Morgan Eckroth

It’s about God damn time. They have known about these problems for years. The travesty of this story is that it has taken this long.

Unfortunately, I say this as a train lover. They require a lot more infrastructure than planes and will always be at a disadvantage because of that. You can set up an airport pretty much anywhere and make it reachable by pretty much anyone. Whereas with the train, you need a dedicated line from point to point that you will commit to maintaining through hell and high water.

There’s also the problem that in many countries, we are deliberately neglecting our train infrastructure and not investing in high speed alternatives that could compete with an airline over shorter distances.

All of these factors combine to make individual trips less efficient over train. I had to cross the United States this week. To do so by train would have taken me 4 days. Doing so by plane took me 6 hours. Nobody would choose a 4-day trip over a 6-hour one unless their goal is to look out the window a lot. Which is perfectly valid. But most people don’t look at traveling itself as the experience. And in this case, I had a particular event that I had to attend.

Personally, I like the way the haiku project does it. They have a bar with how much they need on the website and as they get more donations, the bar starts filling up. I think the most important thing is to be transparent about your costs.

I was interested until he brought up that matrix was just a reinvention of an existing idea. no, xmpp cannot do everything that matrix can. have you ever tried getting consistency of history in xmpp? it’s absolute garbage. his warnings about the fediverse are on point though. I do wonder if matrix will end up suffering the same fate when Reddit offers to federate with them. The matrix protocol is already brittle as it is, and compatibility even between good faith implementations of existing servers is hard.