Yeah I didn’t hear about it at all. Too bad it seems it was only for high schoolers.

It seems lemmy ate my first reply to this…

Thanks for sharing the Signal group, I’ve joined it!

As for OCLUG, Richard who organized the social event usually posts to the sigs-l3go list with the invite at the start of the month https://lists.linux-ottawa.org/sigs-l3go/listinfo.html . If you have a gmail address they’ve been having a lot of issues with delivery. Google seems to block their mailing server and doesn’t even deliver mail to spam.

They also have an irc channel #oclug on OFTC. Not super active, but there are a few people who hang out there. I already use irc a lot for freedesktop related stuff, but I wish it was bridged to stuff people use more like matrix or discord.

Thanks for sharing! I had look on meetup a couple months ago to just find events in Ottawa and never saw the nerds and nachos event. I joined the meetup to get notified of future events. Doesn’t look like anything is scheduled right now. Do they use anything else to organize though? I’d prefer to avoid meetup if I can. I don’t like how they force organizer to pay for an account.

Some of the developer people from OCLUG have a social event as well on the second Tuesday of every month. I’ve been attending that, but I’m very interested in having something more project focused in the city.

I saw you signed the sheet as well, thank you!

It’s linked in the lemmy post https://ottawa.ca/en/garbage-and-recycling/waste-reduction-and-education/upcoming-events

2026 Repair Cafés are scheduled for:

Date: Saturday, February, 21
Time: 10 am to 2 pm
Location: Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre (102 Greenview Avenue)

It’s being organized by the Ottawa tool library (https://ottawatoollibrary.com/repair-cafes/)

If you’re interested in a FOSS hackfest type event I’ve put together a sign up sheet to try and get something organized https://cloud.fryzekconcepts.com/index.php/s/tyWLFqb2JQPHoH5

Hey I put together a sign up sheet to try and organize a FOSS hackfest type event where we come together to work on a FOSS project together. Please sign up if you’re interested! https://cloud.fryzekconcepts.com/index.php/s/tyWLFqb2JQPHoH5

Isn’t there also a decent tech sector in Kanata? I imagine what’s happening with AI bubble isn’t helping with hiring there.

On the plus (if you really think this is a plus), there are few defence companies in Kanata. Perhaps they will hire more with the governments increase in defence spending.

Maintaining a terminal emulator doesn’t really sound like dabbling :P Would you be interested in being part of an event like I described above? Specifically trying to copy something like Boiling the Ocean where there is some technical presentation + collaborative hacking on a few different projects?

I’ll preface saying I’m not a security expert but my understanding Is sometime in 2025 they changed the encryption scheme in matrix following a lot of disclosures of how it was broken to a new scheme that uses MLS and supports forward secrery. I haven’t seen a post yet from security experts discrediting it yet. It sounds like it still has issues from what you’re saying, about soatok disclosing some new problems with it.

On the call side they have element call instead of relying on a jisti widget (but only a few client support it). Afaik it supports encryption. They talked about it last year at the matrix conference https://cfp.2025.matrix.org/matrix-conf-2025/talk/BQZHAH/

You’re right, I was wrong about signal using MLS. I recall reading it somewhere but can’t find the source now.

As for my response, it was about forward secrecy which they do claim to have now. Yeah I wouldn’t rely on matrix E2EE right now, and until its been seriously audited and replaced with something security experts agree on.

For a discord replacement (with public not E2EE rooms) it seems to be the best replacement just because that’s where communities are right now. XMPP+OMEMO is not that interesting to me because I don’t know of any communities that are on there or other users to be a Discord replacement and its E2EE story is not as good as Signal to be a Signal replacement.

For a signal replacement I’m not sure SimpleX or Briar are there yet. SimpleX doesn’t have multi device support last time I checked which is annoying if you’re used to useing signal on your phone + desktop. Any Briar doesn’t work on IOS, so if you chat with anyone who has an iphone they are SOL.

Does matrix have forward secrery now since the switch to MLS? (I.E. the same encryption scheme Singal uses) https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/

They still have a large metadata leak that to my understanding can’t be fixed until they introduce stuff like pseudo anonymous user handles and room handles.

Not a good discord replacement but setting up nextcloud talk (simple p2p voice chat) and then the high performance backend (better supports video/voice calls between 3+ people) was relatively easy. We use it among my family now to have group calls instead of relying on facebook messenger.

If you use the AIO it comes with the high performance backend already set up afaik.

I run nextcloud using the official release without the docket AIO image, but you can just run the high performance backend from docker. This is what I do on my nextcloud server. https://arnowelzel.de/en/nextcloud-talk-high-performance-backend-with-docker

It’s pretty straightforward, just run docker container, if you use a reverse proxy much sure the signaling server is properly configured on the reverse proxy and then modify the next cloud settings to point to the self hosted HPB.

If OP wants voice and video chat like they say they’d have to host synapse and use element afaik.i don’t think any of the other home servers support matrix calling. Cinny and fluffychat don’t support voice or video calls. Fluffychat has it as an “option” but it’s currently broken last time I tried it. Schildi chat might work for voice and video since it’s an element fork. I’ve not tried it so I don’t know for sure.

Do you know if there is a more up to date description of xmpp e2ee without having to read the spec. Specifically interested in stuff like how much metadata is leaked.

IIRC only Synapse supports video/voice calls and only Element & Element X reliably work for video/voice calls.

Was this images that were auto uploading from a mobile phone? I think the bug was a permission issue in Android, if you don’t grant location access it can’t get any of the meta data of the photo (iirc).

you’re probably right as to why.

I’ll note that on my gaming desktop I decided to try out Debian instead of my usual choice of Fedora and its worked fine for gaming with latest gen CPU and GPU. I did install the steam flatpak which will have a newer version of Mesa. I think this is a good middle ground for a system you don’t want to mess with too much.

I thought that was strange to but here’s what they say on their website that makes it sound like you wont be charged for DDoS or bots

How We Count unique IPs (UIP)

The total number of unique IPs is tallied based on total number of legitimate individual IP addresses at the end of the calendar month. If a reader visits your website every day from the same IP address, that will equal 1 unique visitor for that calendar month, no matter how often they visit your website.

Unique is fair

Other providers might charge you based on website hits, website visits, megabytes of bandwidth, services offered and many other metrics. Some providers charge premiums during attacks. We opt for fair, consistent and predictable low-cost pricing that serves our clients fairly. Malicious bots or traffic generated during an attack are not something that you will pay for either, as these IPs will not be counted in your monthly pricing.

You can try switching to a Canadian accent, it’s pretty similar to the American accent as long as you aren’t going for a French Canadian or newfound land accent. Also writing Canada sometimes uses British spelling and sometimes uses American depending on the word.