LTT recently did a video on the last model of the XServe and one of the interesting points is that it's got a self-hosted XMPP/jabber chat server (and mail/exch

LTT recently did a video on the last model of the XServe and one of the interesting points is that it's got a self-hosted XMPP/jabber chat server (and mail/exchange, VPN, time machine backup hosting, etc), and he pointed out that probably one of the reasons it died out was precisely this pivot from product/protocol focus to hosted services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4&t=760s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4&t=760s It is, after all, not like we really need slack or discord or whatever. Text chat is not complicated or resource intensive, people were hosting IRC in 1985 or whatever. Even persistent chat or web-accessible are really just minor features too in terms of resources, and you can forward some ports or set up a subdomain just like anything else. So I mean, to put this ball back in your court: I'm sure you use discord, and I'm sure your employer uses slack. Why do you pay money for that and not just host matrix yourself? Matrix comes with all the free animated emojis you can upload, and a docker container costs you how much? And Algo/Tailscale show that setup can literally be as simple as providing AWS account creds and running a script. Collectively we seem to have decided that these hosted services deliver value, even if that's simply a couple hours of an engineer's time to set up. None of us walk away from Omelas. Why is that? Everyone (even here) kinda rolls their eyes at the BSky/Mastodon folks but the fact of the matter is those are the people walking away while we pay for discord and slack and google business.