dessalines

Only correct answer here.

No probs!

I don't know enough about grapeneOS to comment on it.

Any signal app forks still have to use signals main servers, so they still got your phone number and identity.

Matrix was originally funded by an Israeli company until it spun off, but unlike signal, it's entirely open source, self-hostable, and can be run in a private manner. Phone numbers and identifiers are not required, so even if you connect to a malicious server, the most they get is your matrix id, and things you've explicitly leaked about your identity.

The most we could say is that specific servers are compromised, but its also possible to host it outside a five-eyes country, unlike signal.

What's funny is this is pretty out in the open, and ppl don't realize it. When Yasha Levine criticized signal, the president of Radio Free Asia (a US government propaganda org), sent this out, openly pushing Signal to european internet freedom communities:

Our primary interest is to make sure the extended OTF network and the Internet Freedom community are not spooked by the [Yasha Levine’s] article (no pun intended). Fortunately all the major players in the community are together in Valencia this week - and report out from there indicates they remain comfortable with OTF/RFA.

And I remember you mentioned before, Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, holds interviews with US defense-department think tanks.

Also, it's not just people that punch you back, things punch you back too.

Was just about to comment something similar. Every single one of the cases they cite was completely wrong.

Matrix, simplex, xmpp.

I wrote a longer one here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html

The short version is, that it's a centralized, US hosted service. All of those are subject to National Security Letters, and so are inherently compromised. Even if we accept that the message content is secure, then signal's reliance on phone numbers (and in the US, a phone number is connected to your real identity and even current address), means that the US government has social connection graphs: everyone who uses signal, who they talk to, and when.

New low acheived. Attributing the nazi's scorched earth policy on the eastern front to Stalin.

If the metric is labor time per food produced, agriculture is much more efficient than hunting and gathering. But it requires a ton of startup labor, and waiting months, so it isn't as immediate.

I suppose, but since there's a much more limited supply of gatherable food, there's an upper limit on the time you can spend, and the size of community it can support.

Agriculture doesn't have that upper limit (well, arable land limit but that's still much more), plus it takes a ton of work to sow crops, irrigate water, and wait months for harvest. Much harder than just picking berries for an hour or two a day, which is why the transition to agriculture took so long even after it was discovered.

I think its very possible to do with any native apps, where you can bundle in a small torrent librar. Maybe not iOS, because I think they don't allow torrents, but android and all desktops its possible to load / preload things like images, audio, and video inline. Its not too possible via the web, because most webbrowsers don't have any bundled torrent libraries.

I have my own thoughts about webtorrents (they didn't really survive, while the regular torrent network is still strong). It'd be possible to do with webtorrents solely to solve the fact that browsers don't have regular torrent support, but seeders would be hard to come by, so I don't think it'd work too well.