enkers

Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.

Thank you for the illuminating post. Could you name a few alternatives that better align with the ethos of the fediverse?

That’s such a poor excuse. If they really really thought it was a problem, they could obscure-gate the feature. Make it so you have to long press on the 3rd word of the ToS or something ridiculous, and share that info online.

This is a fairly common practice for potentially dangerous android features, for example. It keeps the less tech savvy audiences from accidentally impaling themselves in the foot.

Usually the vanguard of adoption for platforms like these are fairly technical users. When you start cutting the feature set that brought them to your platform, it starts the death knell for your platform. They’ll go elsewhere to find a platform that respects them more, and they’ll drag everyone else with them sooner or later.

When was the last time you saw android getting a severely bad rap for including ADB?

In what way is it insecure? If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS. If users didn’t understand the distinction, that’s a design failure on signal’s part.

To a lot of us, SMS fallback was the killer feature signal provided.

At least with matrix, it’s decentralised. If they ever try to rug pull like signal did, their users can at least choose to not update if they self-host their own instance. I’d imagine a lot of lemmings would appreciate that, considering.

I was pissed at Signal for dropping SMS support. Their rationalisation was kinda bs. Now I just use matrix instead, since it’s decentralised.

While I do think some ways of communicating are certainly more effective than others, social change also requires some amount of tension to be effective. Cordial methods are often the first to be tried, and are also most often summarily ignored.

Moderates often find tension emotionally distressing because it pierces their perception of themselves as a morally just person. They sometimes perceive what is often valid criticism as being yelled at. This tension is required in order to enact social change, though.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of that tension before, I can attest it’s an unpleasant experience, but it passes, and hopefully leaves room for some amount of contemplation in its place.

I’d highly recommend reading MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, as he bridges the concept much more eloquently than I could ever hope to.