suppenloeffel

Selfhosted services like Nextcloud/Immich aren't nearly as dependent on a critical user mass like Discord/Matrix, but the principle is the same.

If you host for family or friends, they may even use it if you convince them to switch. But when the setup, which doesn't consist of redundant instances and isn't maintained by a small army of SysAdmins 24/7, inevitably breaks for longer than a few minutes, most will switch back to the easy, reliable option.

I'd love to be able to disagree in any of your points, but I can't.

The vast majority of users want something that simply works, is polished and intuitively usable. Reading docs, remembering anything other than the bare minimum, running into issues that don't get magically resolved within 5 minutes will turn them away forever.

Even people with a technical background will at least partially compromise and migrate towards the services with the most users to not isolate themselfs.

Matrix is neat, Lemmy is neat, Nextcloud is neat (well, in theory), Immich is neat, so many other privacy friendly solutions are neat. But they'll always be irrelevant in the global context.

Signal and DeltaChat, as well as Simplex and some others e2e communication solutions, are adequate from a technical point of view.

The main issue is always adoption. You can have the most convenient way to safely communicate with people, it'll be useless if nobody you're talking to wants to use it.

So, since Signal is very easy to set up and use as well as the most adopted, it's currently the best pick for regular conversations.

Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.

And it can't die fast enough, as it's essentially the same as broadcasting your sensitive information over unencrypted radio.

Apart from security, phone number based user identification is such a half-assed approach and I still don't get why Signal wants to die on that hill. It's inconvenient, yet trivial, for anyone to register a second, third or tenth phone number. With a bit more knowledge and inconvenience, even anonymously. It adds so little.

Sweet, now I get to put "worked with NASA" in my résumé.

Their issue tracker is probably the best bet.

I never use dubious sources like this, especially banking apps.

Oh yeah, it's usually a very bad idea, especially regarding apps handling sensitive information. Since my use case for APKMirror strictly consists of apps without internet permission in a dedicated, otherwise empty profile, the risk is acceptable.

open from a direct link from the Play store (in which the app page opens, however, with almost no information, such as version, permissions, size and so on, and the download doesn’t start.

Tested this myself, as that used to be the workaround for apps not appearing, but I'm facing the same issue on some apps. For the time being, installing/updating manually via APKMirror isn't ideal, but I'm not installing the Play Store.

Dude, you are a horrible human being.

Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.

If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it's basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.

It's an awesome field and nothing new.

What? So your advice for improving privacy is to not use a VPN, because the provider may log stuff and instead keep accessing stuff directly through your ISP who will log everything you do and simply use DNS over HTTPS/TLS, which does pretty much nothing for your privacy since your ISP still sees the servers you connect to?

That's terrible advice.