@escape_velocity

Thank you for being the only other person I see on my feed talking about simplex its refreshing

Imo its the gold standard in private anonymous group messaging. Better than Signal, briar, cwtch, deltachat, meshtastic.

All of them have some benefit over simples whether it be signals ease of use and stability, briars ability to share the binary over bluetooth, cwtch's simple in-app gui for self hosting, deltachat's interoperability with email, or meshtastics resilience in mesh networks.

But only simplex has no profile ids, quantum resistant encryption, advanced invite/multi profile management, as well as being decentralized

I think that especially anarchists and activists should seek this level of privacy because compromised contacts can have their conversations with you be corroborated to show you are the same person when you have a static id even if its a random string

Since I don't get to talk to people who use simplex much I should mention why I dont talk to the people in public simplex rooms: it skews far right because the creator is a trans hating[1] climate denier with a bunch of other right wing beliefs I cant remember, you know the usual.

That being said the developers have very little control over what happens on even their own servers: they can disable invite links they dont like but not rooms (invites can easily be regenerated), they can remove file links that get reported but not messages, (files are deleted after 48h anyway bc its a relay network they cant delete it when group members have it cached) and if either of these are hosted on another simplex server since its decentralised they cant do anything

except ig the nuclear option to totally cut connection to stop their own users connecting to users on that other server. but simplex is fairly simple to self host, we should be moving away from the official servers anyway

[1]
https://x.com/epoberezkin/status/1881832239186759841

#Simplex #FLOSS #E2EE #PSA #Privacy #Anonymity #QuantumResistantEncryption #Transgender #Climate #ClimateDenier #Signal #Briar #Cwtch #DeltaChat #Meshtastic

@elexia

I'm going to assume a couple of criticisms you might have of decentralized networks that I have heard people give before but its quite possible I wont cover all your concerns, or ascribe a concern you don't have. I do think all of this is worth discussing from an anarchist perspective though

Decentralization is generally good because it prevents the accumulation of power which as an anarchist I like. No one should be an authority on how people get to communicate. When you already have a moderation position over a network that's different because you have an implied duty to protect the space.

As an anarchist I don't like the notion that decentralized solutions that give the individual maximum power should be disfavoured due to misuse because it implies the existence of some authority that can be trusted to better manage a network and tell people what they are and aren't allowed to say. As much as I believe some people are better at that job than others its against what I stand for to say that *only* certain people should be allowed to and that people like me should decide who those people are.

In a network like simplex there are moderated spaces but similar to mastodon moderation is something that the individual opts into by choosing which spaces to join so I can't really call it a suppression of the individual

As far as people should be held accountable for what they say, it is up to the individual how anonymous they should want to be online, nothing about simplex for example precludes you from associating your analog identity and doing so could provide more authenticity and accountability to what you do and say there but precisely because the individual will always be less powerful than the collective and because humans don't have a good track record for oppressing minority groups anonymity and decentralization should always be an option

#FLOSS #E2EE #Anarchism #PSA #Privacy #Anonymity

@ambiguous_yelp you're making points that would be relevant to someone that still operates on a liberal framework of thought. we're anarchists. a properly E2E encrypted chat cannot be moderated anyway. signal for example doesn't know who you're talking to and what your saying and thus can neither moderate the contents nor give that information to the state. that's a good thing. we need to keep the state out of our private conversations.

our concerns are about the technical limitations of decentralized software. the thing about a service like signal is that unless they compromise one of the end points (in which case you're screwed regardless of your chat solution) an outside actor cannot tell who you're talking to when or even narrow it down. there's no way to construct a social graph. how does this fashware solution mitigate mapping of social graphs if it actually is highly decentralized? that is people don't just use a few large servers as usually happens with "decentralized" services, but are on their own small servers by themselves or with only a handful of users. that's one of the actual hard problems for decentralized chat software that we haven't yet seen a good solution to.