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Posts
3
Comments
148
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I fully support the push for open protocols. It's insane to me that most walled garden messaging apps are largely a wrapper for XMPP.

    Signal supporting SMS would be nice, but I certainly prefer web based protocols over MMS for sending media. The less compression there is on the photos and videos I share the better.

    Other than being forced to use WharsApp due to their market dominance, I have no desire to use anything proprietary or closed source.

    Signal is my top choice open source option, because it's easy for my family and friends to just use, and it's one of a very small pool of messaging apps that is verifiably private and secure.

  • If you log into the app, you'll see promoted content from celebrities and organizations. What do you think drives those promotions?

    It's either direct paid promotion, user data being sold to ad firms, or a combination.

  • Signal is great!

    I remember when it was trash in like 2013, but it's been something I recommend to family and friends since at least 2020. UI is clean, modern, and uncluttered IMO.

    Not sure I've ever seen Signal push anything crypto related.

    Telegram is "pinky promise" secure with a closed source encryption mechanism. I love that it was created by the guy who created VK and fled Russia when the oligarchy wanted control, but that was years ago. Signal is fully open source, including its encryption.

    They store no information on users, not even metadata like phone numbers, and this is documented in the blog posts they make when governments get mad about it after their requests for user data can't be filled.

    The fact that you need a phone number to sign up bothered me early on, but over time I've realized how helpful it is from a UX perspective. Friends and family want to be able to connect to their contacts directly – not ask for a username.

  • This is the beginning of monetizing the app after they started collecting user data a few months back. The more aggressively they decide to monetize, the more aggressive they'll be about pushing promoted content. Remember when Instagram had no ads?

    That's how this works. And they're certainly not going to choose to make less money off of their app over time with the market dominance that they have. Why would they when users will continue to use it?

  • The fact that this is the only new "innovation" worth writing an article about is sad. Technological progress has declined so much over the last decade as Big Tech has consolidated the market. Doesn't help the every minor leap gets turned into a subscription these days either.

  • Liquid hydrogen is the only viable carbon neutral fuel source for air travel due to its energy density. Reducing weight is the #1 most important factor in building aircraft. This shouldn't come as a surprise. It's common sense. Hydrogen can be produced via electrolysis, whether you want to whine about the current situation with natural gas based production or not. It is the only option we know about that is capable of addressing the issue of carbon emissions from air transport. Unfortunately, liquid hydrogen much less energy dense than kerosene, but it's all we have. The important part is that hydrogen is a clean fuel source which can be produced via clean energy.

    Unless you have a Nobel Prize winning alternative energy solution in mind to power aircraft with zero carbon emissions with an energy density as good or better than liquid hydrogen, your advocacy against its use is an impediment to progress.

  • Your fears are making you advocate to impede progress. The government supercedes the fossil fuel industry. That is my point. Yes, there are many barriers to us seeing any meaningful action, including regulatory capture and general corruption by the interests of the fossil fuel industry, but that is absolutely not a reason to give up on addressing the issue of carbon emissions in air travel. The fossil fuel industry advocates are boogeymen. At the end of the day they have no power over the government, and you are acting like they're "too scary" to be confronted.

    Moreover, that is not the point when it comes to technological advancements to make modern society carbon neutral. We should celebrate every advancement that gets us closer to that goal. And yes, I am fully aware that we are very late and millions of innocent lives will likely be lost to the affects of climate change before we get there. But that is all the more reason to work harder.

  • You are a person arguing to do nothing to attempt to solve the problem of CO2 emissions from airplanes, which account for a very large proportion of global emissions. You are arguing incessantly about why progress shouldn't be made. Cut it out. The energy density of liquid hydrogen makes it the only viable fuel source for air travel that isn't a petrochemical. That's why this is important. Fuck your whining about boogymen in the fossil fuel industry as a backdrop to this. It's irrelevant. What matters is progress, because zero carbon air travel is probably the most difficult challenge we face in cutting fossil fuels out of modern society.

  • Late reply, but my main sticking point with Matrix is that it isn't just an app you can tell your non-tech savvy friends to download. I like the decentralization, but most people don't care and want something easy to understand and use

  • To my knowledge, Signal is the only verifiably secure encrypted messaging app that's market ready. Signal is fully open source, including its encryption algorithm which has been tested numerous times and even gotten government agencies like the FBI all butthurt that can't break it or get a backdoor from the devs. I have a friend whose cryptography professor contributed to the project.

    It was only in recent years that Signal upped their game enough with the user experience for me to start recommending it to friends and family. In 2013, when I first recall trying it out, Signal was more clunky and always wanted to be your default SMS app. I didn't like that, because at the time they didn't have a client to send messages from your computer.

    Nowadays they have an desktop app that syncs with your phone, video calling, and even stories – which some people find weird but I'm all for non-Zuccubus owned private and secure alternatives to social media. I'm pretty sure anyone on Lemmy would love to pull more power away from these surveillance based ad companies and stop being data cows.

    Tl;dr: Fuck the Zuck, keep promoting Signal, democratize the internet