They are not free however from consequences, i.e. getting hit in the mouth,

I would say that this is wrong. If you get hit in the mouth for something you say, than it’s not freedom of speech. It’s the law of the strongest.

Example: You wouldn’t hit a UFC fighter for something he said to you on a 1 to 1, however you would beat him if you are 10 against him. This is the law of the strongest.

I don’t believe in absolut free speech. I think that it needs to have limits in it (very well defined limits), and there should be consequences for certain things. And the consequences need to be enforced in a way to counter them, like for example if you say hate crap then you should be forced to contribute to anti-hate orgs.

But isn’t this true for most services, such as Matrix as well? Nothing assures that a Matrix instance is running the exact code on git.

It’s valid for any server. But for signal messaging is even worse than the competitors because it’s centralized.

If you selfhost and they want to take your server, they will?

Correct. With signal there’s no way to escape the US government, but with matrix (or other federated protocol) you can make it harder, so it won’t be worth it the resources spent. You can also host it where the US government don’t have any reach.

Even if you self-host in a Swiss server, with the best intentions and security practices… Other people are going to have to trust you. You trust yourself, but others might not.

But who is more trustworthy? The US government or the swiss government?

Also, the point is to avoid american services. Signal is an american service.

now canada needs to invest in proper public transportation, so in the future people wouldn’t need to buy a car just for day to day life.

And what metadata is Signal leaking?

We don’t know. We don’t have access to what’s running on their servers. (yes i know that the source code is available, but there’s no way to check if that’s the same thing running on the servers). And this is a problem for me: i have to trust a walled garden.

The government seizing an entire batch of amazon servers seems unrealistic

Usually the government goes there a just takes whatever is in the rack they want. Screw the legal business that are there. That’s what happened with the pirate bay raid. If the US government wants to shut it down. It just needs to knock on the amazon door.

the data would be encrypted anyway. Do they even store messages on servers, anyway?

The problem is that you have to trust them. You have to trust a chain of organizations based in the US. Signal pays millions (who pays for this? i have my doubts that monthly donations will pay for this forever) to amazon for the servers. So using them and sending them money is the same as giving money to amazon.

If you are fine with these risks, then use it. Better using signal than using messenger and whatsapp.

I register on reddit 17 years ago. Before the great migration from digg. I remember /r/programming being the first sub to reach 100k subscribers.

I got banned for saying in the /r/europe sub that russia banning youtube in russia was a good thing because then we in the west would get less russian propaganda. Got banned for a couple days. Left and never looked back.

/r/programming is dead already since around a decade. All the good discussions moved to hackernews and lobsters.

EDIT: never forget that spez admitted to silently edit user comments that criticized him

The app already has Jitsi Meet invitations integration.

That’s cool!

I’m not going to change my IM app, because i’m happy with, but it’s nice to know of alternatives.

yes. Metadata. some protocols leak more info than the others.

Also servers in only one place (institution), only makes it easier for the government to go to that place and seize them.

Email isn’t a good protocol for instant messaging (it wasn’t designed for real time communication and it lacks some features like typing indicators or voice/video calls)

Why would you prefer XMPP? Last time I checked most features (like E2EE) weren’t part of the base protocol.

Just because it is not part of the base protocol, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or supports it.

I like it for personal reasons. Just because is lightweight and there are way much more servers than matrix, imho makes it better. However, In the end it boils down to personal preferences and your attack surface.

It supports mail, but also has an encrypted normal chat backend AFAIK

WHen i tried it years ago, it was just a normal email with a special subject that the delta chat client would read, parse and display.

Maybe add Signal; It’s easier than Element, but it’s also centralized

signal runs on amazon servers. Anything that can’t self host and isn’t federate isn’t worth it. Matrix (and element) fill this requirement. But IMHO, the best is XMPP where you can self-host or use federated servers located in other countries.

Maybe add Delta chat

Delta chat is basically email.

Remove Stremio

Why? Because it’s torrents?

Other alternatives would be viaplay or britbox. Unfortunately there’s no legal alternative that’s available in all europe.

Add aurora

Aurora is just a front-end for google playstore. You should add f-droid