hello im trying to find good foss alternatives to apps like discord, facebook, and others that are foss and federated are there any possable apps out there that are like that?
hello im trying to find good foss alternatives to apps like discord, facebook, and others that are foss and federated are there any possable apps out there that are like that?
Thats a pretty awesome question imo.
I think Matrix only makes sense if you‘re already using instant messaging of some sort. Either discord, whatsapp, signal, what have you…
If you are using one of these services, there is a high chance that your data is sold, traded and used for all kinds of purposes, from training AI to manipulating your life choices (or as simple as selling something to you).
If a person is not using social media at all (and has an offline friend circle), then they should happily stay away from any of these products, federated/foss same as the others. Simply because social media is addictive.
But for those (like me) who don’t make friends easily offline, social media makes sense. And for those, it is far better to trust db0 or whatever the admins name is of an instance, than google,
has only one answer. Hell yes!
Element is a for profit company and therefore not the best idea if you want to go fully without data collection I assume. But then you also need to keep all smart devices in your home from calling home, you need a rooted android phone or similar, etc.
So I propose that we do our best, keeping the megacorps from collecting and selling our data without a penny of the profits going to us. In the meantime, we make compromises where necessary. If element is the only „usable“ client for you, let them have at it for the time being. Especially on ios, you‘re transparent to apple anyway and besides you don’t see the apps in development until they leave testflight (iirc).
Let me know if you have any further questions. Have a good one. :)
Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply!
I’m still not sure that moving our trust from a megacorp (as you put it) to some random person or organization running a Matrix server is an improvement. Even assuming the Matrix server admins aren’t selling your data out the back door, there’s no guarantee their admin accounts, or the server itself, isn’t compromised by those same corporations or others, allowing them to harvest all your data (and potentially more of your data than would be possible if you were using at least some of these services natively).
I respect that you have your opinion, but I’m not sure it makes sense to move trust from one organization/corporation to another is guaranteed to be an improvement.
From a security perspective, Signal seems to be brought up the most in these conversations, so I am surprised that you called it out between WhatsApp and Discord. Do you have any evidence that the Signal foundation is spying on its users, selling their data, or that the E2EE they natively employ is compromised?