จLUG

Currently none, but once some members join the group, I would assume we would have informal meetups for dinner or coffee to geek out. At a certain critical mass we could consider meetings with more structure such as presentations.

Me, toastal.

Check out the XMPP & เอกซ์เอ็มพีพี on Wikipedia for a general overview. Or the Ok, but what is XMPP? video another overview.

A small community like this is not difficult to organize via existing mailing lists or chat applications. Facebook & Meetup are proprietary service that require accounts where users agree to and adhere to their ToS rather than defining our own terms; these platforms are also known for their user data collection practices that we should not expose our members to. In the longer term, I would like to host a Movim or Libervia instance that would allow a cental spot for long-term posts & events, but crucially, such a platform would be self-hosted & allow decentralized registration & activity which encourages others to self-host & own their user data.

IRC would be a more accessible chat system, but it’s very limited in feature set (some addressed by IRCv3, but uptake is not widespread).

• Centalized chat so members can’t join from their own servers
• Usernames have to be ASCII so no Thai characters or otherwise
• No label collisions between users, rooms, etc.
• Less media sharing options (requires a maintaing a separate pastebin, image uploader, etc. or using a third-party)
• No rosters for maintaining friendships outside IRC
• No encryption (MUCs generally aren’t encrypted but OMEMO encryption is normal in DMs)

Matrix, is newer but

• Matrix Foundation controls specification, reference clients, reference server, & largest server which stores all the metadata leading to…
• Defacto centralization around Matrix.org
• Hardware requirements for clients / servers are much higher making them ill-suited for low-spec self-hosting
• JSON is not an extensible format compared to XML which makes extending it in the future more difficult

LINE, Messenger, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, etc.

• Proprietary, closed-source
• Centralized
• Probably has backdoors in the encryption for the government
• Selling your personal data
• Community must agree to their terms of services
• Community not really in control of its moderation

Perhaps in the future a bridge could be added, but this would add to the server’s resource usage + requires reaching a common denominator on featureset which can be quite limiting. XMPP clients/servers are minimal & consume few system resources so it shouldn’t get in the way of most folks’ other activities. In the future, existing platforms like Movim or Libervia could be built atop this existing server/service with all sorts of community-focused features without requiring new accounts for more services like those for ActivityPub, etc..