reddit is proprietary garbage, and full of spam.

i've shut down r/libreboot on reddit. nothing but endless silly there.

irc is all you need. we have an irc chat.

the best thing about the irc chat is it's much easier to moderate, and the inherently daunting nature of merely using irc, for the normies, means that the person coming there must really need/want to be there, and isn't going there to post things so frivolously.

that and our mailing list. we have that too.

no more reddit. good day.

@libreleah IRC is like the email, simple, easy, compatible with low cost technology, following the standars. The best option for now and forever

@libreleah you could try a forum like nodebb. It's indexable by search engines and is also activitypub enabled so people from Lemmy or even mastodon could interact.

@libreleah Good riddance. People need to take this attitude towards discord next.

@libreleah well...I've learned harder things for less petty

@libreleah libreboot matrix when? /s

@esoteric_programmer when i can make it work in weechat

@libreleah you can, actually, apparently there's a pluggin for it

@esoteric_programmer yeah, like i said. when i can make it work in weechat.

@libreleah ahh, is it borken?

@esoteric_programmer no, just not easy enough to figure out in an afternoon. unless someone writes documentation for it that doesn't make me have more questions afterward.

i have element installed, and i'm on a few matrix channels. maintaining matrix chatrooms for libreboot though would be annoying, with the current infrastructure of matrix.

@libreleah ahh, then you use element to talk in the invidious and privacy frontends rooms?

@libreleah you mean homeservers and stuff, or moderation bots?

@esoteric_programmer the whole nine yards, yes.

@libreleah I mean, I dk how it works on irc, but generally speaking you can use matrix.org if you don't want to host a server, and also there are hosted versions of the moderation bot people use, the one I know about is called asgard :p

@esoteric_programmer the trouble with matrix is it doesn't offer that much additional benefit in practise over irc.

even if libera were to just explode one day (like freenode did in 2021), there's always oftc, and in the worst case scenario i can just run ergo or something on my own server.

matrix is basically too easy to use. just install element and off you go. irc filters out most of the trolls just because of how arcane it is.

but i suppose i'll have to modernise it eventually. oh well.

@libreleah lol yeah, you can just block matrix.org and there you go, you filtered out most people haha. But yeah, the advantages are modern features as you said, like replying, sending media, encrypted messages and calls, but the latter two you probably don't care about

@esoteric_programmer i do like that you can paste code on matrix with backticks like markdown. to show code samples. that could come in handy for development.

@libreleah ahh yeah, that too, as well as completely arbitrary html, well...more or less, there are limits

@esoteric_programmer worst case scenario i can always just configure irc.libreboot.org and run ergo on it. i had half a mind to do that in 2021 during the freenode/libera split - because i assumed freenode would collapse and that libera would never get off the ground.

libera very loudly proved me wrong, and clearly won, and tens of thousands of users flocked there, so i just settled with #libreboot on libera.

the trouble with matrix is it's too much bloat to run yourself, for a small project.

@libreleah it's not, just install continuwuity or grapevine, set up your reverse proxy, and there you go, matrix server. All those people who have very complex setups either have a reason for doing so, or are doing it wrong

@esoteric_programmer i never heard of those. i'll put those in my notes for future use - thank you!

@libreleah yeah, there's another one written in ansi C, nothing else, but I forgot its name. I run one myself, it's on stealthy.club. My setup is a bit more complicated because I want all the calling stuff and that takes some work, but that's it, once that's done, it's working forever pretty much, and calling is optional anyway

@esoteric_programmer the other thing i don't like about matrix is it seems to have a lot of web-based things. indeed you mentioned reverse proxy - i assume you mean in nginx or something.

yeah and http/any_protocol_version is one great big giant attack vector

if you can do a writeup about your setup maybe i'll try it out myself. it might be fun!

@libreleah yeah, so it's a huge attack vector only if matrix wouldn't be a very, umm, conservative specification so to speak, so most things which aren't matrix that you could throw at it will get rejected. If not, well, feel free to write at security@matrix.org, because that shit is serious. I use a project called matrix docker ansible deploy, combined with my setup which is already traefik and docker powered anyway. I belatedly realise that my life would have been simpler if I just did it by hand, but the migration would be difficult now and I'd have a lot of downtime

@esoteric_programmer @libreleah It’s not the complexity of setting it up that’s the issue, it’s the resource usage.

RocksDB, the database used by conduit and forks (such as continuwuity and grapevine) likes to use up all available memory, so it needs to be restricted by cgroups if you want to run anything else on your system. I initially used used a lower limit (first 1GB, then 1.5GB) and it would after a few days use it all up and become unusably slow (>10 minutes to respond to an HTTP request, at which point nginx would time it out) and had to be restarted. With a 4GB memory limit it runs relatively fine (still much slower than XMPP or IRC but that’s to be expected of a Matrix server), but that’s way more memory than it should need to use.

Compare the resource usage of my conduit server:

● conduit.service - Conduit Matrix homeserver
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/conduit.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-08-21 22:51:49 BST; 1 month 28 days ago
   Main PID: 638 (matrix-conduit)
      Tasks: 12 (limit: 9481)
     Memory: 1.6G (high: 4.0G max: 4.5G available: 2.3G)
        CPU: 6h 1min 42.506s

with prosody, an XMPP server:

● prosody.service - Prosody XMPP Server
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/prosody.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-08-21 22:52:04 BST; 1 month 28 days ago
       Docs: https://prosody.im/doc
    Process: 3296124 ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 1590 (lua5.4)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 9481)
     Memory: 20.1M
        CPU: 1h 3min 32.677s

or unrealircd, an IRC server:

● unrealircd.service - UnrealIRCd
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/unrealircd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-08-21 22:52:05 BST; 1 month 28 days ago
       Docs: https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/
   Main PID: 1605 (unrealircd)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 9481)
     Memory: 28.8M
        CPU: 1h 49min 14.019s

@noisytoot @libreleah hmm, that's interesting, because I get the complete opposite, my test server ran under 1 gigs of ram. My main server runs synapse, and that one is a memory hog, but I never got issues with the conduits, very interesting