@matt It looks like the source repo is archived, with a comment at the top of the readme: https://github.com/NickColley/semaphore

It says it'll remain available as https://semaphore-social.vercel.app/ for as long as that doesn't cost money, but it sounds like it won't get any new features.

@GerryT @ebassi selections are the inter-app data transfer mechanism of X11. They are used to implement the clipboard, middle click paste, and drag and drop.

An application can request ownership of a selection, which will cause the previous owner to be notified it has lost ownership. It advertises that the data is available in one or more formats (e.g. plain text, images, html, etc).

Other applications can check the advertised formats and request that the selection be converted to one of them. The selection owner then sends the data in that format to the requesting app.

The way middle click paste worked was that an app would request the PRIMARY selection when the user selected something, and other apps would convert this selection when middle clicking.

The other part of the system was that if an app lost ownership of PRIMARY, it was expected to unselect whatever the user had selected previously. If they don't do this part, then the user can't tell what text would be pasted by the middle mouse button.

@ebassi @GerryT It was understandable back when apps implemented the other half of the protocol. Namely unselecting text once they lose ownership of PRIMARY.

Once apps started to keep showing selected text without owning PRIMARY, the model broke down. And I'm not sure the people asking for middle click paste would even want this part to change.

@ebassi While privilege separation is obviously the right choice, I can kind of understand why people keep on going for the "run desktop app as root" approach: it is a lot easier to do things the wrong way.

If you're building a graphical app that runs as root, it is quite easy to run the app from the build directory without installing it.

To go the privilege separation route, you're going to need to install at least the D-Bus policy files and Polkit action files. It could probably do with some more tutorial style documentation of current best practices here.