• 105 Posts
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月12日

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  • Ik ben met reddit gestopt, maar eigenlijk los van Lemmy. Was eigenlijk wel prima om daar minder tijd te besteden.

    In die zin is het ook een beetje een voordeel dat Lemmy kleiner is; eigenlijk kijk ik daar één keer per dag, en dan is het prima. Als ik het onverhoopt nog een keer open, dan ben ik er zo weer weg, omdat ik het al heb gezien.








  • Re: “Signal technically cannot know your social graph” (…)

    I would go into the specific points, but really none of this invalidates my main point that Signal is a marked step forward, seems to be having some success, and that undermining that success is therefore misguided. Heck, Signal might be a stepping stone to people using whatever decentralised system you prefer! I was around in WhatsApp’s early days, and never adopted it, because the picture was never as rosy as Signal’s. Of course, it did become significantly worse when Facebook acquired it, but that happens to be exactly the thing that can’t easily happen to Signal.

    I will say that I agree that nothing is eternal, but that’s no reason to encourage people to stay on WhatsApp (which is what disparaging Signal use will actually achieve).

    No, in a decentralized system, (…) you can be your own service provider

    My point was that you’ll be communicating with people each of whom chose their own service poviders, and thus you’re also trusting those.







  • Signal can update the client to reveal your social graph, sure, but right now, Signal technically cannot know your social graph. And there’s two additional layers that make that more likely, which is incentives: being a non-profit, they have no shareholders that would push them to try to look into them, and their primary selling point being privacy, they also have more to lose by doing so. Neither of those apply to WhatsApp. Oh, and a third one: they’d have been in contempt of court, which specifically requested access to such data, and Signal did not provide it because they were not able to.

    (I will also say that, in a decentralised communication system, you are reliant on every party you communicate with, and the tools they use, to not expose such data about you either. It’s not a panacea.)

    Again, it my not be as big a step forward as you’d like, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that this is not a way forward.

    And given that it’s not unlikely that larger steps forward may not be possible at all, or would be reliant on us collectively taking smaller steps forward first, I would definitely reconsider putting active effort into discouraging Signal use. Especially if you’re not putting at least a multitude more effort into discouraging use of the incumbents.






  • any valid criticism against WhatsApp can be identically transposed to Signal

    There’s plenty of criticism that only applies to WhatsApp:

    • Your social graph is visible to Meta,
    • other metadata is unencrypted,
    • it’s controlled by a for-profit company,
    • and that company already has its fingers in way too much of our communication infrastructure,
    • and that company seems to be kowtowing to a (foreign, for some of us) government with ethics in direct conflict with some my own, more than they are legally required to.

    I’m not against XMPP, Matrix, or whatever, but let’s not pretend that Signal is not a significant improvement, and one that actually has a shot at success here.