It’s proprietary and centralized. No practical difference. IRC and XMPP are the way.

“don’t worry it’s for a shrine”

A 3d-printed Trump bust

Try that on my degoogled phone

Too bad it’s only for a handful of Western countries :( I hoped I wouldn’t have to look up bus arrivals in the browser anymore.

A smaller one than that. But yeah, fair - Reddit does deny me entry from it.

One of the reasons I use a VPS rather than a commercial VPN.

The main difference is that in Matrix, a chat’s history and media is stored indefinitely on every participating server, while on XMPP it’s only the duty of the one “hosting” it. And to my understanding, in 1-to-1 chats, the server doesn’t even retain the messages after delivering them, since there’s a separate module for “syncing” the history between devices (that you can set the retention time for).

If they have such “security concerns” with third-party clients, a compromise would be to mark profiles using unofficial clients, and make it possible to see what client it is. Because it’s audacious to disapprove of third-party ones while your own lacks features people find important! Such as:

• Allowing an arbitrary proxy rather than just their own solution (because not only is their own solution inferior to some of the more advanced censorship-evading technology, but this is the field that needs multiple options when one stops working. Also if a person uses a proxy for everything else anyway, making them set up a whole separate solution or find someone else’s proxy just for your app is pointless.
• UnifiedPush.
• Allowing tying a desktop client by typing a code rather than scanning a QR code, which is important when registering on an Android VM (because again, Signal just arbitrarily disallows account creation on a desktop, nevermind that most phones are very hard or impossible to make private!)

Yeah, I also had encryption problems, especially when I was running Conduit rather than Synapse. However, I never had such problems in XMPP with OMEMO.

To be fair, from Signal’s attitude it seems that Molly is tolerated rather than welcomed. And that it may be shut off if it gets big enough.

Yeah, fair.

http://longeepsiteaddress.i2p. Bonus points for having an option for a human-readable domain as well.

I do use cash when possible indeed! But Monero is for things that you can’t physically receive in a store’s office, like a domain name. It’s not a lot, but it is necessary. Gift cards are not available everywhere, and the ones available somewhere would not necessarily work in other countries.

I think cash-like anonymity is something we do really need in online payments. For me personally it is not critical. But I would still not like my VPS and domain name KYCed to me, for example if, say, something like censorship evasion is prosecuted retrospectively.

That doesn’t have any of the privacy and anonymity features. I’d have to read more on this project, though - did hear about it before. Also, what’s relevant right now is that it’s not accepted as commonly as even Monero (which in itself is sadly not as common as Bitcoin).

Alternatives - like what? I understand the concerns but for now Monero is the closest we have to “digital cash”. Hope there would eventually be a more energy-efficient successor.

If the initial swap is from Bitcoin, there is Bisq - that’s been around for much longer than Haveno. Not tried myself, though.

yes

For me it’s pretty much mandatory because Youtube is normally blocked :/

To be fair, while Microsoft is absolutely vile for such restrictions, I think people overestimate how many people would switch computers just to get Windows 11. It’s probably a concern for big corporations indeed, but regular users? I don’t think so. Most people don’t see anything wrong with staying on an OS that doesn’t receive updates. A lot of them already do so - on their phones, because the support is so short! I am now in the process of switching my father to Linux, and it’s genuinely hard to explain him why he has to get used to a different OS: his reaction to “But Windows 10 would no longer receive security updates!” is “So what?”. Windows 7 probably would’ve still had a high market share if 10 had a similar system requirements change.