There's a very long history of extremely effective labor saving tools in software.

Writing in C rather than Assembly, especially for more than 1 platform.

Standard libraries. Unix itself. More recently, developing games in Unity or Unreal instead of rolling your own engine.

And what happened when any of these tools come on the scene is that there is a mad gold rush to develop products that weren't feasible before. Not layoffs, not "we don't need to hire junior developers any more".

Rank and file vibe coders seem to perceive Claude Code (for some reason, mostly just Claude Code) as something akin to the advantage of using C rather than Assembly. They are legit excited to code new things they couldn't code before.

Boiling the rivers to give them an occasional morale boost with "You are absolutely right!" is completely fucked up and I dread the day I'll have to deal with AI-contaminated codebases, but apart from that, they have something positive going for them, at least in this brief moment. They seem to be sincerely enthusiastic. I almost don't want to shit on their parade.

The AI enthusiast bigwigs on the other hand, are firing people, closing projects, talking about not hiring juniors any more, and got the media to report on it as AI layoffs. They just gleefully go on about how being 30% more productive means they can fire a bunch of people.

The standard answer is that they hate having employees. But they always hated having employees. And there were always labor saving technologies.

So I have a thesis here, or a synthesis perhaps.

The bigwigs who tout AI (while acknowledging that it needs humans for now) don't see AI as ultimately useful, in the way in which C compiler was useful. Even if its useful in some context, they still don't. They don't believe it can be useful. They see it as more powerfully useless. Each new version is meant to be a bit more like AM or (clearly AM-inspired, but more familiar) GLaDOS, that will get rid of all the employees once and for all.

Mastodon link: mastodon.social/@Edent/1149363…

Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-29 11:34:22

I'm never going back to Matrix

shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-ne…

I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future!

The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not just on a protocol level, but on an organisational level as well.

I joined Matrix at FOSDEM - the largest gathering of open source nerds in Europe. We were all encouraged to use it - every talk had its own channel, all the official comms came from there, I was even invited to a top-secret private channel for speaker. This was going to be epic! Viva la rèvölūçïón, right? Wrong.

It was dead. Even among the most seasoned geeks on the planet, most people preferred to use other services like Signal, Telegram, and Slack. Why? Because those other tools actually work.

Matrix has two official Android apps - one of which is old and unsupported, the other is new and doesn't work with many of the basic chat features.

I want to be absolutely clear about this - the company behind Matrix have put out an app which doesn't work with their own product! Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a typical view of the official FOSDEM speaker room, using the official Matrix app:

It was embarrassing. People would pipe up in channels and say "this doesn't work" only to be told they were using the wrong app and should go back to the one marked unsupported. So they left, never to return. Even in the large talks, where people were encouraged to use the official Matrix chat, most of the conversation happened on other platforms. It was just too hard to use Matrix.

A few thousands geeks, all used to recompiling their own kernels and participating in the Fediverse, and most thought that Matrix was too much of a faff.

After FOSDEM, I kept the Matrix app on my phone. Occasionally receiving a ping from some long-forgotten channel.

And then, one day, I got hit with the most vile spam. A dozen notifications suddenly appeared on my phone with abuse, torture, and transphobic slurs in them.

You can view the screenshot - but, fair warning, it is grim.

This shouldn't be possible. It doesn't take an expensive team of moderators to add some keyword monitoring. It doesn't take a massive AI model to work out that a stranger shouldn't be able to bombard users with multiple notifications. You don't have to sacrifice your dream of a decentralised future - you just need to care about your users.

This stuff is basic.

I moaned about it on Mastdon and was surprised to receive a private reply from the official Matrix account.

Please do not encourage the spammer by giving them a platform and propagating their spam; you may want to consider deleting your post.

This is classic victim blaming. It is my fault for giving the spammer attention. I am the one who needs to take responsibility and delete the evidence. I shouldn't warn people that Matrix is actively dangerous to use.

Bullshit.

Here's what I expected them to say:

"We're sorry you had such a bad experience on Matrix. Rest assured we're working hard to block these spammers - here's a link to show what we're doing. You can protect your account further by doing x, y and z. Once again, sorry and we hope we can win back your trust."

I'm not saying scrappy open source projects have to hire anodyne corporate communications specialists; they just need to have a little empathy.

But, no, just constant whining about how it isn't their fault and how I am the one who needs to change my behaviour.

This is pretty typical behaviour from the team. Find any post complaining about some aspect of Matrix and you'll see their instant woe-is-me replies.

So I deleted the app. I would have liked to have nuked my account but apparently that's not possible.

I'm not the only one who feels like this. Here's an epic post by Marius, which concludes:

Between the slow performance, the increasing amount of spam, the miserable web client, and the unfinished state of Element X, the Matrix.org network is not something I am willing to continue to recommend, especially to non-technical users. Normal people are simply tolerating it to communicate with idealistic nerds like myself who insist(ed) on using it.

Matrix just isn't focussed on users. I'm not talking about user-experience tweaks like which shade of cornflower blue to use - I mean basic user needs like apps that work and a way to combat spam.

There's a long list of ways the protocol contributes to a poor user experience. It almost seems designed without regard for how it will actually be used.

While the protocol may be conceptually interesting and their intentions noble, I'm not prepared to suffer abuse in the name of technical purity.

Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?

#foss #Matrix #OpenSource #rant

[Request] Allow account deletion

I've looked over the matrix spec and unfortunately /account/deactivate only requires for any future login to become impossible. Synapse fulfils the spec, but does not actually delete the account, w...

^{MoritzMaxeiner (GitHub)}

Samsung has decided to proceed with the Bootloader blocking also in Europe, a move that has caused a lot of discussion. Behind this choice is a European regulation that will come into force in August 2025 and which risks changing smartphone usage in Europe forever. This is why other manufacturers may soon follow suit.

From 1 August 2025, new provisions will come into force RED Directive (Radio Equipment Directive), which redefines the compliance requirements for all radio devices sold in Europe. This is a significant change, not so much for the amount of regulations introduced, but for the effect they will have on the entire Android ecosystem. The issue revolves around three articles that impose specific protections: against network interference, personal data compromise, and digital fraud. These are, in themselves, sacrosanct rules.

But the crux comes with the interpretation prevailingEach device must ensure full compliance not only with the hardware, but also with the software that controls the radio modules. This is where the bootloader comes in. Unlocking it essentially allows you to replace the original operating system with an alternative one, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS.

But these systems, if they modify the radio drivers even minimally, invalidate the CE certification. An uncertified device can no longer be legally marketed or used, at least according to the most stringent reading of the law.

This scenario has therefore led Samsung to protect its devices. Not on a whim, but to avoid any software modifications falling under your legal liability. If a user installs a ROM that interferes with radio frequencies or compromises communications security, the manufacturer (and in some cases the importer) may be held directly liable.

RED does not explicitly talk about unlocking the Bootloader or custom ROM, but it opens one regulatory space in which the margins for maneuver are they narrow. And in doing so, it provides a solid argument for those who have been trying for years to close the loop between hardware, software, and services. After all, customizing the operating system also means breaking away from proprietary services and, therefore, from the model that ties the user to the brand.

Samsung is just the first to move, but it's hard to imagine it will be the only one. Starting in August 2025, it's very likely that other manufacturers will follow suit, at least for the European market.

Work on the backend changes for 1.0 is mostly finished now. What's missing is optimizing the migrations as they currently take about 9 hours for lemmy.ml. Now we are starting to work on updating lemmy-ui for the API changes and new features.

In the last days we did a big cleanup of the lemmy-ui issue tracker, closing 450 mostly outdated issues. Many of these were over a year old describing problems that have long been fixed. From 570 issues only 120 remain. Most of these are very minor, changing a single UI element here or there. It should be possible to implement 90% of them within a month or two.

Here are some of the major changes made over the past month:

• Add ability to block all users of an instance (#5784)
• Notifications rewrite, users can be notified about new posts or comments (#5604)
• Post tags (currently 9 hours for lemmy.ml, still needs more work) (#5869)
• Site and user setting for items per page (#5887)
• Don't show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes (#3197)
• Speedup of 1.0 migrations (#5873)

::: spoiler Full list of changes by user

jfaustino

• Change textarea placeholder for locked posts
• Don't show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes

SleeplessOne1917

• Re-export UpdateCommunityNotifications
• Re-export some types from lemmy-api-common
• Add missing TS derives that were causing errors when generating Typescript bindings
• Add creator_banned to VoteView

dessalines

• Adding a local_site and local_user setting for default fetch limit
• Add ability to block all users of an instance.
• Fast history no background
• Fixing username-instance duplicate migration.
• Don't export inbox combined view internal.
• [Main] remove all caches

dullbananas

• Add update_schema_file.sh
• Refactor pagination cursor parsing
• Speed up init in start_dev_db.sh using no-sync option
• Fix comment depth test
• Prevent stack overflow when fetching nested comment
• Require indexes for all foreign keys
• Use a new separate crate for uplete
• Allow running all migrations with minimal dependencies

Nutomic

• Use case insensitive sort for followed communities (fixes #5903)
• Merge different AlreadyExists errors (fixes #5897)
• Properly parse icons federated from Peertube (fixes #5894)
• Rename modlog items
• Refactor email
• Only use MiMalloc on x86_64 target arch (fixes #5695)
• Purge user images in background task (fixes #4642)
• Finish adding post tags
• Allow remote groups to follow Lemmy communities (fixes #5354)
• Fix foreign key indexes migration
• Remove unused items
• Notifications rewrite and post following (fixes #3069)
• Add unique constraint for person(name, instance) (fixes #5045)
• Extism release version
• Delete report views, add missing report fields
• Update extism
• Federation refactoring
• Fix comment depth off by one
• Move local site user count updates to scheduled task
• Revert " Add post_actions.disable_notifications (fixes #3042) (#5826)"
• Add missing comment depth check
• Dont call resolveObject for search
• Change icon for save action (fixes #1564)
• Use anchor for comment permalinks (fixes #2908)
• Only cache success responses (fixes #3129)
• Redirect away from /setup page if already created (fixes #897)
• Update regex for validating matrix id (fixes #1726)
• Fix host splitting for IPv6 (fixes #2374)
• Increase bio max length to 1000 chars (fixes #2657)
• Change link from element.io to matrix.org (fixes #2293)
• Search changes
• Change display format for community name in search

:::

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

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