The consideration you should pay to other software should depend on your power and influence in the network.

If PixelFed was dominant in the fediverse, and other apps did feel the need for a dummy pic workaround, that would clearly be a problem. No client feels the need to do that because PixelFed is not dominant, but if it was, it would be fine to criticise them for not “playing nice” and helping the rest of the ecosystem.

I think there’s much more scope to criticise Mastodon for the workarounds other software have to use to be interoperable, than PixelFed, purely because of its power in the network.

We need different apps to experiment and work out what users want. It’s totally fine to experiment with different models and ways to view content. Only when you have a lot of influence over the ecosystem should you have extra responsibility.

This would kill bridges like slidge. They authenticate to WhatsApp using the web interface and that token lasts about two weeks before you have to relink it. A limit of six hours would make it unusable.

Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister for me. Despite all the scheming the humour is so good-natured throughout.

Repology might kinda help for your use case. It lets you search for software that is packaged on many different “families” of distributions. You can also filter by category.

Admittedly it does kinda depends on your definition of popularity. But it’s good at answering these questions:

• Is this widely regarded as free software?
• Has it been around for a while?
• Is it useful enough to have been packaged in many places?

I run a prosody server and have a couple of users who run Monal, and notifications work reliably for us!

I made sure to follow the considerations for server admins and it’s been ok.

Regarding the push service: unless you deploy your own version of the app, it’s not possible to self-host your own push service. The flow looks like this:

XMPP server -> Monal pushserver -> Apple pushserver -> Device

Apple only allows the developer of the app to send notifications to their push server. They enforce this by giving the app developer a key specific to their app.

The linkage between XMPP server and Monal pushserver gets set up by Monal: when it connects to the XMPP server, it instructs it to send messages while it is offline to the Monal pushserver.

They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it’s not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.

It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.

I use podget, which is a 248 kB bash script. I really like it, and think it will meet your requirements:

• It’s designed to be called from cron
• It lets you sort your podcasts into categories
• It automatically organises the downloads into different directories based on these categories
• It’s been around since 2005 and is still maintained

From its description:

Podget is a simple podcast aggregator optimized for running as a scheduled background job (i.e. cron). It features support for downloading podcasts from RSS & ATOM XML feeds, for sorting the files into folders & categories, for importing URLs from iTunes PCAST files & OPML lists automatic M3U & ASX playlist creation, and automatic cleanup of old files.

It also features automatic UTF-16 conversion for podcasts hosted on MS Windows servers.

I have read so many posts like this, that try to explain why their company is a special case and why it could never happen to them, only to see the same thing happen again and again.

Tailscale are trying to insert themselves into the stack and become the go-to choice for this kind of networking. When their customers are dependent on it, of course they’ll start extracting rent and capturing as much as they can.

That’s their right, but it’s also a little condescending to pretend otherwise.

As a note of caution, I used Oracle’s free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven’t had any issues for 2+ years now.