Christopher

Not a bad recommendation, but I disagree.

Rocket chat is just as heavy (in fact, it federates to Matrix), uses MongoDB, and has steadily pulled features behind a paywall for years. To me, if I’m hosting the service on my own machines and I’m not using their live support, the idea of paying for the privilege of using it is absurd.

Matrix has come a long way, including integrated voice and video chats.

Yes indeed. It’s now failing. 😞

Man, this kind of sucks.

I wrote a nifty script a few years ago that pulls the popularity metric of a song, converts that to a star rating, and writes that to a tag with Mutagen. At a glance I can see the hits. If I like the track, I’ll “love” it (side stepping the need for a personal rating). It’s a system that’s been serving me well for a long time.

Locking down APIs does seem to be the trend. I’m not sure I’ll look to adapt.

Giving money to Spotify is out of the question, but I may pay for Deezer or something.