We share the goal of making the world more private. I’m not trying to be cheeky or mean. I’m genuinely curious. Would you be against reading to learn how to talk more compellingly?

Thanks for the suggestions. Had time to try to print it. Didn’t work. I’ll try the other options later.

Yes. I suppose I’d like to try it. Maybe the cost is worth the benefits.

That’s alright 🙂

No login at all. You just open the URL and there’s a text box waiting for you to send a message to me.

Oh wow. That’s a pleasantly surprising code of conduct. If the code of conduct is consequential, I stand corrected about my view of Graphene OS.

• “Respectful and kind”. Amazing.
• “Harassment is not tolerated”. Hell yeah.
• “Be respectful and constructive.” Brilliant.

You’re bringing up a fair point, similar to “can you separate the art from the artist”? I think it’s possible; I’ve seen mean and disparaging people do amazing work. Heck, at times I’ve been a cranky worker cranking out good work.

However, I also know that toxic people are hard to work with and limit their own potential and that of others. A quick look at the ACT literature, the intrinsic motivation literature, the learned-helplessness literature, and the Lybomirsky et al. meta-analyses from 2008 and 2018 all point to the same idea: psychologically flexible people are happier and that leads to better work and more productivity, but not the other way around.

Ah. I searched for it and found that guest mode was disabled on Matrix.org’s servers. I wonder if making it work in another server is easy, either with or without GrapheneOS…

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/v5n1yv/whats_your_opinion_on_graphene_os_community/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30929526

A quick search lead to these links. They’re 3 years old. Maybe the community has changed since then.

This sounds amazing. It’s unfortunate that Graphene OS has so much toxicity around it, but this design decision is amazing. Love it.

I tried quickly looking for the feature, but I couldn’t find it. I searched for “Graphene OS Matrix chat homepage guest user”, “Graphene OS chat homepage guest user”, “Graphene OS chat homepage”, and “Graphene OS homepage QR” but didn’t find what you mentioned.

This ticks all the boxes! Thanks! I suppose something I didn’t contemplate is that I would like to close the chat and still be able to get notifications on my phone. I don’t want to always have a dozen chats open, ready for the other party to send me a message. Regardless, I’m glad this project exists!

Oh no. What have I done?

I’m really glad this exists! Thanks for sharing it!

I understand the fear of the bridge being burned down. I also see how that would make Proton like WhatsApp, which has its own protocol and locks its users in. Would it be inaccurate to say that your fear is that Proton pulls an “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” move?

In any case, it’s worthwhile looking at your claims. You mention that Proton is “actively trying to turn open protocols into more closed stuff”.

• Why can I use PGP as the encryption protocol in Proton Mail? Is that a closed protocol?
• Why could I download an archive of all of my emails last December both through IMAP and through MBOX? Are those two “closed stuff”? In fact, I could’ve downloaded my archive as EML; is that a closed protocol?
• Why could I download a copy of my contacts as VCF? Is that a closed protocol?
• Why can I export my Proton Pass passwords as JSON or CSV? Are those closed protocols?
• Is it really tenable to argue that Proton is pulling an “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” move when they support PGP, IMAP, SMTP, MBOX, EML, VCF, JSON, and CSV?

You could argue that it’s simply a matter of time until they pull the rug and close their protocols. Let’s elide the whole discussion regarding the probability of the rug pull happening and instead focus on the present reality: as of December 2024, I could download an archive of everything I have on Proton without a hitch. They do not have the whole Meta thing of “Please give us four working days for us to create an archive of your data”. At least that wasn’t my experience. I could download an archive quickly.

• If users have the capability of downloading open protocol archives of everything they have on Proton, are they really stopping them from going elsewhere?

I understand your concerns of vendor lock-in. The fear is that it could avoid people leaving the service in the future. However, do you know that I use a generic email client that, through IMAP, contains a Proton account?

A friend of mine and I have gotten used to using it during our conversations. We do fast fact-checking or find a good first opinion regarding silly topics. We often find it faster than digging through search-engine results and interpreting scattered information. We have used it for thought experiments, intuitive or ELI5 explanations of topics that we don’t really know about, finding peer-reviewed sources for whatever it is that we’re interested in, or asking questions that operationalizing into effective search engine prompts would be harder than asking with natural language. We always always ask for citations and links, so that we can discard hallucinations.

This was posted in “nonpolitical_memes”, but how is this not political? The definition of politics can depend, but let’s take it to be something like “deciding how political goods will be allocated”. Deciding how resources will be allocated is political. Evaluating how resources are allocated is political. The fact that someone considers something evidently political as not political is political (search for “depoliticization” online).

What does politics mean to you? What do you understand by depoliticization?

It seems like you’re passionate about emojis

Ok, so I just read upon Proton AG, the company behind Proton, and they don’t seem to owe investors money, because it was originally crowdfunded and now it finances itself with subscriptions. That sounds great! It is quite different to surveillance capitalism and enshittification (given that enshittification requires advertisers).

I am not advertising for Proton, by the way. To make that clear, I still wouldn’t use them because they seem to have very limited VPN functionality in their Linux clients. As a Linux user, I wouldn’t want that. However, if they fix that in the future, I could consider switching.

Edit: Similarly, I found this website https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tutao-gmbh summarizing its evaluation of Tutanota as ethical. It takes into consideration its ownership structure. Unfortunately, I cannot find details because there is a paywall for the information, but it could be the case that Tutanota does not owe money to investors and therefore is not seeking to maximize profits but rather provide a good service while compensating fairly its workers. I wish I could have more evidence.

I like that, if I only need mail with 20gb of storage, Tutanota is cheaper.

I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to think a bit longer.

Hence my question :) If there are investors waiting for returns, you bet (and, like, actually, you do in fact bet) they will get more expensive. If it’s a social enterprise, I wouldn’t worry as much.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply!

I have also chatted with Tutanota workers and I didn’t have the impression that they were not driven. In fact, I think about myself: if I was a good enough developer, experienced with their stack, I’d love to work with them just for what they stand up for regarding privacy and openness. It seems like a very gratifying way of spending my time.

As to the closed platforms, I totally agree with your criticism in purely abstract terms; I don’t like that I need to rely on Tutanota for encrypted email instead of a federated system like XMPP or Matrix. However, Matrix has been an aspirational platform in which only my closest friends, and the wokest or tech-savvy acquaintances join. For a good chunk of my daily life, if I want libre, metadata-reduced, and encrypted communication, I have to rely on Tutanota’s closed email system.

Do you think there’s a way of extending email (rather than “reinventing the wheel”) that’s also as simple as “give me your email and let’s agree on a password”?

I was thinking about incentives and motivations. Are they motivated by profits?

I was also thinking about how sometimes listening to everyone in a team can save them from failure. Do Proton and Tutanota listen to everyone?

Not necessarily :)

What VPN providers do you approve of?

What VPN providers do you approve of?

Thanks for the recommendation. I wonder if you’re confusing the DuckDuckGo browser with the DuckDuckGo search engine. I am assuming the post is about the search engine 🙃

What

Seeing this post again made me think, apart from my previous reply, about something else.

I think your “popularity of software” argument is great because it probably holds true, in that an investment in finding an exploit has larger returns if the exploitable software is widely used. But rather than thinking in terms of apps, we could think in terms of operating systems. What if the vector of infection is not an app and rather is an OS? This is perfectly possible and there are massive incentives to find such exploits since this is not app-dependent.

This means that merely using iOS or Android in any capacity (either through Lineage OS or perhaps even Replicant) could be enough for infection. And so far, not knowing what the vectors of infection are for Pegasus, this is perfectly possible.

Perhaps using Linux OS is a good idea, given it’s not as popular.