Dear #TwitterMigration folks, an important tip on #privacy on the fediverse:
There is none.
This is a public medium; please treat it as such. Just as you have no privacy on Twitter (Elon Musk can read all your DMs), you have no privacy on the instance you’re on (your administrators can read all your posts).
You can set the visibility of a post but that’s a viewing suggestion, not a privacy guarantee.
Think of your posts as postcards, not sealed letters, and you should be fine.
Even if you run your own instance, like I do, you have no #privacy on the #fediverse.
Only I get to read the direct messages received at my instance but I have no control over who sees the direct messages I send to other instances.
So, again, until end-to-end encryption is mandated by the core protocol (ActivityPub), remember:
Treat all posts on #mastodon / the fediverse as public and use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app like Signal if you want to have private conversations with people.
@LunaDragofelis @aral Must we always have this conversation? XMPP and Matrix will unfortunately never reach mainstream. And this post is quite clearly aimed at the mainstream. Signal has the best chance to succeed in this space, by a wide margin too.
𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚎𝚊 
"XMPP and Matrix will unfortunately never reach mainstream"
Define "mainstream",
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around to observe it, did it fall at all? You can have the most useful technology on the planet, but if nobody’s using it that itself renders it useless. We don’t need alternatives, we need the alternative, singular. Too much choice is paralyzing. Focus on Signal, because it’s familiar to what people already use.
It's why we have XMPP, Matrix and IRC. It's why we have ActivityPub, Pump.io and OStatus. It's why we have mp3, ogg and flac.
Not a single one is perfect on its own.
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea The point is that most people are satisfied. We’re talking about communication here. Nobody uses WhatsApp because they particularly like it, they use it because all of their contacts use it. So yeah, it may be a bummer, but people prefer one big centralized platform over a distributed one.
Oh I have meet plenty of people that uses whatsapp and they genuinely like it.
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea It’s a catch 22. Nobody will switch to Signal because their friends aren’t there.
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@dusnm if nobody bothers to switch to CIAgnal anyway .. why shouldn't i try to have them switch to something actually good and federated in the first place? in fact xmpp or matrix have one more friend there than signal: me.
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea
@bonifartius @oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea CIAgnal, funny. I'm very skeptical of federation. Not because it's not good, it is, but because people ultimately don't care. And Eugen is very right when he makes Mastodon hide the decentralized aspect of it as much as possible. You don't sell people on technicalities, you sell them on community.
@dusnm
if you are skeptical about it, why are you even here? just use twitter, it's what the people use!
we will be stuck in the mediocre world of the lowest common denominator forever. so many good ideas died because of this reasoning, especially in IT.
@bonifartius @oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea The community is smaller and more attuned to my needs and interests. That's the number one reason I'm here on Fosstodon.
Unfortunately, we need to design systems with the lowest common denominator in mind if they are to have the broadest appeal possible. There have been and indeed still are people who design systems that cater to elites in whatever field, so finding your niche shouldn't be an issue.
@dusnm
i don't get the reasoning that things have to _match_ the already existing taste and knowledge of people.
some time ago, people were first using whatsapp, or telegram or android or an iphone. they just learned how to use those things.
if something else requires learning, people will learn it if it has something in exchange. things like "cloudflare is broken, again, but i still can send messages here, cool".
if we are stuck in perpetually replicating commercial software, we will forever fail. we don't use our greatest strength that we don't have to amass "sales".
look, the normies managed to ruin everything even when NOT using linux. the _idea_ of "normies will use this" gave birth to so many things (consolekit, pulse, systemd, etc.) that are technically unsound, it's not even funny anymore.
thus i'm heavily opposed to cater to their needs. either people want to use good tools, or they don't. not showing them in the first place is the wrong choice.
My mother in law uses Element/Matrix, and finds it very convenient.
Calls work, video-calls work, 1:1 chat works, group chats work.
She is not technical, but has understood the concept after a 3 minute explanation.
@dusnm
i think that the problems software solves can't be made easier infinitively. at some point making things "easier" means cutting functionality. you can optimize the representation of a problem (and solution), but going further will change the problem.
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea
@bonifartius @oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea I agree in principle. But I would say that if cutting functionality helps make the core of what the program is meant to do more intuitive then I'd certainly consider it. I myself use Vim for almost all my typing, and that's fine, but I can't expect my grandma to go through the trouble of learning it, just to write an email. See what I mean?
@dusnm
i do see the comparison, i'd argue that instant message protocols are a bit different: you don't choose a tool which has no influence on others, but on everyone using it.
people receiving the mail can read it in a web mail UI or in mutt. if there just is no federation in a messenger, i have no choice but to use a single server.
the editor example is pretty good: you can write a mail with notepad or with vi, as the interface is "text". just to compare, you can't have features like "doesn't break when cloudflare breaks" or "can't be taken down completely by governments" with centralized protocols.
@oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea
A feature doesn't have to be immediately intuitive to use, it only needs to be easy enough to learn quickly by reading a user manual.
Something that pisses me off about pretty much all software is that it just assumes a familiarity level. This sucks for my mom who is still very unfamiliar with her smartphone, but all the functions just have a symbol without a description. This makes helping her very difficult, especially over a phone call: "You have to press the arrow button" "No the other one"
Also, services don't need to be immediately intuitive to be usable by normies. There used to be a thing we called a "user manual", but apparently those things have been forgotten because capitalist corporations have become too lazy to write them.
@bonifartius @oklomsy @aral @LunaDragofelis @selea I want a world where my grandma can use the technology I help create. I'm not against people learning new things, but it's my idea that we can streamline the process until it becomes intuitive for most people.