AceKat

Yeah, maybe OP has something to do with them? They teach to stay away from MLM everywhere, it’s not just reddit. And that’s positive, because it’s a scam

Before reading it I though it was another poorly written blog post, but it actually brings up great points

Imho the doubts about signal are legitimate but way too overblown. Signal has sealed sender, so nobody could (easily) know who sent the message, a VERY strong cryptographic protocol and encrypted profile information. Sure, it’s centralized and it collects your phone number when you sign up, but your messages are safe, they are not stored in the cloud and even if they were collected, all the information would be useless thanks to the signal protocol. I understand that the doubts are in good faith but they dismiss every effort made to bring a solid, private messaging app like signal to the general public. You can’t self-host, third-party clients are not officially supported and the service it’s centralized, but that’s a matter of freedom, not privacy. If it makes you feel better you can use matrix, but the problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t exist

I agree with you that FLOSS doesn’t mean automatically better and there is no reason to wear a tinfoil hat. You ultimately have to trust someone if you don’t inspect the source code yourself. I was just saying that being revol centralized and having access to every information isn’t the best design for a discord privacy-respecting alternative, but they do have a good privacy policy, so if you trust they respect it (atm no reason to doubt that) then it will be surely better than discord. Discord does collect chat history though. On discord privacy policy:

Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature.

They don’t say that they sell said information for advertisement (even if they send some data to third parties) and I don’t have seen any report about them getting caught doing that, I’m sorry I assumed. But I admit I get a bit carried away with doubts about companies who offer closed source software to a very large userbase. If there is a chance of making more money, they usually take it.

For the same reason facebook is one of the biggest companies in the world. Having access to thousands of users’ chat history is very useful for ad personalization and could be worth a lot of money. To fight this decentalization and encryption are crucial, you can’t trust that they will never use that data for advertisement purposes, maybe introduced in a privacy police change. Solid encryption algorithms are feasable for smaller groups, but as I said, at least DMs could be encrypted

Since it doesn’t have any encryption the only advantage I see is the fact that it’s open source and that there won’t be (hopefully) any data collection, but conversations will still be completely unencrypted, which is not that great. Nothing tells me that whenever this revolt’s userbase grows in size, they won’t start collecting data, including every message previously sent. Encryption exists so you don’t have to trust anyone to keep your messages safe, I hope they implement some sort of e2ee protocol at least for DMs

This kind of extensions don’t need several commits every week, for example updating a software once per month could mean that it’s more stable and has less bugs than one that updates every day. About the feature though, you’re right, localCDN does block a lot more CDN requests

Really depends on which extension you actually install. For example using something like ClearURLs has no way of impacting your fingerprint. Telling people that they can’t install extensions in general is deceiving, instead you should just suggest to consider the pros and cons of each one specifying that some are counterproductive.

For the second part, Bromite is great and I’ve been using it for quite some time, but you have to be aware that using a chromium-based alternative still indirectly depends on google. Using firefox or firefox-based alternatives is the best option

Agreed. I tried many different desktop environments and I still come back to gnome when I want a more polished and modern DE. I can completely understand the critiques but it’s a matter of taste after all