It’s a lovely thought, but I think it really depends on where the ‘start’ and ‘finish’ lines are. Plenty of arbitrary pairs of dates that don’t bear this idea out at all. When will the music stop on the moral universe? Will it coincide with the zenith of justice? Maybe it’s just a matter of having hope for the future, which is nice to have.
Lots of food for thought there, though I must say I’m not fully convinced, particularly by the alternatives. In my experience matrix and xmpp), there are things that keep me from recommending them to my friends. The writeup mentions client fragmentation, which causes problems with encryption. That is a huge problem in this context. Ease of use is another, which may be dismissed by someone tech savvy, but shouldn’t be ignored in the broader context of activist communication.
On that note, self-hosting is a double-edged sword. Are most activists equipped with the knowledge/skills to implement and maintain a hardened secure server? Using somebody else’s server requires trust.
Those points in mind, I also think we can’t forget threat modeling. For as widespread as Signal is, there haven’t been to my knowledge any confirmed reports or leaks indicating its compromise. In contrast, we have court documents that show very little information gained from subpoenas to Signal. My feeling is that Signal is a good option for a lot of people. Phone number identifier is not good, but you can mitigate by registering with another number. If your threat model includes federal agencies, then you should be worried about your device being compromised, in which case it doesn’t matter which app you’re using. Also, don’t carry your phone to actions no matter what app you’re using.
Edit: d’oh! Meant this to be a reply to the post below, that links to dessalines’ github Signal takedown.
I love NewPipe, and it works great 95% of the time. Occasionally YouTube updates something, and NewPipe breaks for a few days. To be fair, part of that lag is related to fdroid delays publishing updates. On a related note, SmartTubeNext is an amazing app for use on android-based smart-tv type devices.
There’s a lot of help out there for setting up a nextcloud server, either at your home, or on a VPS. Once you have the server up, you can have as many clients as you want, and each client can have a copy of any/all files you have on the server (each client storage space permitting). Depending on how much data you have (and file sizes), you’ll have multiple copies at any given time. That’s what I do.
Another thing you can do, is use something called ‘rclone’ to mount something like: google drive, onedrive, dropbox etc., as a network drive on your computer. Rclone has the ability to encrypt these folders, meaning google/dropbox/etc can’t see what your files are, but you can see them fine on your computer. You interact with your this mount as you would any other folder on your computer.
No one in a position to fulfill the terms of this game would allow it to be won. Therefore I’ll just take the $50.