Right, matrix.org is back online as of 17:00 UTC. The server is struggling a bit as it catches up. Huge apologies again for the outage; postmortem + ways to avoid a repeat will be forthcoming. See also www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/m... & www.heise.de/en/news/Matr.... Thanks all for your patience.

Memphis

This is an invitation. If you think that this is a way to operate, let me know. Let's start a group chat and see what happens.

I'm willing to bet that that kind of environment doesn't look a whole lot like Blue Sky or Twitter, where you have only 300 characters to say what you mean to say. What you realize when you start speaking to type is that that can be filled in seconds.

But where are people practicing together, not just alone talking with machines or using this as a faster way to type, but really in a group setting where people are encouraged to speak their mind without adulteration and to directly flow their thoughts into a collective consciousness.

We can put our thoughts into words in a dynamic flow, and it's also something you can learn to do better. It's not something we're practicing as much now because we sub-vocalize ideas into text using our fingers, and then we go back and edit them.

It's not just the raw words per minute of the typing versus speaking that matters. It's that we're dramatically better at speaking. It is what we've evolved to do for millions of years.

The biggest problem in my experience is that actually the recipients have trouble parsing what's been said because so much can be said so quickly like dramatically faster than you can write

You could set this up a few ways. You could have a group chat where, by convention, people are behaving this way. Or you could have a kind of application that makes it seamless for the user to do this.

I'm really fascinated by the dynamics that might arise in a group chat or asynchronous messaging system where everyone is encouraged to use speech-to-text and to do minimal correction of what they write.

There's a lot of talk about not having enough resources for science. The journals are eating them. What are they giving back to the scientific community? Is it enough to justify the cost?

The journals' propositions are becoming inappropriate. They say, "For only four months of PhD stipend, you can publish a paper that everyone can read for free online." That's something that we can do without them---If we can agree to break with their brand signaling.

It's a very hard social problem. The political and brand power of major scientific journals is overwhelming. But maybe a solid majority of us are fed up.

It will take collective action by scientists. It is possible if enough of us agree that publishers' margins indicate something very wrong and parasitic is going on.

We can end all of this. It's time for a completely open publication system. Like a preprint server, but with reviews. A system supporting these two things at once is a journal. At least, it replaces a journal with something better.