I'd be curious to hear your criticisms of Signal! While I haven't seen anyone describing it as a "paragon of privacy and security" I do think it is a highly accessible SMS replacement that is also open source, end-to-end encrypted, and operated by a nonprofit.
I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.
Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!
"Lemmy" is actually not a platform like Reddit, it's software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is "getting fascisty" you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That's the beauty of ActivityPub!
Matrix.org & the servers they run, which was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence
Can you elaborate on this? The only connection I was able to find to Israel at all is that the British people who originally created the protocol worked for an American company (amdocs) that was founded in Israel in 1982, but bought out in 1985 long before Matrix was developed. Furthermore, Amdocs hasn't funded the development of Matrix since 2017 and the current Matrix.org foundation is based in the UK.
"Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations" seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business "powered by Mastodon".
Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.
This is what I don't understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim "decentralized" while still having full control over the data.
This is not what you want to hear, but even in Star Trek Earth had to go through a third world war, and in the devastation it was really the Vulcans who had to step in and basically played nanny for a generation after they were like "oh fuck no those rednecks have a warp drive?"
A "reply guy" (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a "redditor". Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it's also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.
Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.
I'd be curious to hear your criticisms of Signal! While I haven't seen anyone describing it as a "paragon of privacy and security" I do think it is a highly accessible SMS replacement that is also open source, end-to-end encrypted, and operated by a nonprofit.