I think people are because of the latest trends in social media thinking that you need to be huge to be successful. While you do need a certain threshold of people, semi-anonymous social media really doesn’t need to be that big. Just big enough to sustain enough little bit niche communities. That doesn’t just need users it needs time. People have this habit of hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. And while I am not able to mod because IRL, I am still looking into niche communities here to see if I can help in some way as contributor. Just need to get through my imposter syndrome in that I don’t really feel good enough for comment creator.

Pissing off entire nation state or at least people in power in that nation is unfortunately easy these days. And while the average person usually doesn’t run into these issues the shrinking spaces and criminalization of civil society even in countries you wouldn’t think are that far gone are at the level that surprising people might run into these issues. There are also some situations where you don’t need to piss off entire governments to get a lot of data from a person. Tech-savvy abusive spouse might be enough.

We are not really disagreeing here. I just think that we need to be open about the vulnerabilities and strengths of software. The security of Signal and Matrix are absolutely great especially compared to things like WhatsApp. But they are not 100% secure. Very little is.

Of course use Signal or Matrix but please don’t think that makes your messaging entirely impenetrable. I am not saying their end-to-end encryption has been breached. But a compromised device is a compromised device. Signal might be secure at least for now, but is your keyboard?

We do live in times of zero-click spyware and while the general public doesn’t necessarily have to worry about things like Pegasus atm, it is still used increasingly and not just against people who break the law.

I do my best, although I do fail to be up to date every once in a while, to stay as secure as possible, but to think any communication is entirely secure is not a good policy.