Yeah, it’s going to be a long process realistically, and hopefully there’s actual sustained state level commitment to getting that done from the European countries. Frankly, it should’ve been obvious why it’s a bad idea to become so dependent on foreign tech, but better late than never.

Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.

It’s the job of the people maintaining the project to review changes they merge in and to understand them. When people make PRs to my projects, I don’t just trust them blindly.

Seems to me that the sole focus should be on the quality of the code being submitted. I don’t really care how it was made, the question is whether the code is clean, if it’s doing what was intended, if it has tests.

oh yeah that’s a good instance that’s generally friendly for leftists

For Mastodon, I’d recommend just joining any large instance that’s been around for a while. You can always move accounts if you decide on a different one later. Mastodon makes it pretty easy, and can automatically notify your followers if you hop to a different one. You can also run your own with masto.host for like 6 bucks a month. I’m on pixelfed.social, and been pretty happy with it.

Wouldn’t hurt. Something where you put in your interests, and then it suggests servers and communities to join would help people get on boarded and actually see enough content to stay engaged.

This is the core of the issue, and it’s wild how many people don’t get it.

Your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

It’s a really good idea as it makes it much easier for people to get bootstrapped. Obvious downside is that these packs will create biases in the feeds people see, but on balance I think the benefits outweigh the downsides here. The key part is to get more people using the fediverse and to make it a viable alternative to corporate networks for regular people.

Yup, very similar stuff.

ha!

I’m sure that’s what was going through the mind of that one downvoter 🤣

Yeah, I just needed something basic to keep track of notes, and Joplin does more than enough. The sync is the real killer feature for me. I already had a NextCloud I’ve been running, so being able to sync notes through it was really great.

Helps to read the actual article before commenting. The freeloading refers to corporations hammering hosting infrastructure run by volunteers.