Element X is quite good now (note the X, not the classic ‘Element’). Fluffychat’s good too but missing some features.

Incorrect. Technically Matrix is a protocol, and a forum client can be made. You already have some PoC social media ones. It just so happens that most well known clients at this time and for instant messaging. But it can be much more.

In the current pseudo-capitalist world economy, the rich do help in pushing a circular economy, in a variety of industries. If the rich are too taxed they’ll more easily leave the country and move elsewhere. Your country loses a lot of its GDP. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but it’s also how the government of today runs, where everything is run on credit and paid for later.

Lean-governments are possible, but in such a case a government can never spend more than its GDP produces. No government would go that way right now, mainly because people aren’t educated enough to make a decent argument for it, verbally or otherwise.

Your country either welcomes the rich, or answers to the IMF.

In summary//TL;DR: In a credit-based, credit-ran, loan-promised economy, greatly successful small and medium businesses are not enough to keep GDP high enough to pay off national debt.

There are some good Matrix community, on matrix.org as well as individually run homeservers (federated).

Leaving a comment here on behalf of HIMYM: Bowl.

Just to make it clear to any other people reading this, Jellyfin has Group Sync where you can create groups with participants and syncplay media.

Odysee did/does something interesting where if one uses the desktop client, the video gets streamed and cached, and then seeded back over a configurable amount of time. I could see creator’s communities being self-sustainable this way.

Self-hosted Matrix.

It still needs polish, but it’s on a good path. Meanwhile others are centralized by a single authority with an easy target painted on them for government coercion along with multiple other attack surfaces, and even information easily traced to PII. Also, not everything is encrypted. A lot of metadata is left out of E2EE. And those servers/providers have that data.

By contrast, a drop in the ocean is far more likely to not be targetted from the outset, making pretty much any matrix server (potentially with the exception of the matrix.org one, but it’s ok to treat it as a demo anyway) a really good choice in that sense.

Ah I see. Did you change the lobby URL in the config file? There’s a config file with a lobby URL, you need to change it to point to the correct lobby where servers will show. Or is that what you with the changing the default server?

Edit: Just checking, are you running at least version 2.65? Also, I mentioned changing the config file, I’ve just been reminded the file is downloaded separately and then just replaced, no need to change it. I’ll DM the unofficial “official” guide from the forums.

I’m also on Linux. Ensure you have docker and docker-compose installed. IIRC you also need the windows server files# . I’ll get back to you with my server compose file.

Not strictly the same, but one of the most amazing feats to me in this topic was done by the Sacred community over at DarkMatters.

Apoligies for the wall of text, but I consider it worth a read.

Sacred 2 in particular never had its server code open sourced, leaked, or anything of the like as the studio went bankrupt before anything could happen, this was around 2010.

Over the course of a decade a few volunteer devs would pick up a project where using tools like wireshark etc they’d essentially sniff traffic sent by a client attempting connection to a server that didn’t exist, and using this, devs would literally try to GUESS what a server would respond, and what a client expected, essentially trying to build out the backend infrastructure from SCRATCH.

Fast forward to 2020 or so and progress was still being made, not only that but things were beginning to actually take shape. In 2021 (IIRC) one dev in particular had the general frame of a working server and continued to work on it. Fast-forward and since 2022-23, you’re able to run both a LOBBY for multiple servers and an actual GAME SERVER yourself, self-hosted and code is open.

I’ve ran a couple servers using docker since, where I played with friends, and being able to replay that childhood game, with friends, one I thought I’d never be able to share the experience for, is a dream come true.

Another neat thing is that it was reverse-engineered in windows, but the docker containers literally run WINE to translate windows calls to Linux and it just works.

Knowing I’m able to in 2,5,10,30 years pick this up, and not only that, but replay with friends means this work of art has a great chance at preservation.

If you’re into power metal, there’s a band called Blind Guardian, they not only did they the main theme for the game, but the band’s members have an entire quest-line in-game that culminates with an in-game concert. Again, a work of art worth preserving, and now, it can be shared.