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Good question. The documentation doesn’t make it clear, so I guess that’s open for interpretation

Touché. I’m not trolling, but uBlock Origin was such an obvious answer that I had both thought of, and already installed it for my less technologically literate friends.

FWIW, if somebody deletes a post (whether it is a moderator or the user that made it), all the comments underneath it become virtually inaccessible. Ironically, that is worse than how Reddit handles it, where a moderator theoretically could delete comments, but must do it manually.

Even if you make your own community, if you want to remove a bad post with good comments, you have to choose between keeping the post or destroying the comments.

So, for right now, we have to keep our fingers crossed and hope the developers take up the call for a change

I wish! Recommending ClamAV to clueless friends/family seems like an okay solution, but then again they tend to not install software at all, and the greatest danger that might befall them is a well crafted phishing ad.

According to what metric? I’ve never seen Firefox top the list. Right now it’s hovering at 4% to 8% of all browsers, depending on who you believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

While I agree with you in theory, I’m not sure how it would go in practice. The percent of people not using Chrome or a Chrome clone is, at this point, in the single digits. And since they have de facto control over the internet, it’s pretty easy to force other browsers to do what they want.

Although, come to think of it, DRM didn’t really prevent people from ripping Netflix or Amazon content, or even streaming it on something like Discord.

True, but like you said, on a per user basis. The typical desktop user isn’t going to have a clue about a text-based interface, unless they vaguely remember DOS or a room sized computer back in college that used the same terminal conventions that Linux still uses today

And then the servers would be federating

A federated service has all the privacy downsides of a centralized one. The home instance of any federated one. Any home instance you choose in a federated network has 100% of your data, just like a centralized network.

We can compare it to Revolt. It is centralized, and yet you have 100% control over using the official server, a different one, or your own. You have 100% control over whether the official server gets your data or not.

In fact, I would argue that because the different Revolt instances are not federated, it is easier to identify when your data is given to a server versus not.

WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

My policy has always been “flip the switch even if it doesn’t work, so if a lawsuit opportunity comes along, you can say you did your part.”

I didn’t even realize such a lawsuit was ongoing.

If two people decide to create their own server and disable federation in order to prevent other servers from gathering their data, then they will never communicate

Personally, I kind of assume the average desktop user won’t understand a command line utility and text editing for configuration… I’m curious if there is a graphical utility that provides that kind of thing, or just works on its own.

I remember the first time I turned on fail2ban on a server and immediately realized I would need to spend a lot of time learning about the service, how to configure it, and worrying about changing the default retention times. And I’m not particularly smart, but I like to think I’m smarter than the average relative on the computer.

The biggest issue is that a federated service has all the downsides of a centralized service, with additional problems of federation (data spreading to other servers which act as a centralized service to their users) tacked on. Outside of recommending improvements for accessibility with E2EE, I’m not sure if there is an easy solution.

An incredibly helpful trick for reading privacy policies

Does the average desktop user need fail2ban? I assume they wouldn’t even make their computer accessible from the internet or start opening most ports.

Okay, looks like I wasn’t totally up to date. The directory service is basically a glorified bot account, and it allows people to manually list groups that they want to be discoverable. Not only is it opt-in, it’s a bit of a hassle.

IMO not a problem at all.

Does the privacy group in Element have E2EE? I was kind of assuming it wouldn’t.

You sure? I’ve never heard of that before. Every “directory” I’ve seen is a manually assembled web page, cobbled together on GitHub