Good to know, thanks!

Ah that must be it sorry. I thought they had decorelated phone numbers and IDs

Groups have an encryption key that I guess you receive from other members upon joining.

Spaces is an underused feature that I hope see gain more traction! It makes Matrix a credible competitor to Slack and Discord

Not really, have used it for years like that. But you need to set it up initially on your phone. The newish feature (less than a year) is that I think they do not require a phone number to set up a new account.

That’s really interesting! It shows which communities share users. I am part of jlai.lu, a french-speaking community that is relatively isolated by also slrpnk.net that seems very spread out!

Would it make sense to compute the standard deviation of each instance’s communities? It would give an idea of which are islands and which are more extended. Not sure if it makes sense to compute it more on 2 dimensions or on the original 21934 though.

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I’d have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.

I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked “hardware guy” who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.

On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.

So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that’s a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.

Someone asked something similar in reddit a few days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1amqzc4/foss_for_selforganizing_groups/

Does Walmart have a monopoly on kinder chocolate? The idea is to have several distributors each with as complete a catalog as possible. Having such a shattered offers between platforms makes it very noncompetitive against any piracy solution.