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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29557 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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What are the alternatives? If you can't control your creation, it falls under the sway of the swarm. If you retain control, you can be coerced.

I don't think it's difficult to make a system where two people who want to talk to each other in private can. The difficult part is linking two people who don't know each other but would like to.

How many people even use Telegrams built-in discoverability mechanisms instead of "hey, here's a link to a group I started"?

Yeah, you have to say goodbye to control over your creation, but that's the world we live in. The creators of Signal don't seem to mind, so I don't know why that wasn't good enough for Telegram.

How far have the founders of Signal lost control of the code? If it’s an open-source project, presumably there are owners and admins of the main fork, and if those aren’t the makers then I imagine a code of conduct will appear in due course. Likewise if there’s no company hiring and paying employees, sooner or lately one of the volunteers will turn out to be law enforcement. It’s legitimately tricky I think.

If you want to say true invulnerability is impossible - fine. I'm just saying the current batch of alt-tech leaders are at best asking for it, and at worst they're deliberately building honey-pots.

I wasn’t arguing, more trying to figure out what I would do in that situation and where the vulnerabilities would be.

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