then you don’t understand Capitalism

…and American “democracy” and their “constitution”.

I mean people seem to forget it was founded by a bunch of folks who were not driven by the fervour for the motherland or their fellow humans and their emancipation …. but they wanted “the freedom” (no no no, not the “freedom” freedom) but freedom from taxes, freedom to own and trade slaves, freedom to massacre the “native Americans” and entirely disenfranchise them (if somehow they escaped the massacres), freedom to make a capitalist world where the few rich literally and legally own the majority poor and middle class (via owning the resources and power) - so the American freedom! It’s vastly different from what freedom is/was considered in the rest of the world.

• If you have a targeted group/peer need then whatever they are using or whatever you all decide right in the beginning - I’d suggest Matrix or some other decentralised alternative, definitely not Signal.
  • Matrix had the huge opportunity to be “the messaging app” but they neither became good at corporate usage and definitely ended up sucking at personal usage. They started doing too many things, at once, and while completely ignoring the individual user.
• If you want a wider general acceptance then sadly Matrix is DoA. WhatsApp becomes a huge choice outside USA and China but it has started becoming shittier by the day and looking at who has become WhatsApp’s global head now, I don’t think it’s gonna get any better (check his last “app” or company’s screenshots and come here if you don’t end up vomiting). So Signal or maybe some other similar app. You are limited by societal trends and acceptance here, not the tech or finesse or privacy of an app.
• If you just want privacy and a simpler app, proven (at least so far), then well Signal it is, as much as I hate it for reasons they decided to make it a centralised messaging app and then stuffed crypto in it etc.

And to add insult to the injury they will then be asked to be “nicer” and will be blamed for not getting enough tips. I mean for heaven’s sake NL, don’t become a hellhole, even though it’d be a richer hellhole. And mind it, “overall” richer, not everybody richer, oh no, oh no! Very few will become massively richer and a lot will start becoming drastically poorer (just look at the big beautiful Gaad’s own nation).

Then they will come for the housing and health and other benefits that the citizens and residents are entitled to, whatever there is.

Remind me again… is the right wing (populism etc) getting a foothold in the NL (like in DE) by any chance?

See…. when the software hub for the world is just one nation (and that too the most powerful, the most corrupt, in fact with legal corruption, and has been the single most devastating nation to this planet - indirectly and directly, with a leader at the helm who is… well let’s not get into that… … yada yada) then the risk is not just someday your banking system and emails stop working, these are far greater and insidious risks.

This is how societies are broken and then taken apart.

My best breakups have been when I didn’t wait for the best or right time to break up. Because once you are there, even if you wait, you know it’s never going to be the right time; it will only fester and fester until your entirety is gradually dragged into an existential sepsis.

That’s absurd coming from the founder of a FOSS messaging app who actively decided not to let Signal federate and rejected any other open source Signal client. Not only that, even now you can’t truly use Signal’s new “username” feature. If any of the recipients have your number stored in their phonebook, irrespective of whether you know them or not, the username goes for a toss. This was/is the problem with Telegram’s username feature. Signal knew this and still decided to go ahead with it. Not to mention never doing anything about completely removing the phone number from the account after its creation. This has been, by design, a privacy and hence safety threat, and even after the username feature was implemented, this not getting implemented is very concerning.

A lot of these “privacy sensitive” service providers are actually quite user-hostile.

Find a middle ground - get your own domain (pick a good registrar) and find a respectable mail host that has a support team with accountability who don’t treat you like a burden on this planet when you attempt to contact them (i.e not Tuta, not Mailbox-org - nope!!!, not Proton etc.). Do not go overboard with DMARC/etc in the beginning. Go about it slowly.

Also - make sure you use a service that lets you connect via an IMAP/POP client. It pains me to say that, but if you start avoiding services based on “five eyes” and “14 eyes” and “195 eyes”, I’m pretty sure we will be looking at pigeons and corked bottles in the sea. So, if you need E2EE over email - please use E2EE in the email using GPG on your own. I’d highly recommend not falling for the privacy theatre of the likes of Proton.

It’s one of those organic produce items among the Internet things which happens to be in vogue these days.

• By forcing you to use a non-anonymous Google Account.
• Then tying it with Google Play Services on that device.
• Google Play Services are like a combo of arteries and nerves of Android OS.

That’s how.

That’s the opposite of minimalism, I’d argue. I would consider minimalism as: having less, keeping/retaining less, and also, and in my opinion – more important, doing less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4 this is just an example as he is kinda famous. But you can find more. Here’s two seasoned journos talking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4682YUnN_yQ and this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TXokRjBVSaA (I don’t like this journo to be honest but it’s another example of very common Indian accent - hers is actually less sophisticated as the previous ones have had kinda more “private school” upbringing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha-LoNqOaEk few examples of subcontinent English

It is actually nice when the person has better language proficiency in English. What people often make fun of on the Internet are many who either don’t know how to speak English or don’t know it well, and that’s pretty common and normal for that country of 1.5 billion. If you listen to any seasoned Indian journalist (especially a bit older), you’d hear that faint old English lilt (from the middle of the start of the last century). You will also find that in the way Pakistanis speak English. It’s very similar.

I like most or all of them when the speaker has at least above-average proficiency. Except American. Esp. the one that rolls a lot and for long (probably from the South of the USA, I am not sure). That’s what makes it very hard for me to watch/hear most of the American content.

My favourite, though, is from my home country, which has a very slight tinge of (old) British accent (colonial leftover/hangover) and also the Middle Eastern accent (it’s close to home), again only if the speaker has very good proficiency.

The thing is most of my gold (i.e. ~20% of my portfolio) is as ETFs. Good luck to me using that when civilisation collapses, if it does (I don’t think that’s happening in the shape and form as it sounds from this article). But then it was not likely at all I would be able to safeguard that in the physical gold form either in that perceived atmosphere of tyranny and mayhem, so that’s there.

One could, however, look to reduce or balance (whatever you wanna call it) USD exposure.

There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.

And then there’s the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: “Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can’t you?” completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.

The number of times I have used TikTok in my life is the integer just below 1.

(And now I am getting a sense of what that “other kind” of echo chamber these platforms are becoming as opposed to that kind of echo chamber Twitter etc are)

I mean the damn thing is banned here.

This is relevant for immigrants who are trying to escape poverty, almost with no future in their own countries either for their personal or professional aspirations. I am not a China fan, but when you look at countries around the world, many of which are very poor and underdeveloped but with lots of brilliant, hard-working people with dreams and potential, they would rather go to a place where they have at least some stability, predicted living and working conditions, and a future, rather than to a place where one doesn’t know whether the potential future mayor of New York City, born and brought up in the USA and hence of course a citizen who happens to be the son of a world-famous filmmaker and a well-known academic, will actually be deported or not. I mean that’s a real possibility at this point - let that sink in. (I am not even going for more extreme examples)

I wish things were better, and I wish we didn’t live in a world where China, yes, China – of all the countries, might become a viable alternative for people from the developing or underdeveloped world compared to the USA.

No, I am afraid it’s not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn’t make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.

I would assume that they mean ‘VPN not for anonymity’ when they say that. I agree with you though.

The thing is that 10 min search results in - trust all of them, trust none of them. A lot of folks also have affordability issues. So that makes this issue even more complex. When they turn a bit more “respected” forums they are told to “self host” or are given recommendations that they already knew of but couldn’t afford. So the problem lives on. All this lead to shady and heavy marketing VPNs come to the front.

With the phone number, no; and since there’s no Signal usage without a phone number, well…. Also, I think somewhere on their website (or some place) they talked about burner phones as if it’s a universal phenomena.

Signal has felt “out of place” to me. Odd. It doesn’t fit in, doesn’t make sense if I think a bit farther about it.

I hope something decentralised comes out of Signal protocol minus the need for a phone number.