Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.

If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it’s basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.

It’s an awesome field and nothing new.

Yes, but in fairness: The same is true for iOS or GrapeneOS, though that’s for valid reasons.

As much as I’d like to use a Linux phone, it’s simply not feasible for almost everybody at the moment.

What do people user their phone for?

• Private conversations
• Banking
• All kind of apps

Linux phones, at the moment, are way behind Android/iOS in terms of security and, since privacy requires security, also in privacy.

Even stock Android has so many more security features, that it’s not even close. Verified boot, exploit mitigation, (working) app sandboxing and so on. Not even speaking of specialized projects like GrapheneOS.

Even if the app ecosystem was there and the OS mature, I’d never run my banking through a Linux phone at the moment.

Some sort of user-controllable merging of community views would honestly alleviate most of this:

Adding something like user-specific topics, e.g. allowing the user to consolidate all posts from instanceA.communityA and instanceB.communityA and even instanceA.communityB into a custom community view shouldn’t be all that difficult to implement (he stated naively, having never looked at the codebase).

A great addition would also be to allow the merging of posts, e.g. show all comments of all threads under one post where the post URL matches and/or the title matches.

This isn’t exact, since multiple communities can discuss the same topic from completely opposite viewpoints, but at least allowing the user to consolidate stuff and control it would be huge.

I know that it’s a core design feature of Lemmy and the underlying federation, but it’s pretty annoying that multiple communities with the same name can exist on different instances while not necessarily following the same ruleset or even purpose.

The small user base gets even more fractured that way, a lot of posts get reposted to multiple instances as well.

So you either:

• subscribe to one or two communities and miss a lot of potentially interesting conversations
• subscribe to more communities and get flooded with reposts and potentially stuff you don’t want to see due to a different ruleset