Micro on Jan Kremer

Email

mail@jankremer.de (Jan Kremer) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:46:52 +0100

It’s a shame we don’t have ubiquitous decentralized chat equivalent to email. I know Matrix and XMPP exist, but neither are complete enough. And they dont’t have a lot of users.

Discord

mail@jankremer.de (Jan Kremer) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:45:02 +0100

Since Discord announced it will start asking users for age verification, I became obsessed with reading about alternatives to the platform. And there are a lot of them. As a self-hoster, I immediately thought of Matrix and XMPP. Both have their pros and cons and different implementations.

I was almost ready to pick one of them when I stopped and thought to myself, would I really use them?

And my answer is a clear: No!

I will not replace Discord because I don’t even use Discord now. I haven’t had an account there for years. When I message my friends, it’s either on Signal, WhatsApp, or iMessage, which are all end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) messengers. The only thing I’m waiting for is E2EE RCS (Rich Communication Services) so I can ditch WhatsApp at some point.

Markdown Tables Suck

mail@jankremer.de (Jan Kremer) — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 16:28:52 +0100

Tables are arguably the worst part of Markdown. No horizontal lines except for the mandatory one at the top. The only feature is the possibility to align cells.

Org Mode does much better, but isn’t perfect either.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to have a simple tool for simple tables. But sometimes I need more customizability.

Use Timestamps

mail@jankremer.de (Jan Kremer) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 10:12:30 +0100

Every blog post should include a timestamp. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline.

Also, don’t make me look for the date. Put the date as obvious as possible, preferably at the beginning of the post.

I was reading Julia Evans post about nix and it was not immediately clear to me if this was a recent post. Only when I copied the URL to complain about it I discovered the date there. Safari hides most of the URL by default.