Hank Hill from King of the Hill

Software making doesn’t need to be social media. Sad are the folks that think everything with an account should be Web 2.0.

It’s implicit endorsement. It signals that you’re an incomplete candidate without participating in the corporate data collection game.

It has a built-in filter for the poor folks that use these proprietary services like Twitter X, Microsoft GitHub, and Discord Username.

I wouldn’t apply anywhere asking exclusively for these platforms instead of something generic like: instant messaging, public code forge(s), weblog/microblog(s). I would encourage you, reader, to ask around & make sure your org isn’t hiring based on proprietary service usage. Heaven forbid your applicant is from a place under US sanctions & literally couldn’t use the services even if they wanted …or like your candidate has any values about privacy.

Please provide your phone number to enter the room

Last I read, you can’t use WhatsApp without sharing your contacts. This helps Meta build its shadow profiles and keep tabs on folks not even using it. The metadata is also often just as valuable as the actual contents.

But eventually the “you’re the product” instance will dawn on ya.

That’s still Cult of vi. It counts. But you have to choose one side & fight for it til you’re freed of your mortal coil.

If true, that would be awesome if a new SteamOS became a Linux on-ramp (Debian base didn’t quite pan out).

Yep, you best pull your Chad chaps, & decide what’s better: Church of Emacs or the Cult of vi.

Most of the language servers can run with Vim, Neovim, Helix, Kakoune, or Emacs as you noted. You could run VS Codium if you’re the “Tech Conservative”, but ultimately if you’re going all the way to “Tech Paranoid”, you won’t touch VS Code or Codium knowing Microsoft is steering the ship with another EEE plot in mind. It’s all a part of that package with Microsoft™ GitHub® + Codespaces® + Copilot® trying to vendor lock-in the developer experience into the platform.

If you chat with one user from Matrix.org or one user in your room is Matrix.org (or any org they host for) then all of that chat data will be synced with them. A room with any general traction will inevitably have someone from Matrix.org & there’s not a lot of options to choose from (I’ve seen a lot of instances shutdown because of the cost to sync all that data was too much).

But that’s why I said “in practice”.

Tech normie also uses VS Code as a text editor sending data to Microsoft & using proprietary plugins.

Matrix has de-facto centralization around Matrix.org where all metadata floats back through them in one way or another. Due to the expense of all the mirroring required (every message + attachment from every DM & chatroom of every user) as well as the Python back-end being slow, it’s in practice not good to self-host despite in theory Matrix being good. XMPP runs on a potato relatively & has so much feature overlap (with the ability to extend being inherent to the protocol)—the only issue is fragmentation of servers & clients (though Conversations Compliance is close-ish to a minimal standard).

Tor/Mullvad are better for anonymity use cases, but when you go tweaking it (settings, add-ons) you are no longer blending in with the pack. LibreWolf suits a more privacy-oriented use case I think since it’s not aiming to mimic Tor, but just have privacy settings mostly maxed out & you opt into everything you are comfortable with, such as cookies—whereas base Fx you have to opt into more privacy.

Where’s NixOS?