You can just as easily identify servers of a decentralized platform and block them. The disadvantage of a central service would come into play if say the US were to intervene, though Signal has already said they would move abroad if that was the case. For network level blockage it makes no difference if the service is central or not
fira959
joined 10 months ago
Whats mind blowing is the BS people like you come up with to shit on a non profit open source project.
All decentralized protocols have this issue. The servers need to handle metadata for chat groups, like who is part of which group. If the servers are under individual control, nobody can force them to delete this data. The question is, do you trust a non profit organisation like signal to minimize and delete metadata (which court orders have proven they do) or do you trust all individuals of a group chat to do the same when you manually ask them to.
Matrix is the worst option when it comes to avoiding metadata. A group chat with users on 10 different servers will create ten different places to store the metadata with no way for any user to delete or edit this metadata. Its a privacy nightmare.
Nobody forces you to use it. A manual arch install is still one of the most valuable leassons I learned when I started using this OS and nothing keeps new users from doing the same today
This is the same discussion as with learning programming languages. In the us, most universities start with python, to make to easy by avaoiding memory management. In Europe, most universities start with C and C++ to teach the basics to the core. Both approaches can be appropriate depending on the student.
Lazygit
Thats pretty good, thanks.
I would recommend Arch, but only to users who want to learn and understand linux and have the time to do so.
Git - the Github Desktop application is a great example of how easy git could be for users like me who only rarely use git. Every time I need to do somethign other then a simple pull or push I need to look it up and by the time I need it again I have forgotten the command and need to look it up again. Just give me something like Github Desktop on linux
Before Github, there was no collection of open source repositories that are easily searchable, making it easy to find and promote open source software. I am not aware of any alternative that ever did or does a better job at making open source contributions that easy. Even when I try to use codeberg as an alternative, my Github repos will always get more contributions. No idea how we could even begin to change that.
That is true for both cases as well. One thign to add though is that signals own cencorship circumvention makes it even better at resisting this kind of blockage then an arbitrary decentralized protocol, though for an objective comparison it would take some research.