User: Niquarl

Peertube is basically a libre response to Google’s Youtube. It has no ads (apart from possible in-video sponsors), has no central server and this leads to a better possible content moderation. The content moderation is based on the server that you signed up to chooses to ‘federate’ with and manually black-lists ect… This of course means that NSFW (eg. porn) can be found on Peertube yet might no be available from your viewing experience as that is based on the instance/server that you are viewing the federated network from.
It’s a work in progress and this review is so basic it’s basically just to give a few words and 5 stars for a FLOSS project that incredibly didn’t seem to have any reviews yet.
(I’ll come back to update and improve this review in the future.)

I have used Matrix for some time now and yet the only reason is that I find it the least bad open-source messaging app.
Today, in a world of so many different protocals for IM, both proprietary and FOSS, I trully believe in Matrix’s vision of a federated multi-support IM service. The compatibility with IRC has made it a truly recommendable program for most things and has allowed to completely uninstall my horrible IRC app. The possibility of the federation although problematic for complete privacy is a very good tool for the sustainability of the project, indeed it does not need for the official to pool in great amounts of revenue to keep the servers afloat or have the it die when the lead devs aren’t as interested by it anymore or don’t have the ressources/time to keep it sailing smoothly.
However, Matrix fails spectacularly at what actually matters for greater adoption: a clean, lightweight interface (web)app. I shall first start by thanking the devs that have created third party clients for Matrix because I just do not like the webapp. It’s honnestly fine. The desktop version however is just horrible for not-so-powerful computers (I would recommend nheko-reborn as cross-platform). The android app however, I must admit is much nicer, however it is a bit more than I need so I use the ‘minivector’ fork (available via f-droid).
To add to the dissapointing, yet encouraging, applications are the features. There is no doubt that to compete with a propritary application is quite challenging for any FLOSS project and yet the most basic features that make discord (or slack) great to use is not implemented (and does not seem to be in the roadmap?) in Matrix: rooms! I swear I think the mere creations of different rooms would make Matrix so much better. The audio/video is really, I think, secondary to the implementations of the most basic and advanced texting features. These have been for some time, I believe, become expected by most people/users.
And yet, despite these critiques, I shall keep using Matrix and look forward to it’s future because I dare express my optimism for it’s future sucess.

The purposes of the Libre Game Night are threefold;

• one, to have a enjoyable place to hang out and play with others,

• two, to play FOSS games, including a very enjoyable 24/7 minetest server,

• three, to promote FOSS games.

In all honnesty, I think it does accomplish all three but great improvement could be made. The use of IRC and Mumble are not necessarily the best choices to wider the community, and I think this is shown through the small number of regular players, whereas the use of different software might help (there was a talk of a discord bridge, rightly rejected, but still, perhaps the existence of a non-bridge server could be beneficial). However, a better organisation would be greatly appreciated: the voting system (as perhaps a rotating system to know wich game to play, or a second day in the week having that system ?), not to mention the website and wiki seem a decade old (just like the use of IRC in a way, except that IRC has got some benefits). I also am lead to believe that a system to RSVP when one would be connected might tend to bring about a greater number of persons, as would having another night or not at least 4 different timezones. The timezones can of course be a good thing with a very large and arround the globe community, yet I do not have the sense that this needed.

On a temporary note, during the global COVID-19 lock down every night is libre game night!