The author of that essay (@dessalines@lemmy.ml) is one of the main devs of lemmy, so you’re asking in the right place lmao
I get this perspective, but I don’t personally wanna use it cuz “costs advertisers” == “rewards ad companies” and it’s the ad companies I have a problem with more than whatever random company decides to pay for an ad. Punishing companies for intrusive advertising is great, but not if it’s making even more money for Facebook/google/whatever fucked up company is the actual driving cause of the ad industry’s state.
I didn’t consider account recovery, that’s a good point. Personally I don’t usually bother with it for anything I want to be private - if I lose it I lose it lol.
It’s still not perfect, but some of the private email hosting providers like proton have email aliases, so you could use one for recovery without giving any info to hackers (assuming you trust the email provider). Definitely less secure than only a public key being exposed, but maybe an acceptable tradeoff for the convenience of an existing established solution?
You rule out social networks, but why? Wouldn’t a fediverse microblogging (or full blogging) platform work fine for the purpose? Just pick an irrelevant username and a strong+unique password and only access your account through tor using any and all relevant best practices.
Given you want the continuity of the author preserved, I don’t see the functional difference between the posts being associated with an anonymous account and them all having your public key. Am I missing something?
I do think their point about not using E2EE enabling better moderation is worth considering, because it’s absolutely true that the server being unable to filter malicious content makes moderation harder. Still, imo any decent chat client should support it as an option, because if I’m talking to friends I don’t want any servers having access for any reason. Large guilds for public info, like the KDE matrix for example, shouldn’t be E2E encrypted for this exact reason (iirc it’s not, because matrix allows the choice and KDE has chosen correctly). Lack of encryption doesn’t mean all moderation issues are solved, though, cuz that same unencrypted KDE matrix had a pretty major problem with CSAM being spammed a while back.
So IMO the ability to disable E2EE is valuable for a discord replacement, but the author’s idea that E2EE shouldn’t be implemented… does not follow.