Great - as long as it’s a web app.

Yes, all good points. I did mention points 2 and 3, and I agree they’re all important.

Very thorough and informative article (even if from an interested source).

IMO the fact that even Switzerland is going here should tell us that the privacy camp is not really winning this whole argument.

And personally I’m even slightly divided on it myself. If we look at this through the lens of legacy offline equivalence, there was never a guarantee of privacy in the pre-encryption era, even in democracies. For two people corresponding with each other, the police have always been able to ask for warrants to spy on mail and tap phone calls. In practice, privacy depended more on obscurity, and the fact that data-mining phone calls and mail was not possible. Now take a group chat with 1000 people - to ask for total privacy for such a conversation in the pre-internet time was just a logistical impossibility. These are the “common-sense” arguments that the police and - let’s face it - many ordinary people today find pretty persuasive. Countering them is going to be hard. Especially since there clearly are cases where bad stuff is plotted in the secrecy of encrypted spaces. Organized crime of all kinds, terrorist attacks, even genocide (over Whatsapp in Myanmar and elsewhere). To win this argument, we’re going to need convincing answers for all this.

One good answer is that (as I understand it) human intelligence (i.e. infiltration) has always been more effective for police than the “lazy” option of signals intelligence.

Then there’s the natural expectation of privacy argument. IMO this is very persuasive for 2-person conversations. Personally I find it absolutely outrageous that some policeman, for purposes of “public safety”, could just listen in to my private conversation with a single friend. Maybe this is a Western mindset. I’m not sure that in China everyone feels this way.

But a total guarantee of privacy for group conversations of 10, 1000, 1 million? Perhaps. But among the general public that argument is yet to be won.

As I recall, a major reason it didn’t take off was very simple: the new “Sunday” only came every 10 days instead of 7!

The best bit about it was definitely the evocative month names.

13! A prime number indivisible into anything. Ugh!

Exactly. Let’s wait and see.

Source is Meta itself, so perhaps not a good overview of the story.

The two third parties mentioned have not even launched yet. .And the “Join the waitlist” buttons on their websites look suspiciously similar.

Would be interesting to understand better what’s going on here. Lots of us are waiting patiently for a way to interact with the billions of Whatsapp users without accepting (as they carelessly do) a contractual relationship with Meta.

Yes, this was predictable. Breaking encryption was always a non-starter, it makes no sense even in theory. The real threat has always been client-side spyware. And technical fixes (like FOSS OSs) are band-aids, in the end they won’t be enough, given that computing solutions will always be tailored to the majority, and most people just don’t care much about privacy.

This is going to be an uphill battle given the monoculture of the mobile OS landscape - i.e. it’s a duopoly of corporate giants vulnerable to arm-twisting by governments. It’s winnable IMO but only if people resist cynicism. In the West we still have a measure of individual freedom, this is absolutely not the case in much of the world. Many people, especially younger people, seem to be unaware of this. If we’re gonna save these freedoms while it’s still possible we need to wake up and get more involved in politics. Unfortunately there’s no other choice.

I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.

Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.

Years (and years) ago, I used it for a while. I kept getting locked out of my email (GMX) account. The messages DeltaChat creates are obviously full of cyphertext, and to a spam filter they look very spammy.

The DeltaChat concept is an interesting idea, and clearly a sort of progress, but it’s also a bit of a hack. As a stopgap solution, fine, but I say the day we can replace Signal is the day that Matrix becomes usable. I wish that day would come sooner.

Since when did I claim to be “passionate” about anything? My proposal concerns new users, it’s in the title. I’m not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it’s important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.

You’re an argumentative fellow! I’m still not sure exactly what it is you’re disagreeing with. My proposal is pretty boring and inoffensive. Everything’s in the post. But if you disagree, that’s fine.

Servers are communities.

No they’re not. Communities have “c/” in front of their name. I’m sure you know that already.

You’re just saying I should practice what I preach and get off LW, is that it? Can’t be bothered, but fair enough. My proposal here concerns new users.

Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.

Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).

What youre asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.

People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.

You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?

That’s exactly what they’re saying - and believing - about you. Meanwhile they have the power. Good luck.

Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.

This - IMO - is the kind of thinking that has got US politics into the state it’s in today.