@aktivismoEstasMiaLuo#AWS is a bad procurement choice, but it's just commodity hosting, not a software dependency. If you dig a bit you'll find that most of the fediverse is ultimately hosted on AWS, as are #Signal, #Wire, and if I remember rightly, #Matrix.org. I'm pretty sure this isn't the worst thing about any given service, Reddit included.
I had the same experience, refused to use FB since 2010 and finally got some of my family to start using #Wire. In hindsight, I wish I'd chosen #Riot, since Wire have recently set up a US branch to take #VentureCapital, and deprioritized their server<> server federation plans. @aktivismoEstasMiaLuo@gamliel
@thibaultamartin I know exactly what you mean. I burned one getting my family onto #Wire, only to have problems with my older devices never working or getting abandoned (eg travel laptop due to #Electron dumping #32bit support), and with getting a reliable #VPN connection to use it from inside China. I caved on software freedom and got some of them to set up WeChat, which at least avoids the VPN issue. I expect that's where we'll be stuck, until we move away from China, at the earliest ;)
@strypey So there's a lot to unpack in that document. The #Session onion routing protocol involves using a #blockchain called #Loki to make it difficult for an adversary to control a significant fraction of the nodes and prevent exposing the IP addresses (and therefore identities) of a user and his/her contacts to the same person or group. (As you noticed, Session is not yet using onion requests.)
There's also swarms and attachments and message storage (including attachments), online vs offline messages, multiple device support, spam resistance, a modified version of #Signal's encryption protocol, group chats (3-500 member "closed" groups are end-to-end encrypted like the rest of Session; "open" groups are not, and require an account on a special group server [self-hostable])
Note that all this stuff happens under the covers. It seems that Session will handle most of it without the user ever seeing it. I'm going to query some family members and see whether any would be willing to try this as a secondary channel (for now #Wire is our primary channel). Just adding offline messages is a clear advantage over #Jami, but the lack of audio & video chats is going to limit its usefulness.
I'm also pretty sceptical of the decision to make #Signal the default SMS app. I'm aware that of the #FreeCode chat apps that support both text and voice/ video, all are either walled gardens (eg Signal, #Wire, #Keybase) or painfully bleeding edge (eg #Riot, #Jami, #Tox, #Delta.chat). But I've discussed the reasons for my mistrust of the Signal and the cult-of-personality around it's founder at length.
@Blort My family is very much still on #Wire (that is, the ones that aren't only using stuff made by #Facebook, but I never communicate with those family members except by SMS text messages).
Whatever AP devs do, determined BadActors can easily circumvent blocks by going to the web page of your feed. What people looking for private discussion spaces need is something like #jabber#MUCs, or #Matrix rooms, or #Wire group chats, or #Crabgrass groups, or private Discourse instances, or any one of dozens of other free code tools that exist for private group discussions. But no, they demand we turn the fediverse into those to suit their use case. #EntitledAsFuck
I was initially pretty angry, because conditions were better when I was ready to begin our trip (3.5 hours earlier) and the delay was avoidable. But that dissipated when I talked to my grandson #GS3 via #Wire videochat.
Thanks. This is a tough one. #Wire is the first and only privacy-centric tool that is in widespread use among my friends and family. Several of them tried #Ring (now #Jami) before that, but it was a bad experience all around and cries of "it got better" won't get anyone to try it.
A friend of mine recently told me he's had good results getting friends and family using #Riot (the flagship #Matrix client). I'm seriously considering recommending that (or #Pattle) over #Signal or #Wire as the best #FreeCode chat app for use with non-geek friends+family. Riot has always had the major pro that's it already decentralized, using an #OpenStandard,. Other than that, it now has pretty much the same pros and cons as Wire, including being developed by a VC-funded parent company.
#MeaCulpa. Anyone who follows me will have seen me vigorously defending #Wire as preferably to #Signal, and one of the reasons I gave was that Wire were a private company (not VC-funded or corporate owned), based in Europe, where the tech industry is more strongly regulated to protect user privacy than the US, where Signal is based. Looks like Wire have set up a US partner entity to funnel VC into the company :(