The left doesn’t really have any political power under capitalist hegemony where there’s economic consensus in the political and ruling class. There are many leftists but essentially no political left, and at the same time politics can no longer impact our economic arrangements, irs basically a spectacle we react to from different angles. What we have are centrist liberals both portrayed as “far left” by the right, some who ignorantly react to that with “yes, I am far left!” And those who actually have a visceral hate for capitalism have almost always been dealt with on common ground between centrist liberals and the right.

Not wholly opposed to that, markets can serve the purpose they’re designed for, and I could see an evolution of cybersyn that helps run the economy using simulated markets.

Code Sherpa

Most industry standard software that people use in their jobs is closed source. When you watch movies or listen to music or play video games you’re supporting proprietary software. Same with finance and basically any office job. Niche IT jobs are the exception but I’ve been in enterprise IT for 20 years and this is just how it is in a capitalist economy. I’d prefer for public ownership of technology platforms but it’s basically reduced to a consumption model within the current system. Like the platforms people consume media through isn’t very significant, which the open source community puts a lot of ideological importance on. Most open source projects are also abandoned and become obsolete too quickly. I’ve basically been relying on the same set of proprietary Adobe software for part of my income since the 90s, can’t name an open source alternative that does what I need it to do or has this longevity even though I’d prefer it.

Btw a way you can verify the security of a chat app is by reading case docs from law enforcement about what’s required to obtain communications through said platform. With whatsapp the closest they can get to message content is by retreiving cache from the iPhone chatsearch database, and metadata from WhatsApp about who sent a message to whom and when but not the message contents. Retrieval of WhatApp messages through proprietary security forensics software is limited to how certain phone models and OSs locally cache messages basically. This applies to different platforms the same way though and isn’t something special about WhatsApp or Meta. The unique thing to Meta is how quickly they respond to law enforcement requests about metadata collection.

The whitepaper explains it in detail. Closed source doesn’t mean worse by default. In a lot of cases the opposite since professionals were hired and paid for their work and the company thinks they have an edge on the competition. Open source is more of a grab bag. Commercial use of open source is plagued by abandoned projects and lack of support obligations, even though it might be better in certain instances.

Might as well use whatsapp in that case which is debatably on par or better than signal for encryption.

The average person just has no idea about RCS or protocols in general and are incidental adopters of it just like SMS. Sometimes these nerd debates about platforms and protocols emphasize technology features over actually connecting with people or doing something productive on said technology.

These nerds will debate platforms way more than use them productively.

Used a self hosted matrix with element for years now it’s solid. Have a friend group who uses it for everything with dedicated channels etc.

“I only talk to other nerds” basically

They hated him, for he spoke the truth.

Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it’s not what actually makes a platform good to use.

“10 degrees to the left in good times, 10 degrees to the right when it affects them personally.”

Problem I have with calling this a feudal arrangement is a lot of serfs actually had family rights to their land/means of production under land tenure agreements. It’s more the notion of private ownership of land and production that has led to these private technology increasingly mediating more of our lives. I’ve seen the concept of technofeudalism used in good ways but the overall thing is capitalism and they are more elements of feudal type arrangement within that.

Need a proper public house

Would probably change the cabinets to a lighter color but I love it.

Phone number is the weakest form of 2FA but it’s still an improvement. I’ve never had to use my phone in Discord though, I don’t how Discord would even verify someone’s phone number as legitimate. But like I said I have a couple Discord accounts with different emails, probably on 30-40 servers, and have never run in to this. So if they’re collecting personal details in this really granular and specific manner, it seems like they’re not doing a very good job at it.

Enforcing two factor because of suspicious indicators isn’t bad on it’s own though, it’s privacy concerns about Discord preceding this which makes it a bad thing in this context.

The one I referenced there was the Dirtywave discord, highly recommend checking it out, and I think they have a channel for partner servers. The lines forum is also a great community if you’re in that musical space. I couldn’t name a good music discord for lets say traditional genres or general production, the thing I like about what I’ve found is it’s niche. Like once I posted a work in progress and someone active in a scene for the genre I was going for messaged me and we chatted about our approaches and traded some instrument and project files we’d built on the device, all though discord.

So to me I want that type of community, what platform it’s on isn’t really something I care about all that much.

I don’t know of any either and I’m on like 40+ servers probably. I’ve run our weekly dnd on it for years without issue after trying the other options. Get that it’s not good for tracking and documentation in any official capacity but it’s pretty damn good for active niche interest communities.

The music production servers I’m on are a perfect use of the platform IMO. There’s a server run by a guy who manufactures an open source tracker device, and there’s channels where people post works in progress, get help from others, there’s streaming events where people can submit songs they’ve made using the device, etc. There’s a bunch of people popular in the music scene who regularly help noobs. Always ongoing active discussions, everyone is polite, there’s a lot of knowledge shared in real time.

So when people are like “Discord sucks use my favorite platform instead,” I’m just like I don’t even care about the platform I just wanna be where some cool shit is happening and your platforms are fucking boring. Show me the cool servers on your platform then so I actually want to use it. It’s the idea of these platforms people like, and I like it too, my close social group uses a privately hosted Matrix service which I use every day, but I’ve never found a comparable community on these services outside of this use case.