That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.
Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?
What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.
Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.
You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.
Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.
Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).
Worked pretty well for me in the past.
I’ve been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.
Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don’t really use it though).
I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don’t care and don’t want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.
It’s a Librem5 phone with cringe name and 100% markup, but it’s their own product nonetheless. I.e. it is not a generic Android with a custom skin and preinstalled apps like Trump Phone, Freedom Phone, or Quantum Internet box.
You can buy pretty much the same Librem5 assembled in China for ~$700. Take a look at Liberux Nexx Linux phone too (they are just staring out)
(Not sure what you’re calling racist here, appeal to “patriots”?)
To add to the list:
Here in the Northeastern US, weather patterns seems to shift forward. It stays hot till October. Even November might have a few summer-like warm days. And “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” is ironic since there was snow on Christmas only 2-3 times out of last 10 years or so. Snow comes in mid-January