29 Aug
2025
29 Aug
'25
7:57 a.m.
Dave. Good day.
On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:26:12 +0100
Dave Cridland <dave(a)cridland.net> wrote:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 00:00, Elle
<elle+xmpp-standards(a)weathered-steel.dev> wrote:
It appears that "critical mass" does not occur at once, even though it
should, similarly to online video games in which people want to have a
server full with players at once, otherwise they leave very fast
instead of patiently waiting for more to join.
So, there should be a possibility to communicate with the current
server of choice from other servers.
Once more people would utilize that different system, we would be able
to switch from the current server to other servers.
- IANAL, but the use of any of the XSF materials is covered by
our IPR statement and I believe that explicitly allows any such use
as training LLMs. I don't see this as a negative for the XSF. This
doesn't negate concerns for *other* organizations or projects.
I understand that given the licensing, LLM training may be
permissible. That wasn't the point. As an org, and personally, I do
not want to contribute to a technology largely designed to destroy
my profession. Unfortunately, a number of projects I care about are
still hosted on platform owned by one of the biggest developers of
LLM tech.
You mentioned before that contributors are free to mirror XSF/XMPP
repos on other platforms. This sounds like a good first
contribution for our org. I'm willing to put in the work to mirror
the repos, and try to coordinate any issue triage that gets
submitted on the mirrors.
Absolutely, go for it. But at the moment, the bulk of the effort has
gone into supporting our use of Github, so unless there's real
critical mass in what you're attempting, you may find it results in
no change.
- It is very demotivating for people working on this to get side
line opinions without actual ongoing involvement.
Apologies if this sounded like sidelining, that wasn't my
intention. I was giving voice from my perspective on why *I* am
demotivated from contributing to projects hosted on Github, and
offered some viable alternatives.
And I get that. But I also get that Github is easy to find, and saves
the (overworked) team a lot of work. Github isn't great, but burn-out
is far worse.
- I will not go into my personal opinions on political,
societal, or ethical choices or opinions, by anyone or any
corporation, here. I do have them, as many here can attest, and
they usually go with a beverage in a private, in-person setting.
Right, because FOSS, decentralized communication platforms are
completely apolitical, and detached from society. There's obviously
no ethical considerations, either. Mind backdooring OMEMO for any
government that asks?
The technology does what the technology does.
Some people might (probably do) use OMEMO to hide unethical and
illegal things from governments, too. Governments themselves use XMPP
for all kinds of things, and I'm sure that you may well have opinions
on which of those are ethically aligned with your beliefs.
The communications platform *is* apolitical. It does not distinguish
between "bad" things (like enabling C&C systems for malware) and
"good" things (like rapid triage of pressure sores). So people use it
for both.
What you (or I) choose to support is up to us - the protocol has no
views, and I'm broadly with Ralph on saying that carries over to the
XSF.
And to be sure, I can't see myself engaging if a bunch of malware
authors started working on improvements to the protocol to support
their use cases, and if governments started asking for backdoors in
OMEMO, I assume you'd not help them either. But they're welcome to
try, I suppose.
Dave.