Also @shrugal@lemm.ee.
Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/
This is suspicion on the level of “you can’t be sure reality didn’t just pop into existence 10 seconds ago”. You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!
What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn’t comply because they didn’t have the requested data. That’s about as good as you can get.
Using p2p for messaging is really nice for decentralization, but it has the major downside that both communication partners have to be online at the same time to find each other and transmit a message. So you might have to wait for it until both look at their phones at the exact same time. On top there are privacy issues, like being able to see the devices and public IP addresses of other users.
Imo its just not practical and robust enough to be used by millions of non-techy people.
Depends on the level of technology we are using. If we’re zapping around from one habitable planet or interesting space phenomenon to another star trek style then absolutely yes! But a hard no with our current level of technology. I like to spend my time in an environment that’s actually somewhat friendly to life.
Here is an in-depth technical explaination video.
I doubt it. While the server to server communication is standardized with ActivityPub, the server to client (app) communication isn’t. This means different Fediverse apps have different APIs to login, fetch and create posts and so on. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever have a standard API here, because the apps work diffently and have different needs for their APIs. Maybe some kind of common denominator, but that probably wouldn’t be feature complete on most apps.
So the one app to rule them all would have to created custom API Implementations and UIs for every Fediverse app, which would be a loooot of work and probably a worse experience than specialized apps.
I think federating with an instance that would actually want federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use it’s leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it’s not in their interest to distribute the userbase to multiple servers they don’t own. They only need it to bootstrap their own service.
Ever heard the phrase “democracy without democrats”? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.
I think being able to migrate your identity from one instance to another is a core requirement to fulfilling the promises of federation. The idea is to be able to freely leave a bad instance, but all you can do now is completely start over on a new instance, losing all your posts and followers. That’s way worse, and not how it should be imo. No big instance has gone rogue yet afaik, but as soon as one does this will be a major issue!
To really accomplish that we would have to create a mechanism for a user to own their own identity, e.g. in form of some sort of secret key file. This would introduce a huge number of usability issues though! Handling key files is really hard, so that’s probably not an option in the near future.
What we definitely should add is some sort of instance single-sign-on, so you can log into another instance by having your original instance authorize the login attempt. This should then allow the new instance to use your original account (for subs and posts), and also migrate that account to the new instance (update handle on all your posts, migrate your followers, …). This would be a bit worse than owning your identity, because your original instance could just refuse to authorize any SSO attempts, but it would still be a big improvement imo.
Maybe we can also just combine the two, so instance SSO and being able to download an identity key as backup.
I run a Synology NAS and use their backup solution Synology C2. It’s e2e encrypted, pretty affordable and well integrated into the system, so it was basically a one-click setup. Also, they keep old versions for 30 days, but only the most recent versions count towards your quota, which makes the space usage very predictable.
An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, …), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.