Not another one.

There is no expectation that everyone has to agree with you, either offline or online.

Egregious straw man, obviously I don’t think that.

enormous misunderstanding what [downvotes] are

Says who? You? What if it were you “misunderstanding” this? I know your version is the majority one, but there are plenty of people who agree with me that downvoting is toxic, hence the existence of downvote-free instances.

A downvote is softer than a negative comment, and if you think a downvote is a slap in the face, how should I interpret your negative comment? A kick in the face?

The big difference, to bore you with what you must already know, is that a downvote affects in most default configs the visibility of the comment. So it’s effectively a mild form of censorship, which IMO is not “softer” than a negative reply. And it’s certainly not better than than a constructive negative reply, which, believe it or not, is possible to do.

The best argument I have seen for your case is that downvoting provides an off-ramp for potentially sterile conflict. I.e. people hit the downvote button instead of replying with rage. That’s a decent pragmatic argument. But whatever reason I personally manage to control my rage at other people’s “wrong” opinions, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask them to do the same.

on somewhat of a crusade against downvotes

It’s true. For me, to downvote an opinion (and this is what the vast majority of downvoting is) is the virtual equivalent of slapping someone in the face, or telling them to shut up. We don’t do it in person, we shouldn’t do it virtually.

First, I don’t want to denigrate your project. I think it’s great, so good luck to you.

But… As an end user of this kind of software, what I would like to see personally is for developers to work together more, in the spirit of FOSS. To pool their limited resources, instead of working in isolation on personal passion projects which (let’s face it) will probably go nowhere. Encrypted messaging in particular is a massively hard nut to crack: it’s technically difficult, and you’re up against the almost prohibitive barrier of network effects (nobody will use new software until everyone uses it). To make all this extremely plain, what I personally would prefer you do with your talent and energy is to devote it to an existing project with an existing codebase and genuine prospects of succeeding at this almost impossible challenge. For example, Matrix.

That said, I’m sure you couldn’t care less what I personally think, and if you insist on going it alone, then good luck to you all the same.

Yeah that’s true but in this scenario it’s your fault, not theirs.

Every social-media platform strips EXIF metadata before publishing the photo.

So the issue is the trustworthiness of the social-media platform itself. Personally I always strip the metadata before sharing anything anywhere.

A nuanced take in response to casually lobbed accusations of Nazism? How come you haven’t been banned?

OK. So this is just another XMPP-vs-Matrix debate. Assuming that the holy grail is a distributed, federated drop-in replacement for Whatsapp, then, as I understand it, Matrix is a far more advanced on that path. In any case, just as there are not competing protocols for email, the ultimate solution is clearly one protocol. Everyone jumping ship every 3 months will not get us there.

This exchange shows a clash of philosophies. While you are not wrong exactly, neither is your interlocutor. The “capitalist” mindset (as illustrated by your good-faith comment) is to treat this like shopping - “we’ll just go elsewhere”. But the whole point of FOSS is that we do the work, not “them”. So while it’s true that “not everyone can be working on everything”, ultimately that’s very much our problem and one that only we can solve.

We agree on more than you think.

It should go without saying that I agree with your description of things. Likely everybody else here does too, it’s why we’re all subscribed to a “privacy” community. I just don’t see the point of telling people what they already know, that’s it’s all terrible, that they’re right to think it’s terrible, etc etc. I’d prefer to hear ideas for solutions, personally.

But others will surely vote you up and vote me down, so I guess I’m in the minority.

A web browser is the space shuttle of consumer software. The Gecko rendering engine alone has an enormous attack surface. Which of these forks is contributing security patches to keep it secure?

There are two distinct things to optimize for here: your immediate privacy, and the future of a non-corporate web.

If all you care about is the former, then do… whatever. But if you also care about the latter, you cannot use a browser that supports the Chromium monopoly. That means using any Firefox fork. Personally I use Firefox itself because it’s Mozilla that employs a paid security team, whose work all the forks are freeloading off.

even more so in our so perfectly democratic societies

This in particular makes little sense, and IMO the whole comment is nihilistic and defeatist and generally not very helpful. Just my opinion.

Some excellent points here. Needless to say, I totally agree.

“delete if you don’t want to fight” places like Politics

Nicely put.

Check out mine, it makes me look like an absolute monster. But I’m really not, and my views are objectively centrist on basically all topics. There is a genuine problem with viewpoint diversity - and IMO with straightforward tolerance - in Lemmy’s mainstream communities.

That said, I think it’s great that a community can be explicitly “wholesome”. Like sibling I would probably steer clear of it, but I wish it every success.

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It’s like asking an engineer to build a safe bridge that only collapses for bad people

This metaphor for encryption backdooring is great.

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Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it’s not worth the trouble. If you’ve had a difference experience then good for you.