Ferk

Wouldn't it be easier and more direct to simply impose a tax to those external big tech services?

I don't understand why using protection against "bad actors" as an excuse is necessary at all if getting money from big tech were the ultimate goal. A lot of people within the EU would happily support such a tax targeting big US companies, it's the privacy problems what we are pushing against, not the fees. So I'd expect a more direct and honest fee for external companies making business within the EU would be easier to pass if that were what they actually wanted, wouldn't it?

I don't think EVERYONE needs to understand / know about it. I mean, I remember when I was young most people had no idea how to use the internet (hell, they didn't even know how to program a VHS), yet I was perfectly happy using that technology.

I only need a specific set of people and specific communities to be there for it to be worth it. Like I said: I no longer use reddit, even though the fediverse has only a small fraction of the content existing in reddit... I would have expected people in the fediverse would be more receptive to unpopular but technologically/ethically superior alternatives.

Yes, but the question is: what does matrix need to establish itself as a solid alternative?

You can't answer that by saying "people don't use it, change that" because that's something only people can change, not matrix, that'd lead to a cyclic problem.

Specially when that's given as a counterpoint to justify not wanting to do the change for "this community". It's contradictory to want its popularity to be changed but accept the lack of change alone as a valid reason to justify your communities not changing.

like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.

Note that "secrecy" and "privacy" are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.

It's possible to have one and not the other...

You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).

Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP.. or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).

But that's cyclic reasoning. Nothing that you need/want will be on matrix if you (and everyone else) does not think it's worth to make what you need/want be in matrix..

I don't need EVERYTHING to be in Matrix, just the things I'm interested in. So I'm happy when I see a push to have those specific things there. This is the same argument as to why I don't use Reddit anymore, despite Lemmy/Kbin having only a fraction of the content.

It also helps the fact that Matrix is very flexible when it comes to mirroring/proxying other protocols. I can easily access IRC communities from Matrix, for example. The integration in that direction is nicer than requiring discord channels to add bots that parrot an IRC chat.

There are plans for Matrix to move to P2P someday... I wonder what would happen in that case. Or if we just used https://tox.chat/

Would the regulation apply at all when it's just a protocol used between the users, with no intermediary or central server offering the service?

Why not just go for Tox or some other P2P serverless communication system? They can't ban / go after a system that has no central servers, can they?

In fact, it’s not unlikely that the behavioural data of people who pay to opt out of being spammed with ads will be more valuable to data brokers.

True. This is why the AdNauseam extension doesn't simply "hide" ads, but it goes out of its way to actually simulate clicks for ALL ads, causing algorithms to be unable to more accurately profile you and making the pay-per-click model fall on its face. If everyone did that, advertisers would have to pay for completely meaningless clicks making it no longer worth it to advertise this way.

Though it's still not a solution to privacy, since it still gives some insight on your tastes by allowing them to know what websites do you frequently visit.

Sad. I did not know that.

Although, to be honest, I was sort of expecting it would happen sooner or later. It did not look like the product was ready for mainstream users yet, and the devices at that price must have been tough to sell.

For anyone curious, this message from the CEO has more details: https://web.archive.org/web/20230822232437/https://mycroft.ai/blog/update-from-the-ceo-part-1/