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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • TL;DR: F-Droid isn’t referring to that, but yes, the app requires an API key for a paid service to perform unlimited requests.

    Long answer:

    When using the expression “non-free”, F-Droid refers to something not being free software, where the term “free” doesn’t refer to its price (free as in beer), but to it giving its users freedom to do what they want to with it (free as in speech).

    However, this application in particular relies on a service called AudD, which is a paid service based on the number of API requests done. So while the F-Droid “anti-feature” list doesn’t refer to its price, this app still relies on a paid service and requires an API key upon launch (although it seems you can do a limited number of requests without one).
















  • XMPP is a protocol for decentralised chats, allowing people registered on different servers to chat with people on other servers, kind of similar to how email works (and Lemmy of course).

    Google Talk was a service by Google which started with XMPP support, letting users from other XMPP servers chat with Google Talk users. Google Talk was always slightly different from the XMPP standard, due to having proprietary code in its backend, leading to chats between Talk users working flawlessly but not between XMPP and Talk users. Slowly, Google Talk became more popular than the other servers.

    Eventually, XMPP server-to-server support was removed as part of their transition to Hangouts, meaning once Talk users switched to it, XMPP users would no longer be able to chat with them and would have to switch to Hangouts. While XMPP still exists today, it’s definitely a niche nowadays, and this is part of the reason.

    Edit: proper paragraphs