’t run a home server but I’ve heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)

Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don’t think the design is ideal, it’s more described as a distributed message bus, what I’ve read of the spec it’s over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn’t scope itself to the particular task.

That said, I haven’t written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I’d really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:

I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I’m no longer certain it’s viable.

I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.

It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the “user flow” still isn’t at Discord levels.

I’ve rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn’t suited for success either. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see a way through.

No thanks, people hop from centralized platform to centralized platform thinking things will be different.

Consolidated power, especially when fully captured by market forces, will always enshitify, the only out is federation.

Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that’s how I got up and running with it.

Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.

Maybe give it a try; it’s my favorite language to write programs in now, it has an extremely good standard library, and for everything else there’s a mass of high quality crates, its build system is actually competent and makes compiling on Windows or Linux trivial, plus many, many more quality of life features.

What a wonderfully enchanting exploration of Gorton.

I’ve had a soft spot for Gordon Modified for a long time, I use Signature Plastics keycaps on almost all my keyboards, with its wonderful rounded characters . There’s just something about it, easy on the eyes, immediately legible at even small scales, it’s a comfort font.

Unfortunately I don’t think Verbatim manufactures any quad-layer discs, so Sony was the only real option for 128GB disks.

Furthermore, M-Disc is still very pricey per-GB, and their non M-Disc BD disks aren’t priced that much better. I’ve also recently got a spindle of Verbatim BDXLs that every single one would fail to either write or read at the layer transitions, so having a single option here is already proving to be painful.

Seconding this, while I have the option for multi-gig at my address, I don’t have the need, once you get around gigabit upload speeds life is fine.

I can upload hours of uncompressed gameplay to YouTube in under an hour, and that’s limited mostly by their ingest speeds (≈300Mbps) and not my end, so that’s plenty.

With all that said, the option for consumers is great, I’m thankful I have that choice, wish more people had it too.