Bit of a downer, but it is an Android news site. kbin currently doesn’t really merit much of a mention in that context. The PWA is nice, but by its nature barely related to Android, since it also runs on Windows, MacOS and everything else under the sun.
Looks more like 17 minutes after launch.
This isn’t a hill I’m willing to die on at all, but it does mildly annoy me that The Open Source Definition is used by proponents to mean the same thing as “open-source”. For anyone not familiar, The Open Source Definition is a document used to determine whether code should be certified by the Open Source Initiate as “OSI Certified”. Proponents argue that anything which does not meet the OSI’s definition is not open-source, while I think there’s room in the language and the mind for disagreement on whether “open-source” and “eligible for OSI certification” are synonyms.
The OSI was originally founded with the goal of registering a trademark for “Open Source”, but this was unsuccessful as the term is too broad and descriptive. Failing that, the OSI decided to instead register the trademark “OSI Certified”, which can be applied to works which meet their Open Source Definition. Ultimately, what this means is that nobody owns the phrase “open-source” and it’s an organic part of language which is not strictly defined by the specific terms of any certifying documents.
Over the years, there have been plenty of non-commercially licensed software with source available for use: a popular example is video, computer and arcade game emulators. The MAME emulator was for years released under its own non-commercial copyleft license before eventually being relicensed under BSD (which meets OSI’s Open Source Definition), and popular SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis emulators Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX both continue to be released under similarly “open but non-commercial” licenses.
I’ll happily agree that none of those are eligible to bear the “OSI Certified” trademark and that they don’t meet OSI’s Open Source Definition. But when people start saying they’re “not open-source” it rubs me the wrong way, because we’re just talking, not trying to achieve trademark certification. Not to mention that the whole nature of software licensing is to note what restrictions there are on the use of the code, e.g. most open-source, copyleft licenses deny you the right to use their code without attribution. However, we basically all agree that that’s fine and you can still call a license open-source if it includes that restriction. It’s a shades of gray situation that people are treating as black and white just because a definition exists which they can refer back to, with the assumption that all people must subscribe to those specific terms.
There’s entirely valid counter-arguments, of course. It’s useful to have strict definitions of nebulous concepts like open-source because it could cause confusion, and you have to draw the line somewhere or else the term becomes completely meaningless. e.g. You risk people referring to things like source code leaks as “open-source”. There are frequently cases of people ignoring non-commercial license terms and selling those softwares (Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX are often bundled with commercial retro emulation hardware), which you could argue stems from confusion about whether or not commercial use is allowed. But the same devices often violate the licenses of OSD-compliant software as well, so it seems more likely they just don’t care about open-source software licensing terms.
So anyway, Genesis Plus GX is open-source but I’m not willing to fight you about it.
As much as I’d like to argue otherwise, it’s easily one of the most accessible versions of live chat around currently. I’m still on IRC and also on Matrix, but neither is as user-friendly as the centralized single-account, single-app, single-server setup of Discord. That’s absolutely not to say that it’s the best option, but it’s the simplest to explain by far.
My fellow Matrix nerds can tell us all day about how they got their whole family using Matrix and it’s great and everybody understood it, but I strongly suspect there’s a level of one dedicated user doing things like app and instance selection (or self-hosting) for the entire group, while everyone else is pretty much along for the ride.
Matrix does solve some of the issues of IRC, like using a single account to interact with basically any server, but room discovery is still not great, the mobile apps lag heavily behind desktop, there’s persistent basic usability bugs like unread notifications getting permanently stuck, and privacy is an afterthought with most Matrix apps broadcasting your presence to all other users at all times without any option to stop that behavior. Plus, the heavy reliance on bridging with IRC for many communities also kind of loses you the benefit of the single-account approach since you end up having to register an account for your bridge user anyway (and I can hear the eyes glazing over at this point).
Then there’s the network effect, of course. Most of the stuff you can reach via Matrix is super nerdy: Linux distros, fediverse support rooms, Wii U homebrew development channels. This part isn’t Matrix’s “fault” per se, but it’s definitely a reason why people would choose to use Discord or maintain a presence in both. At this point, unless there’s just nothing that interests you on Discord, switching to Matrix really has to be an ideological choice.