Five years ago, a open-source project I worked on moved to Zulip (from Slack) and it was a small hurdle. But after a month, I really like it!

So much that I’ve pushed a few other open source projects (who lived on Discord).

I was really surprised when I started a new job two years ago and THEY used a self-hosted Zulip. It’s everything Im used to on Slack.

Discord has team speak/video sharing, which I don’t think Zulip has. But then again, we use something else for video calls.

For e2ee, neither does Discord, nor Stoat, which is what most of these comments are pushing people towards.

What was the problem with Zulip on mobile did you have?

I only use it for text chat, so I’m curious.

It does lead to slippery slopes. First, it’s to block “adult content”.

Then, they’ll consider certain topics “adult”. News about current events? LGBT content? Video games with some violence in it?

Facebook is an example of this slippery slope. And for parts of the country, they do need to scan an ID.

Back in mah day as a teen in 1999 who didn’t have parent supervision, I went on the internet and learned HTML to update my geocities page with more pictures of anime and hotties.

I downloaded 4 songs and it took me 10 minutes a piece, and one of them ended in .exe.

I played web games that didn’t know how to make money so sometimes they’d beg people to give them money or put banner ads all over the place.

The I found some cool software on Usenet. It was broken in 80 rar files (I am still testrunning winrar), and when I unzipped it, it was corrupted.

Then I reached out to my AIM/ICQ to chat with a 22-yo man pretending to be a teenager and cyber’d with them. But before I got to anything good, my mom picks up the phone and my connection dropped.

My favorite part about the commend that Windows is poor quality software is the part where Satya Nadella bragged about how as much as 30% of windows is written by AI

1. Turn on monitor.
2. Sudo su
3. Copying and pasting terminal commands I find off the Internet
4. Living life to the fullest.

Thinkpads running Linux for the staff.

We use open-source. Our own on-prem servers running Linux. A lot of our software is also open source. Our git, our office suite, our video and chat… All open source.

We just got rid of our Google Cloud connections a few months ago, but we’re still reliant on aws, cloudflare, etc.

Give me a week long battery.

I got a Chromebook that lasts like seven days sleeping and 30 hours that I booted with Linux. It has headphone jacks. It has three USB ports. It also cost like $300.

It was awesome for light coding and browsing, and lasted 10 years.

Still got sweats going, “Eww it’s notApple/isGoogle/cantplayCrysis/cant3DModelWhileWatching4K.”

“… And that is how I used React as a database language.”

~me presenting at a conference in 2026

I read it twice and it felt like word salad.

I try not to let considerations get in the way of doing great work.

This is what makes me laugh so much. I had an argument a few years ago with a guy who shat on low-powered PCs because his gaming rig was 100 times more powerful.

And like dude, this shit isn’t for you. The world doesn’t revolve around your needs.

Now I got boobs and I’m hot.

This is the energy everyone needs in their life. You go girl.

These platforms are a gateway drug to open source.

I got more folks into Linux using Reddit than I have anywhere else.

Ooof, yeah reading their comments, I agree.

OP, if you’re reading this, start even smaller. Not everything has to be right in your house.

I been deploying web apps since 2010, and I jumped right into self hosting during the pandemic and it was a massive headache or challenges I wasn’t prepared to face or maintain.

I gave up (for now) and just used open-source apps and AWS, because I needed availability. And every few months, I do a bit more to one day move everything to pure self hosting.

Like you can use any of these characters from Tekken. Or any of the characters from Squid Game. I guess any Kdrama could work too, but it might be too random.

This was my mistake when I started self hosting a few years ago!

I went all-in on FOSS. And my God, it was constantly a maintenance nightmare for some apps. Some would break with updates. Some times I felt I was playing wackamole replacing one set of problems with new ones.

Then I met a swlf-hoster who has been doing self hosting for two decades and he helped he unfuck my stuff by recommending commercial and paid services. And honestly, it was awesome because I’m too old for this shit. I just want working services.

It’s a fucking web app. Make sure it works for a browser. You suck as a web developer if your shit web app needs to work on a specific OS.

And those are fighting words because I build web apps.

Theres a dark pattern where a service makes you fill out a form, choose your actions, get to 95% done and then hits you with a Credit card request, assuming you already made it this far.

Who are they fooling?