Every community I care about is dead

  • 1 Post
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • I haven’t read this series yet but it’s on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I’ve recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.

    I’m lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I’m not sure if I ever will.







  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.








  • Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn’t impact Conduit as much is that there’re other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

    Right. The current perspective is based on the idea that if Synapse/Dendrite go closed-source right now, an open source version would be good as dead. Element is responsible for 95% of Synapse/Dendrite and I’m sure a community fork would have to play a lot of catch-up to figure out how to keep it going. If the community was more involved in Synapse/Dendrite implementation (and if Element let them) there would be less cause for alarm, as closing the source would just mean an immediate community fork and putting Element on ignore. Also to reiterate, The Matrix Foundation is not going along with Element on this move, and even if Element pulled something shady the Matrix Core Spec etc. would still remain open and under the Foundation’s control, so the max we have to lose is Synapse/Dendrite and all of Element’s developers.

    As for the rest I agree and I do actually trust that Element is simply playing their only card here. These maneuvers are all required in order for Element to survive as a company at all, but they also unfortunately leave this backdoor open as a consequence. Matthew has pinky-promised over and over that they are only acting in good faith and that they would never use the backdoor, but it’s understandable that the presence of the backdoor is putting everyone at unease. Best case scenario we take this as a warning sign that if Element drops dead tomorrow then Matrix is also dead. If people want Matrix to not be practically owned by Element then we should diversify and prepare escape plans.