I’m concerned about centralization the most.

Their own FAQ: https://simplex.chat/faq/#funding-and-business-model

To be fair, Simplex is also a for-profit company. However, it’s at least decentralized and more open, I’d take it over Threema any day.

With banking apps - it actually depends. I found out that in my country, most banks’ apps (like, all the big ones except for one) don’t require Google services, since requiring them would cut off a lot of users with Chinaphones (Huawei being the biggest example). The NFC payments in them are also their own implementation, independent from the Google one.

However, in case of at least one bank, the apk download link was hidden behind some dark patterns (ironically, less hidden than Signal’s apk, lol), trying to instead direct people onto the national app store.

Yeah. This is ignoring the fact that not only did they live in the same house, but also the adults used to have the absolute authority over their children. Living standards changed and it’s okay. Even now, my parents dread me living with them as an adult because that would mean me never becoming fully independent.

It’s proprietary and centralized. No practical difference. IRC and XMPP are the way.

“don’t worry it’s for a shrine”

A 3d-printed Trump bust

Filming yourself can make sense, though. I do gymnastics, and my coach outright encourages it, since you can see your mistakes better and remember what you were doing during your last visit.

I do make sure no one else is in the frame, though. And ask people whether I’m visible on their recording, to which the answer is always “no”.

I’ve heard of them in the context of screwing over people who want an easy income: they’re promised some pennies for their connection being used, then find themselves banned from Netflix and Spotify for “being on a VPN”.

Also, isn’t this where scrapers come from?

Try that on my degoogled phone

Not even just PGP, there are so many options! XMPP with OMEMO that now comes with all the mainstream clients, Matrix, Simplex… Veracrypt for files… Although indeed, PGP has the benefit of you being able to just copypaste the output into whatever chat box you’re currently using.

Too bad it’s only for a handful of Western countries :( I hoped I wouldn’t have to look up bus arrivals in the browser anymore.

A smaller one than that. But yeah, fair - Reddit does deny me entry from it.

To be fair, it’s during this decade when Linux became A LOT more friendly to non-technical people.

One of the reasons I use a VPS rather than a commercial VPN.

The main difference is that in Matrix, a chat’s history and media is stored indefinitely on every participating server, while on XMPP it’s only the duty of the one “hosting” it. And to my understanding, in 1-to-1 chats, the server doesn’t even retain the messages after delivering them, since there’s a separate module for “syncing” the history between devices (that you can set the retention time for).

If they have such “security concerns” with third-party clients, a compromise would be to mark profiles using unofficial clients, and make it possible to see what client it is. Because it’s audacious to disapprove of third-party ones while your own lacks features people find important! Such as:

• Allowing an arbitrary proxy rather than just their own solution (because not only is their own solution inferior to some of the more advanced censorship-evading technology, but this is the field that needs multiple options when one stops working. Also if a person uses a proxy for everything else anyway, making them set up a whole separate solution or find someone else’s proxy just for your app is pointless.
• UnifiedPush.
• Allowing tying a desktop client by typing a code rather than scanning a QR code, which is important when registering on an Android VM (because again, Signal just arbitrarily disallows account creation on a desktop, nevermind that most phones are very hard or impossible to make private!)

Yeah, I also had encryption problems, especially when I was running Conduit rather than Synapse. However, I never had such problems in XMPP with OMEMO.

To be fair, from Signal’s attitude it seems that Molly is tolerated rather than welcomed. And that it may be shut off if it gets big enough.