58: Where Can You Engage with Fedora?

So there probably could not be a time in history, Eric, where it's more important than ever to have a unified communication platform.

There are all manner of different social media entities that are putting all manner of restrictions.

And if you look around the world, countries are making the decision to ban and or to restrict who can say what and on what platform.

And so Matrix, if you haven't heard about it, is a decentralized communication platform that was started for the expressed purpose of federated communications.

What do I mean by federated communications? So if you look at, for example, email, you might be Eric at the IT guy, and I might be Noah at Ask Noah Show, but we can email each other together.

And that's been true, Eric, for decades.

30 plus years we've been able to do that we knew that that was a possibility we knew that the world could function like that and yet we traded that reality for an alternative reality in which if your organization uses microsoft teams and my organization uses slack we can't talk to each other and so that idea of federation or that idea moving from one organization to the other didn't really hold true when it came to instant messaging.

And I have personally been through, let's see here, we started with IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Then it went to, I guess, Facebook Messenger for a while, Steam Messenger, Viber, Telegram.

And finally, so in every one of these transitions, yeah, Discord, thank you.

Every one of these transitions, I lost people.

There were people that I made connections with or people, friends that I made, and I lost connection with them.

Somewhere in there is SMS.

Matrix seeks to solve all of that in part because they did something really interesting that I think that Lotus Notes did back in the day, or well, Microsoft did back in the day when they were trying to take over for Lotus Notes.

What they did was they provided backwards compatibility.

So you could open your Lotus Notes spreadsheets inside of Excel.

And so Matrix is kind of doing the same thing where it allows you to be backwards compatible.

So you're a Fedora community member.

You're really used to IRC.

That's okay.

There is a way to bridge Matrix back to IRC.

You like your IRC client? That's okay.

There's a way to use WeChat, for example, with a Matrix server.

And so what...

Essentially, all of these projects, to include Fedora, have centralized around Matrix, and they're moving to Matrix for real-time communication.

So, really easy to get started.

So there probably could not be a time in history, Eric, where it's more important than ever to have a unified communication platform.

There are all manner of different social media entities that are putting all manner of restrictions.

And if you look around the world, countries are making the decision to ban and or to restrict who can say what and on what platform.

And so Matrix, if you haven't heard about it, is a decentralized communication platform that was started for the expressed purpose of federated communications.

What do I mean by federated communications? So if you look at, for example, email, you might be Eric at the IT guy, and I might be Noah at Ask Noah Show, but we can email each other together.

And that's been true, Eric, for decades.

30 plus years we've been able to do that we knew that that was a possibility we knew that the world could function like that and yet we traded that reality for an alternative reality in which if your organization uses microsoft teams and my organization uses slack we can't talk to each other and so that idea of federation or that idea moving from one organization to the other didn't really hold true when it came to instant messaging.

And I have personally been through, let's see here, we started with IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Then it went to, I guess, Facebook Messenger for a while, Steam Messenger, Viber, Telegram.

And finally, so in every one of these transitions, yeah, Discord, thank you.

Every one of these transitions, I lost people.

There were people that I made connections with or people, friends that I made, and I lost connection with them.

Somewhere in there is SMS.

Matrix seeks to solve all of that in part because they did something really interesting that I think that Lotus Notes did back in the day, or well, Microsoft did back in the day when they were trying to take over for Lotus Notes.

What they did was they provided backwards compatibility.

So you could open your Lotus Notes spreadsheets inside of Excel.

And so Matrix is kind of doing the same thing where it allows you to be backwards compatible.

So you're a Fedora community member.

You're really used to IRC.

That's okay.

There is a way to bridge Matrix back to IRC.

You like your IRC client? That's okay.

There's a way to use WeChat, for example, with a Matrix server.

And so what...

Essentially, all of these projects, to include Fedora, have centralized around Matrix, and they're moving to Matrix for real-time communication.

So, really easy to get started.